550 - We Still Play Medieval Dating Games
Welcome back, Annalisa!
We’re so excited to welcome back Annalisa Castaldo to the show for a fascinating conversation on The Art of Courtly Love, a medieval manuscript written 900 years ago that resembles a strange combination of romance novel, pickup artist manual, and incel manifesto. Annalisa Castaldo is a professor of English, core faculty in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, and chair of the English department at Widener University. Annalisa is also an ordained Buddhist priest and member of Multiamory’s exclusive community.
Throughout this episode Annalisa discusses the origin of the book The Art of Courtly Love and the history behind it, and we explore how these medieval dating practices still influence our current modern dating and the problematic courtly rituals so many of our traditions stem from.
Annalisa discusses the following points with us during this episode and we chat about what they mean, both past and present.
"We declare and we hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion of necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other's desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing." (p. 106, The Art of Courtly Love)
“Real” love requires freedom and choice, but marriage is an obligation, therefore love cannot exist in a marriage.
Modern parallel: How do we still separate romantic love from committed partnership? NRE vs. long-term love?
Women have only one power: saying yes or no. They are not permitted to pursue and must be passive beyond their one power.
Modern parallels: Who texts first? Who proposes first? How does gender affect dating dynamics?
"Love causes a rough and uncouth man to be distinguished for his handsomeness; it can endow a man even of the humblest birth with nobility of character." (p. 31)
Men need love to become better people, but women don’t need this ennobling effect because they are already moral gatekeepers.
Modern parallels: The “she makes me want to be a better man” trope. This sets women up as rehabilitation centers for men.
The Suffering and Obsession Rules
"That love is suffering is easy to see, for before the love becomes equally balanced on both sides there is no torment greater, since the lover is always in fear that his love may not gain its desire." (p. 28)
A few of the rules we discuss in this section are:
Rule XXX: "A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved."
Rule XXIII: "He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little."
Additionally:
Is this NRE or unhealthy obsession?
The romanticism of suffering for love - still prevalent today?
How this normalizes anxiety as "true love.”
The Strategic Rules: Medieval Dating Games
Key rules in this section:
Rule XIII: "When made public love rarely endures."
Rule XIV: "The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized."
Rule XXI: "Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love."
Discussion points:
Playing hard to get - timeless or toxic?
The secrecy rule vs. modern "soft launching" relationships.
Jealousy as proof of love - how this enables controlling behavior.
The Medieval PUA Scripts
Class-based approach system:
Different dialogues for different class combinations.
Scripts include anticipated objections and counterarguments.
Example: Middle-class man approaching noblewoman vs. peasant woman.
"If you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women [peasants], be careful to puff them up with lots of praise and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force." (p. 150)
Discussion points:
Direct line to modern PUA culture and "negging."
The idea that different "types" of women need different approaches.
Class/status anxiety in modern dating (i.e. out of someone’s league).
The Manipulation Through Fear: The Afterlife Fairy Tale
This story is from pages 73 to 82 in The Art of Courtly Love. It’s summarized as:
Man tells woman a tale of visiting the afterlife.
Women who reject all lovers are tortured on thorns.
Women who accept too many lovers are overwhelmed with unwanted service.
Only women who accept the "right" amount of lovers are rewarded.
Discussion points:
Using fear and shame to control women's choices.
Modern versions/parallels: "You'll die alone with cats" or "hitting the wall."
The impossible balance women must strike.
Medieval incels
In this medieval text, the author, Andreas Capellanus, teaches men how to “win” at love, then turns around and declares that it’s all terrible and women are evil.
"No woman ever loved a man or could bind herself to a lover in the mutual bonds of love. For a woman's desire is to get rich through love, but not to give her lover the solaces that please him." (p. 200)
Lists of women’s “flaws” go on for pages, from page 201 to 209, listing women as "greedy, envious, slanderous, slaves to their belly, inconstant, fickle, disobedient, proud, vain, liars, drunkards, gossips.”
Incel Playbook, Medieval Edition
Familiar key arguments in this section:
Women only want money/resources (medieval "gold diggers").
Women are incapable of real love.
Women are naturally deceptive.
Nice guys finish last (good men are rejected for wealthy ones).
Discussion points:
The "red pill" isn't new - this is 900 years old.
It has the same structure as the modern manosphere: "Here's how to get women" followed by "actually, women are terrible"
The Madonna/whore complex in full display.
Some points for critical analysis:
These aren't "timeless truths" about love - they're constructed rules from a specific time/place.
We still see these exact patterns in modern dating.
Understanding the source helps us question what we assume is "natural."
We can choose which traditions to keep and which to abandon.
To wrap up our conversation with Annalisa, we touch on the following points:
Which of these medieval ideas still serve us? Do any of them?
Which ones are we ready to let go of?
How do we create new "rules" based on equity and genuine connection?
What would Andreas think of modern polyamory?
Transcript
If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Annalisa: I give this book full points for staying power, but I really hope that people use it as recognizing, first of all, idolizing women and putting them on a pedestal as the thing that ennobles men always leads to them being pushed off the pedestal and treated like absolute dirt. And second, that all of this stuff that goes into making the romance industry in Western culture is not inherent and that we can have relationships that are based on actual open communication, transparency, honesty, and that will create relationships that are much happier than this sort of obsessive NRE feeling. You can't live your life that way. It's just too tiring.
Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.
Emily: I'm Emily.
Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.
Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.
Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're traveling back in time to the 12th century to uncover the surprising origins of modern dating culture. We're joined by a very special guest, Professor Annalisa Castaldo, to explore the Art of Courtly Love, which is a medieval manuscript that reads like a bizarre mashup of a romance novel, a pickup artist manual, and an incel manifesto, all written 900 years ago. Annalisa is a professor of English, core faculty in gender, women, and sexuality studies, and chair of the English department at Widener University. She also has a Master's of Education in Human Sexuality and is an ordained Buddhist priest. Along the way today, we'll be connecting these medieval ideas to modern dating phenomena, from playing hard to get, and keeping relationships secret to the notion that women are gatekeepers and men must earn love through suffering and self-improvement, like the plot to every rom-com ever. You might be surprised or possibly horrified to learn just how many of our romantic traditions actually come from a very specific, very problematic medieval court culture. So, Professor Annalisa Castaldo, thank you so much for joining us today.
Annalisa: Thank you for having me.
Jase: So this episode idea came about because you actually reached out to us, and you've been on the show before talking about Buddhism, but this time you reached out saying, "Hey, I have this idea for an episode talking about courtly love and its connection to modern love." Where did that come from? What's the story behind that?
Annalisa: Well, I am blessed by the ability to teach not only early modern literature, which is my focus in graduate school, but medieval literature. The big secret is that medieval literature is the freakiest, weirdest stuff ever. And it's so much fun to read. There's dragons, there's witches, there's monsters who roast people over an open flame. There's a woman whose raised as a boy and could possibly be transgender. It's wonderful stuff. And so I always teach the Art of Courtly Love when I teach medieval literature. First, because it's a central text, but second, it always grabs the students. I forget exactly what it was in one of the Multiamory episodes. But I was listening and I thought, that reminds me of the Art of Courtly Love so much. I started looking at the comparisons. I was like, this has gotta be an episode. This has gotta be something I share with everyone else because as you said in your introduction, it's Pickup Artist, it's Incel Manifesto, it's every romance song you've ever heard, it's the plot of every romance novel, and it's been that way for almost a millennia.
Jase: So when I started looking at this text, and I've not read the whole thing, I've not taken your course, unfortunately. But what I saw is in the chapter breakdown, the very first chapter of book one, there's three books within this manuscript. The first chapter of book one is What Love Is. We've done episodes about that before. Other people have written. I'm like, well, let's see how the answer compares here. It goes all over the place, but I just wanted to read this very first paragraph here that I thought was a good teaser of the funny way that medieval people can talk about sex. And the quote is this: Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish, above all things, the embraces of the other, and by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace. Meaning, doing it, I think, is what they think. All the precepts of love. It goes on to talk about a bunch of other crazy shit, but I don't want to spoil too much of that since we're going to be getting into that here in the episode. So could you give us a little background, Annalisa, on the history of this book? Where did this come from? Why is it part of this core literature that's still taught today?
Annalisa: Absolutely. So the first thing I just want to make 100% clear is I am not in any way claiming that love didn't exist before the late 12th century. I don't know enough about other cultures to see if these ideas came about in China or South America or wherever. But what happened in Europe is that around the middle of the 12th century, there was something of a secession, less fighting going on, and so fewer men dying, and also a couple of really powerful women. You probably know Eleanor of Aquitaine. Or have heard of her. She and her husband, Henry II, who was the King of England at the time, ruled over the Angevin Empire. England and a good part of France were combined together in this one kingdom. Eleanor of Aquitaine was incredibly rich. She held property in her own right, and she was as powerful as any man. She was a woman. She was very powerful. So the fact that there were all of these extra men milling about looking for something to do, and Eleanor of Aquitaine had this fascination with the power that women can or can't hold, she created these courts of love, and her daughters followed through a couple decades later. So we're talking about Poitiers, especially in France, so these very upper class courts where they were playing games of love in a way that was pretty new. There's reference to similar things in Ovid back in ancient Rome, but that was always more of a one-off and the courtly love that Eleanor established really made rules of courtly love universal. If you were going to be a true in-love person, you had to follow these rules, even though some of them are somewhat impossible. We'll get into that. And they held courts of love where they actually held cases where a woman wouldn't give her affection or a man she did and how that should affect their relationship. So it was treated as this incredibly important cultural event.
Dedeker: Can I ask a question? Because I already have 16 questions about all of this. Okay, so if I'm understanding correctly, this becomes a byproduct of, okay, not everyone is killing each other. We have more energy left over for not just trying to survive, but to do all the other things that life has to offer to the point where what could be considered, quote unquote, maybe a natural coupling of people or people getting together or marriages being arranged, we get to heap on this extra frosting to this to fill our time and stave off our boredom and to play around with human feeling and attraction and things like that. When you talk about games of love, all I can think of is spin the bottle. What?
Annalisa: The pig?
Dedeker: What do you mean by that?
Emily: Pursuit and withdrawal.
Annalisa: I don't know if they played spin the bottle, but I'm loving the image in my mind of guys in armor spinning a gauntlet or something. The games I'm talking about are sort of part one was the very elaborate wooing that men were supposed to undertake to gain a woman's interest and then try to push that step by step towards full sexual engagement. Theoretically, the man was supposed to worship the woman from afar in this chaste and ennobling way. Even Andreas Capellanus, the author of Art of Courtly Love, does not pretend that that's true. But that was a way to put a fig leaf on what they were doing, to make the church accept what was going on. So the first was these very elaborate games, including things that you probably already know about, like jousts and tournaments where the men showed off, but also giving money, singing love songs. This is the period of the troubadours, so you'd hire a troubadour if your voice wasn't very good, serenade your love, literally at a tower sometimes.
