ABSTRACT
The most explicit description of courtly love was written by Andreas Capellanus, a Church-educated official at the feudal court of Aquitaine (1184/ 1941). Capellanus' The Art of Courtly Love follows the medieval rhetorical custom of presenting both sides of an issue by praising and explaining love for two books and then condemning it as unChristian in the third. His catalogue of "rules of love" is full of psychological insights and clues to the twelfth-century attitudes toward love:
relish. 6. Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity. 7. When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the
survivor. 8. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.
