ABSTRACT
Lovesickness, amor hereos, amor heroicus, or 'heroic love' was most thoroughly delineated for subsequent eras during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Surrounding the woman's glowing form are objects that would have suggested well-known and long-accepted remedies for the lover's desperate condition to the original viewers. Love and music were, in fact, accounted similar agents by numerous pre-modern thinkers. Both were paradoxically insubstantial forces that produced evident physical effects, both spanned the distance between metaphor and matter, and both served as agents of divine promise and perfection. The medieval musical medical heritage likewise included auditory stimulation of erotic appetite in conjunction with banquets and communal baths, a reverse manifestation of the same unities of sensation and self-care elsewhere meant to distract from obsessive love. The quintessential music-books for healing the wounds of love in the absence of the hand that inflicted them are the collections of rounds, catches, and canons that circulated as witty musical curiosities, particularly in England.