Jase: Get your friend Cyrano to give you poems to then recite to them if you weren't good at that.
Dedeker: Yeah, it kind of predate some Cyrano, but maybe seems like it could be appropriate.
Annalisa: Could be, although they weren't trying to hide that they were using someone else's words. They were trying to show off how much they'd spent to hire the best troubadour.
Jase: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Emily: Interesting. Yeah.
Jase: Okay.
Annalisa: And then of course, I guess I...
Jase: Appreciate it's more honest there.
Annalisa: In a way. The second part of the games is this literal court of love where people who were— it's kind of like Judge Judy, honestly. People would come before the queen or Queen Eleanor, her daughters, or another high-ranking noble, and they would say, "Here's the conflict we have," and it would get decided. And these were supposed to be binding— I don't know if they ever were, but they were supposed to be binding arbitrations. So if they were like, "Yeah, you have to give yourself to this man because he deserves you," and the one was supposed to just go for it.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: Boy, now I have 10 billion more questions.
Dedeker: Well, okay, so to bring us back.
Jase: Maybe we'll get that.
Dedeker: Yeah, to bring us back to, so this text then, this is all based on these conventions that were being developed at this time. Like who compiled this? Who wrote this? What was their authority?
Annalisa: So this is written, the author is a guy named Andreas Capellanus, or in English, André the Chaplain. He was a clergyman. He is writing to his nephew, I think, Walter, as opposed to saying like, here is a manual for what love is and how you can play these games. And then, as Jase has already teased, in part three, he's, nope, I was just kidding. Women are horrible. But it seems more likely that he was writing this down at the direction of one of the women in the court. This had been done in poetry, very famous, beautiful writer, Chrétien de Troyes. who wrote the first ever Arthurian legend that included Lancelot.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Annalisa: Yeah, Lancelot comes from France because the first person who made him up was French, was literally wrote, you know, the Queen Marie, daughter of Eleanor, Queen Marie asked me to write on this topic. So it seems like he was probably set to the task, went about it as best he could, and it was either preserved or well enough known that people kept referring back to it.
Emily: So it was eventually kind of used as a manual throughout time of these are the things that you should be doing in order to woo a woman.
Annalisa: Well, interestingly, I don't find many references past the 13th century to the text itself, but everyone is using the stuff he talks about as if it's the most natural thing in the world. And so that sort of romantic in love, rom-com, NRE behavior seems to have developed a set of rules that come from Andreas, and everyone was like, oh yeah, sure, we'll do that.
Jase: Yeah, and so to go into a little bit of the what is love in this context in general, there are a lot of specifics about what is and isn't love. So one example of that that I can read here from this chapter, What Persons Are Fit for Love, and this explains that it's anyone who is capable of doing the work of Venus, wink wink, but it says age is a bar because after the 60th year in a man and the 50th in a woman, although one may have intercourse, his passion cannot develop into love because at that age, the natural heat begins to lose its force and the natural moisture is greatly increased.
Dedeker: Wait, dude, okay.
Jase: Which leads a man to... Yeah.
Emily: We all want to be a true lover.
Annalisa: But.
Dedeker: Yeah, I'm reading this text. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Maybe Annalisa said, Lower than the Angels, all about the history of sex and Christianity. And yeah, literally in bed last night was the explanation of this whole natural moisture thing and why I guess that means you can't fall in love. But could you elaborate?
Annalisa: So this is a period of time when medicine was based around the four humors. Men were typically seen as hot and dry, and women were moist and cold. And that is why women sought out men because they wanted to be warm and drier. And so they would seek to sort of pull the heat from men. And when men and women both get older, hormones shift so they become more and more wet and cold. So we tend to think of moisture in sex as a good thing, but in this case, it actually means that your body is no longer able to kindle sparks.
Dedeker: The kindling is too wet. It's too moist.
Annalisa: Yes.
Dedeker: I got it.
Jase: There you go.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: Yeah, so that's what happens as you get old, that you don't have enough heat, you have too much moisture. And then similarly, a girl under the age of 12 and a boy before the 14th year do not serve in love's army. Right.
Annalisa: Too young.
Emily: I mean, I'm all right with that too.
Jase: But then I love this next line. He says, However, I say and insist that before his 18th year, a man cannot be a true lover. Because up to that age, he is overcome with embarrassment over any little thing.
Dedeker: I mean, it's true.
Emily: That is true.
Dedeker: He's not wrong.
Emily: He's not wrong.
Annalisa: Yeah. That's the thing. You read some of this and it's completely bizarre, and then you're like, but wait.
Jase: That kind of made sense. But then the other part I wanted to get to here is that this is from a fair amount later in the book. He says, We declare and we hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: For lovers give each other everything freely under no compulsion of necessity. But married people are in duty bound to give in to each other's desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing. And so by his definition, you can't love your spouse because you're contractually obligated to do whatever with them. Therefore it's not love. I did not expect to see.
Annalisa: Wow. It's one of the best parts of this book, which is to present marriage, as it was understood in the 12th century, as basically a business deal. You join houses, you join families, you produce offspring, you support each other. Mostly the men were out doing the work, but at the same time, if a man went off to war, his wife would be in charge of the household, and in some cases that might mean an entire castle. And there was no divorce. There was very rarely divorce, put it that way. So in that case, you couldn't have love because love must be free. Must be chosen freely. Although, as we'll see, I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the idea of bullying a woman into loving you is still considered getting your love freely.
