The woman in the satyrical tradition in the medieval latin and the misoginy in Andrew the chaplain’s De amore

Abstract

In the context of the apogee of the literary phenomenon known in the medieval world as the art of courtly love, peculiar due to its complex ideals of idealization of feminine love, a virulent mode of critical writing of women is found, either in poetic form, or even mixing them both. Modulating the canon of ancient criticism against the feminine gender, this type of misogynist writing was responsible for the appearance and updating of a mode of satirical literature composed in the Latin of the XI and XII centuries, strongly committed to the ideals of traditional misogyny. It is in the wake of this type of misogynistic satirical literature written in medieval Latin that the present article aims to analyze, in a critically-theoretical and comparative way the controversial, because ambiguous in its intentions, De amore, a treatise written about 1185 by André the Chaplain or André Chaplain (Andreas Capellanus). The article intends to show that the misogynistic disposition of Chaplain constitutes a satirical literary form of the time combined with the cultured idealism of courtly love. But at the same time, it expresses the idea of a strategic confrontation of misogynist politics of stabilizing the female figure as a perfect paradoxical equilibrium insofar as it serves at the same time for the defamation and praise offered to male prerogatives.