Dedeker: Just don't put a ring on it, then it's free love. Yes.
Jase: As long as there's not a contract written out then.
Annalisa: Right.
Dedeker: Well, I want to put this in contrast though, because I think our modern day, I guess modern day critique is that, yeah, maybe marriage historically has always been a business contract and it's only quite recently that we've decided, no, it also has to be the love of your life and your soul mate. I'm wondering in this author saying this, is he pushing against, are there other voices who are saying like, sure it's a business contract, but like you should love each other or you can fall in love with each other? Or is that in contrast or is this just like, oh yeah, everyone knows that you can't love your spouse?
Annalisa: Well, again, I want to point to the difference between love as the way we think about long-term stable love and this kind of charged NRE falling in love, what we would call infatuation or obsession or something like that. I do think it's true. If you look at things work done by Esther Perel, the idea is that when there's no strangeness, there's too much familiarity, leads to a loss of desire. That is basically what Andrea Capellanus is saying, that in order for there to be love in this new sense, courtly love, it needs to be hidden. It needs to be freely chosen by the man and the woman, and they need to keep their distance from each other. If we think about how we know that in modern times, NRE lasts longer if people are separated and only get together every once in a while, it's the same principle. So they're trying to recreate this idea of the obsessive hormone driven fascination with another person without actually understanding anything about chemicals or hormones. And things that Capilano says mostly will work. If you're very jealous, if you don't see the person very often, if you always feel like you're gonna lose her and she's too good for you, that's gonna make your desire burn hotter. When you do get together.
Dedeker: So it's almost like this is about how do we extend the game and make it more fun? How do we avoid taking the fun out of the game?
Jase: Fun in quotes, I guess.
Dedeker: Yeah, fun in quotes. Yeah.
Emily: Now, I'm assuming, I think I know the answers to this already, but if two people are married, is it just sort of assumed that there will be affairs and that those are going to be the people that each other actually loves as opposed to just the person that you're in this business contract of marriage with?
Annalisa: I mean, it varies. I think there are lots of relationships where people really did love their spouse, but there is always underlying that this sense that this is an obligation. The tricky part is how accepting were people really of affairs? Obviously, it falls much more heavily on the woman. than on the man to be faithful because they did not have any birth control at that time. And primogeniture, the inheritance passed from father to eldest son. And so it was really important for men to feel that they could be sure the children, or at least the oldest son, was theirs. But Capellanus is very clear that you should not, as a man, try to woo a maid, a virgin, because that just ruins her prospects of marriage, destroys her life. It should be at best, a widowed woman, but more likely a married woman, so that the two of you can be entirely sure that you're freely loving each other.
Emily: Wow.
Dedeker: Yeah, that's surprising to me, because I feel like I'm so used to, I mean, I was raised in purity culture, right? And obviously going even outside the culture that I was raised in, I think we're so used to this idea of, yeah, the untouched virgin, like that's gold, right? That's the prime real estate. And it seems like maybe for marriage where you need to have a child, but when it comes to just having a lover, it's like, no, you want someone who's already- who knows what they're doing. Who's already off the market or something like that.
Jase: Yeah. Or who's already had the opportunity to establish their marriage from a legal financial point of view.
Annalisa: Yeah. They've checked all the boxes and they've sort of settled into this routine. They might not even see each other. Most days, the spouses, they had very different worlds they ran in, especially if the man was of the nobility and was spending a lot of time at court. And I just, I have to read my very favorite case. A certain knight was in love with a woman who had given her love to another man. But he got from her this much hope of her love, that if it should ever happen that she lost the love of her beloved, then without a doubt her love would go to this man. So you got two guys, one she's in love with and one who wants her. And she's like, okay, if he dies, you can have me. A little while after that, this woman married her lover. The other knight then demanded that she give him the fruit of the hope she had granted him. But she absolutely refused to do, saying that she had not lost the love of her lover. In this affair, the queen gave her decision as follows.
Dedeker: Hold on, can we give some predictions before we get the queen's judgment?
Annalisa: Sure.
Jase: Okay, yeah. Okay, okay.
Dedeker: Okay, so the situation is that he's like, hey, you're married now. That can't be your lover. You're technically, quote unquote, available for a lover now. You said that that could be me. I should be first in line, right? And the woman's like, no, no, no. That was not the terms of our agreement. It was only if my lover died or if I lost his love in some way.
Jase: And I think it depends whether there was a court precedent yet set that defined that married people cannot be in love.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: So she did lose the love of her lover by getting married.
Dedeker: That's a good argument.
Jase: If there's a legal precedent.
Emily: Yeah, I wonder if the queen is gonna say, yes, this other guy, he's gotta be your lover now. Make that union the one that sticks.
Annalisa: Jase is exactly right. Wow.
Jase: Because that was established.
Annalisa: It was established. The queen says, We dare not oppose the opinion of Countess of Sempaña, who ruled that love can exert no power between husband and wife.
Jase: Therefore, there was a legal precedent.
Annalisa: Yes, there was a legal precedent. And I guess, you know, when a guy takes his beloved to court and demands that she love him back.
Dedeker: That's work.
Jase: She needs to. Yeah.
Dedeker: Who's policing this? Is this all just social policing, right? Once this judgment is handed down, who's going around to make sure it's enforced?
Jase: Is it all just for show? Yeah.
Annalisa: Probably. But that's not in the book.
Jase: Wow. Fascinating.
Dedeker: So weirdly, what this is reminding me of is so I studied fencing for a while, classical fencing. The thing that really surprised me, the thing that surprises a lot of people, is to learn that there are these rules in fencing known as right of way rules, which essentially means that in a fencing bout, maybe you were the first one to strike your opponent, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you won the point based on the order of when you made contact with your swords, that sometimes it may mean that actually technically that point could have gone to your opponent. Therefore, it's like you almost kind of illegally got the point. Like it's these rules that don't make sense maybe necessarily. What in our organic guess at it, but there is this particular internal logic to it. That's what it reminds me of, is that, I think our modern day sensibilities are like, what? She doesn't want to be with him, and she married her lover. That's that fairy tale ending. But there's this whole other system that has its own logic around this.
Annalisa: I actually fenced for over a decade.
Dedeker: Okay, so you know.
Jase: Okay, you get it.
Annalisa: And you're absolutely right. Yeah, I get it. Yeah.
Jase: Before we go on to learning about how to play the game in medieval times, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some sponsors for this show. Please go to our website, multiamory.com, and check out our sponsors. Give them a listen. They do help support our show. Use our promo codes and links and all that in the description. Of course, if you want to join our amazing community, which Annalisa is part of as well, you can go to multiamory.com/join and get ad-free episodes, access to our video discussion groups every month, as well as our Discord server and our Facebook group. So please go check that out. And we're back. So let's get into the game. How do we play? What are the rules of the games?
Annalisa: So there's this tiny moment where there's a gesture towards gender equality, but 99.9% of the time, the man is the approacher, the assertive one, the active partner, and the woman is the gatekeeper, the passive partner. Of course, we still sort of play into that nowadays, even though things are changing. So the middle part of this book is Andreas Capellanus offering these pickup artist dialogues, where men approach women of different nobility levels, and dialogues to show both how men should approach women who are higher or lower in rank than them, but also things that a woman might argue and how a man could respond. And so they are, there's no sort of like overt example of negging that I could find.
Dedeker: I was just gonna ask about medieval negging.
Annalisa: But they're sort of next order because it's things like, oh, you are so wise, but if you were so wise, you would realize that this thing. So it's sort of like, compliment immediately undercut.
Jase: Sure. I guess that's a form of a neg, I suppose.
Dedeker: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, a soft neg.
Annalisa: Yeah. And always the men's part of the dialogues are like three to four times longer than the women's.
Dedeker: Sure.
Annalisa: And are almost always successful, although occasionally the dialogues do end with the women saying, well, you can certainly hope, and the man's saying, well, that's good enough. But usually the woman is one over. And so after that, what you're supposed to do if you're in this sort of secret fair is find an intermediary, someone who is a friend to both of you who will carry messages back and forth and help arrange secret meetings. And you're just supposed to pine for each other in between these secret meetings. At the same time, while you're pining, the man should become ennobled. by his love. He should become more generous, more religious, actually, more courteous. He should somehow magically become handsomer, braver.
Emily: The woman doesn't start working out.
Annalisa: Get a lot out of this, except, I guess, to be proud of her handiwork.
Dedeker: I mean, we have.
Emily: She takes some shopping and, like, gets some better clothes.
Dedeker: Exactly. No, we have.
Emily: Gosh, there's a...
Dedeker: That's a blueprint of so many tropes that we have now.
Jase: Right?
Dedeker: Like, yeah, the rom-com trope of... I mean, I think about Danny Zuko at the end of Grease, when he's finally like, okay, finally, I will pull myself together, right? Try to clean up my act for this woman. Or we have the trope of, you know, women, I quote unquote, like, training a man or stringing him along to the extent that he finally pulls himself together or starts dressing nicer. I think we see this sprinkled throughout so much of our pop culture still.
Annalisa: And I don't know if you know the movie Hitch with... Oh, yes.
Dedeker: I was thinking about Hitch also.
Emily: Mm.
Annalisa: Yeah, very much this sort of intermediary who is going to help you get the woman. The whole idea is that women are never going to naturally fall in love with you. You have to seduce slash verbally bully slash impress your way into their hearts.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: So the thing, though, that kind of surprised me about these dialogues when I think about comparing it to, like, modern pickup artists, tips or lines or whatever, is that it feels like a lot of these are trying to present a very logical, reasoned, and here is why, therefore you should accept me as your lover, which is interesting to me that it's kind of playing, trying to play on logic rather than on emotions or excitement or feelings or things like that. And I guess if you have a court system to then back you up and be like, see, he did prove his case.
Dedeker: Yeah, I've made an airtight case to you.
Jase: Right, that surprised me a little bit how much the arguments are that, like this quote here, you are troubling yourself to say what seems to be against all reason. For all men know that if one gets easily what he desires, he holds it cheap. And what formerly he longed for with his whole heart, he now considers worthless. On the other hand, and he kind of presents this whole logical argument to say, and that's why, therefore, you should conceal the love affair and then we should be lovers or whatever. It's all trying to work out this, then that, then that, then that, and therefore this.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Annalisa: And you do have to remember that this is in a time before most entertainment, so talking and having these sort of debates was one of the things people did. And especially in the courts, the idea is, by the way, that this is courtly love because it is only available to those who are of the upper class. There's middle class, lower nobility, and upper nobility, and there's actually a really horrible passage where he talks about the love, if you make the mistake of falling in love with a peasant. So he starts out saying, We say it happens rarely that we find farmers serving in love's court, but naturally, like a horse or a mule, they give themselves up to the work of Venus. So if you fall in love with a peasant woman, which is just embarrassing, but if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women, be careful to puff them up with lots of praise. And then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force.
Emily: Oh my God.
Annalisa: For you can hardly soften their outward inflexibility so far they will grant you their embraces quietly.
Dedeker: That's so interesting. So as in like a peasant woman is not gonna be swayed by the same logical arguments. Right. The idea of like not sophisticated enough, not smart enough, so you like, so treating them like an animal, you gotta just make them do what you want them to do. That's cool. Go for it, Brad. Well, so yeah. Okay, but how does that compare to other advice given to a man who wants to seduce or approach a woman who is of a lower class than him, but not so low as to.
Jase: Be a peasant woman? He's high nobility, and she's middle class or something.
Annalisa: So the greater the difference, the more the man can just sort of demand what he wants, but he should always, the common thread in all of these dialogues, especially when the woman is of a lower class, is that they will be swayed by any attention because, wow, you're a count, and here you are talking to this almost middle-class woman. And so you just have very little to overcome, whereas in the other direction, if a man of the middle class is trying to woo a woman of the nobility, he has to go way out of his way to prove that he is beyond the norm of his class, that he's worth loving.
Dedeker: How would he prove that? Do they give any concrete examples?
Annalisa: So in this dialogue of a man of the middle class approaching the woman of the upper class, one of the things she says about him that's problematic is that you can't possibly be a warrior for all those soldiers ought naturally to have long slender calves and a moderate sized foot longer than it is broad and looking as though formed with some skill. I see your calves are fat and roundly turned and abruptly and your feet are too huge and immensely spread out.
Dedeker: I, okay, I love that, that when she's coming up with an argument, she's just like, okay, what, okay, his calves, great, that, I'll just zero in on that, just the first thing, I didn't identify.
Annalisa: And then he comes back and says, the objection you raised about my large flappy legs and my big feet don't show much intelligence. Men say that in the furthest parts of Italy, there lives a man, and he goes on to talk about all these men who are kings or other nobles who have, not attractive. With flabby legs, yeah, and round heads.
Jase: Wow.
Annalisa: But they're really intelligent and noble, and so she should recognize that he is like that. And she has to give him a chance to prove it, to overcome those flabby legs.
Dedeker: The flabby calves. Oh, man.
Annalisa: Right.
Emily: Goodness.
Jase: When we're looking at the connections between kind of modern-day dating culture and all of these things with this, something that's jumping out to me as being different is the whole strict social class thing.
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: That in modern day, we don't have the same strictly defined class structure. However, we do still have a lot of these terms like someone being out of your league or, oh, like they're in a different class than I am, where we don't mean it as, it's not defined as clearly, where it's not like, I'm descended from this person therefore, or I own land therefore, we have a little bit more of an amorphous sense of like, class or we use the whole like, oh, well, I'm a six and she's an eight. So therefore I have to approach this differently or something.
Dedeker: Well, sure there's that, but like, I think our class structure is just a little bit more insidious now. I did read a study and I'm so sorry, I don't have the citation for it, but they were looking at behaviors of users on dating apps and they did find that like if a person's pictures had particular markers of being middle class or upper middle class, they were much more likely to be swiped on. Controlling for all other factors, such as the clothes that they wear, their type of haircut, what's in their background, right? Yeah, can you see what kind of car they have? Can you see like the tasteful decorations in their apartment? What are the things they talk about as being their hobbies? Like a lot of these, like, I think nowadays, more subtle markers of class that we still pick up on and I think subconsciously still favor, even if it's not as clearly stratified as, oh, I very much know I'm a middle-class merchant and I know that this lady is nobility.
Annalisa: I agree. And I would actually add that I think our markers aren't subtle. The constant drumbeat of women who are very conventionally attractive getting men who are rich or who have high paying jobs and how that's just a natural normal thing is exactly the same as what's going on here. In the 12th century. The women are not as overtly trading beauty and sex for security, but that's because the expectation is they're already married and taken care of. Otherwise, it's the same sort of dynamic for a lot of what we imagine as romance. The guy sees the woman, falls in love with her meat suit, pursues her, she resists for a while, recognizes that he's actually really great and possibly rich, and they live happily ever after. Or at least told the sequel.
Dedeker: The meat suit, meet cute.
Emily: Yes. I thought you said meet cute, but you said meat suit. Yeah, goodness.
Jase: Oh, goodness.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: So then when it comes to this NRE idea of love too, that it's all about that pursuit, right? I'd say the same thing's true with pickup artist manual, dating advice type things. It's all focused on that first part of getting together.
Annalisa: Yeah.
Jase: Right? And then it kind of stops and it's like, yeah, you got it from here. That this book does go into a little bit of how do you keep love increasing after you've first consummated it? It basically boils down to what you were talking about before, which is don't see each other too often. Make sure that there's still distance. And then the way to decrease love is just by seeing each other too often is having too much of a chance to talk to each other. All decrease love. So too many opportunities of seeing them, too much talking to each other, and too much opportunities for exchanging solaces. I don't know what that means. It means doing it. Okay, cool.
Dedeker: Exchanging solaces. I'm gonna adopt that one into my list of euphemisms.
Jase: Yeah.
Emily: Too much sex is gonna make you love them less. That's interesting.
Annalisa: Yeah. Too much sex just ruins the fun. Yeah, love increases likewise if one of the lovers feels real jealousy, which is called, in fact, the nurse of love.
Dedeker: Uh-oh.
Jase: Jealousy is the nurse of love.
Dedeker: Wow.
Jase: Okay. 'Cause we've often talked about how there's this kind of cultural assumption that jealousy means you love someone a lot.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: Both in the sense of it justifies feelings of jealousy and being possessive and all of that because it's, oh, it's just because I love you. But then also we've talked about how sometimes a partner might feel upset and like, oh, you must not really care about me if you're not jealous.
Annalisa: Exactly.
Jase: Or, you know, so many movies about intentionally making someone jealous. That's very much a practice of, like, oh, I want to be sure this person is into me, so I'm going to make them jealous.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Jase: Could we believe that comes from here?
Dedeker: But if I can append a follow-up question to that, I have a question around, like, how quote unquote, monogamous is a courtly love relationship meant to be? In the sense, like, sure, you might be courting a married lady, so it's technically not monogamous, but is it just she has one slot for a lover, as it were, and you occupy that role? Is there a genuine chance that she might just be fickle and she might decide, actually, I'm not into you anymore, I want to pursue this other lover? Is there a chance that another dude might scoop your lady? I guess I'm wondering about what are the quote unquote sources of the jealousy?
Annalisa: Oddly enough, the rules are very clear. You can't love two people at the same time. That's just impossible. It literally says, Thou shalt keep thyself chaste for the sake of her whom thou lovest, so the guy should not have sex with other women while he's trying to get into her. Thou shalt not knowingly strive to break up a correct love affair that someone else is engaged in. And so you have to respect the guy who's there first, but it also...
Jase: Oh, there's a dibs system.
Dedeker: Right of way. Right of way. Like fencing.
Emily: There you go.
Annalisa: And then there's also a rule two, he who is not jealous cannot love. Three, no one can be bound by a double love. Rule one, by the way, in case you're wondering, is marriage is no real excuse for not loving. So you can't use your marriage as an excuse for turning away a lover.
Dedeker: I see.
Jase: So not that marriage is an excuse not to love your spouse, but it's, you can't use it as an excuse not to love somebody else.
Annalisa: Exactly. Right.
Emily: Okay. Were there excuses, though, that were okay to use if the woman just decides, like, I'm not into this guy, so I don't want him to continue pursuing me? Did that ever happen? Was that allowed to happen?
Dedeker: Take your own deaths.
Annalisa: This is another example of how what happened in the 12th century is exactly like the way some men practice romance today, which is, if you can't give me a reason that sounds reasonable to me that works for me, you have to accept my date, romance, sex, whatever. Like, there, the woman has to be available to a guy unless she has this can draw from the short list of like, you know, I have another partner, I'm dying in three months, whatever, I don't know. But, but there are a lot of men who don't seem to recognize I'm not into you. As a legitimate reason to stop pursuing a woman and accept that she's not, it's not going to happen.
Jase: I think the way we see that still exist in modern times is that most women have learned that if a guy is interested in you and you want him to stop, the only reliable way is to say you already have a partner.
Dedeker: Whether or not it's true.
Jase: And not to say, I'm not interested. Because then that's just the opening to do this kind of like, well, let me convince you. Because we can see here rule number 18. Good character alone makes any man worthy of love. So, what is good character?
Emily: What does that even mean?
Annalisa: Oh, so fuzzy. That's the thing.
Dedeker: Yeah. Yeah.
Annalisa: When made public, love rarely endures. That's another way to keep the love increasing. Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love.
Dedeker: Well, can I bring it back to the jealousy piece? Because I'm still like, okay, but if you can't love two people at once. So, like, what is he jealous of? Is it the possibility of her liking someone else?
Annalisa: Yeah.
Dedeker: That she could be attracted to somebody else. Is it jealous of— I know we're supposed to spend time apart, but the fact that I can't spend all of my time with you makes me feel jealous of you and your time, which is good, 'cause that's increasing my love for you, and that's kind of part of the game. Like, I'm trying to wrap my brain around it.
Annalisa: It's never 100% clear, but I do think that the first thing you said, the idea that a woman might transfer her affections to another man at any point is why the lover is always apprehensive and always jealous, and therefore the flames of love keep getting hotter and hotter.
Jase: The very last rule here, rule 31 in this particular list, is that nothing forbids one woman from being loved by two men or one man by two women. So you can have multiple lovers into you. You just can only have love for one of them.
Dedeker: I think they quoted that in The Last Duel, actually. Yeah.
Jase: They might have.
Emily: That was quite a film.
Dedeker: Ben Affleck whipped that one out.
Annalisa: Right.
Emily: Jeez.
Jase: Before we continue on to the growth of medieval incels, I guess, and how that relates to modern day, in part three of this book, we're going to take a quick break again to talk about our sponsors for this show. Please give them a listen. Use our promo codes and links in our show description that does really support our show. And if you'd rather support us more directly and join our amazing community, you can go to multiamory.com/join and there we have a sliding scale to join our community, which gets you access to our Discord server, early releases of ad-free episodes, as well as our monthly video processing groups, where you can have real-time conversations with us and your fellow listeners.
Dedeker: So to circle back to, Annalisa, you were alluding to the fact that even some modern day men will go through this same cycle of pushing, pushing, pushing, not feeling like the person they're pursuing is giving an acceptable answer, an acceptable reason for their rejection. I think many of us have also had the lived experience of usually a dude pursuing, pushing, pursuing, pushing, and then once he hits the wall, when it's clear, oh, she's not going for it, then there's this 180 into anger, abuse, verbal abuse, insults, then it's like this complete Jekyll and Hyde situation. And you've alluded to the fact that that almost seems to happen in this text also, where we talk about this pursuit in these games and how fun it is to court a woman, and then it takes a turn.
Annalisa: Yes. So book three starts out with Andreas Capaladus saying to his friend Walter, I only wrote this so that you wouldn't think I was too stupid to understand the rules of the game, but really, love is horrible. Women are evil, and I hope to convince you to have nothing to do with them. And then he goes on this amazing misogynistic rant where he essentially says, women are, all women have all the vices in them. They can't be trusted. They're greedy, they're sluts, they're cruel, and that falling in love leads to all of the crimes. In fact, there's actually a passage where he says, you will find that there is not a criminal excess that does not follow from this same love, including homicide, adultery, theft, false witness, wrath, and he ends up saying, Incest very often comes from it, for we cannot find a man so well versed in the divine mandates that if the evil spirit incites him to love or merit, can keep it under control, his passion for women related to him by blood. So yeah, if you allow love to run unchecked, eventually incest. And, yeah, men will be killing each other. It's all, yeah. So get away from women. Men going their own way. Women are evil. Evil in some of the most extreme ways. As just one example, it says, he actually says that we hope that this is talking to Walter, your noble birth and excellence of character may never be spotted by the infection of Venus. or stained by illicit commerce with a woman, or soiled with her filthiness. Boy. For there is nothing in the world more loathsome or wearisome than to meditate too intently on the nature or characterization of a woman.
Emily: I just want to know who hurt him or rejected him for him to decide to do this 180 in the book. And also, so many of these things that you're describing and just what you read there, really does sound very similar to people's viewpoints today about women. And by people, I mean men's viewpoints.
Annalisa: And by men, you mean incels who have these mantras.
Emily: I mean incels.
Annalisa: Definitely.
Emily: I mean, yes.
Annalisa: Some men are very nice.
Emily: Some are quite lovely.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: Hashtag not all men.
Jase: You mentioned the whole men going their own way, which definitely for me was like, oh, that's the red pill, like MGTOW men going their own way movement of that whole, well, in modern day, it's like, oh, feminism has made all relationships terrible, and therefore we shouldn't have any relations with women, really. Like, maybe we can have sex with them sometimes, but for the most part, the whole system's broken, so we're not going to be part of it. And it kind of sounds like this guy's getting into that, but he's more the, what's called in modern day MGTOW culture, quote, going monk, which is just not even doing it at all. Not even casual sex. Just like, fully forget about women. Which also reminds me of Paul from the Bible, which we've been reading recently on Drunk Bible Study. But he also kind of had this opinion of, like, yeah, I guess you can get married if you want, but it's better if you just don't, because it all sucks. He didn't quite say it that way, but, you know, that's the vibe he gives us.
Annalisa: Yeah. And what's interesting is if you think about the culture that Andreas Kapalanas is writing for, first of all, Christianity is the central belief system and clergy are supposed to be celibate and at least some of them not, there are many, many ranks in the Middle Ages of clergy. Not all of them were celibate like priests were, but a lot of them were. Moreover, men spend a lot of time with other men going to war, going hunting. The sexes spend a lot of time separate. And so the idea that men should actually just completely abandon women was not a big leap for them the way it is for us, where men and women meet at work and in casual activities and so on and so forth. There was much more division. And of course, with Christianity doing its thing, and Paul, as we've learned, the idea that women are evil comes from the fact that Eve was the one who got us thrown out of paradise. And therefore, all women, I mean, everyone has original sin, but all women have double dose of inherent evilness. And the less time you spend with them... a double dose. Oh, yeah.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: Extra moist. Yeah.
Emily: So moist and cold. I agree with the cold part, though. I am always cold. I do need somebody to snuggle me.
Dedeker: Okay, but that means I need to...
Jase: Steal the warmth from.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Emily: I need to steal my partner's warmth.
Dedeker: That makes a certain amount of sense, though, that if this is like a heavily gender segregated society, that it isn't that difficult to think about women and love, first of all, is kind of, it sounds like a little bit inextricable from each other of, right? If you're going to play around with women, it's going to be this whole courtly love game or whatever. And to almost think about it, like, I don't know, I almost get this vibe of a parent telling a child, like, just don't do drugs, you know? Just don't. Just say no. Just say no to women. Just say no to courtly love.
Annalisa: Yeah. And it's also important, I think, to remember that people could be married, and also essentially not interact with the opposite sex. You come together to have your baby, and then you go to your separate parts of the castle or whatever, and don't really interact much. And it's a business arrangement in the same way today, two people can run a company together, but not actually get along or spend much time together.
Jase: What started this whole episode was you kind of pointing out from your class that you teach about this, how not new all this stuff is. I think that we can have articles that come out now of like, oh, look at this new red pill movement, you know, and that was a big new thing, or like, oh, like this whole incel thing is new and kind of saying, actually it's not. It's actually been around way longer than I would have guessed this kind of attitude and this idea. I think it also points out that this is something that we might assume Oh, well, the internet is what allowed this kind of thinking and these people to find each other and create this kind of, you know, misogynist, oh, we're gonna live outside of this, or we're gonna just learn how to manipulate women 'cause they can't be trusted or whatever it is. They're like, even that's not new. Which I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse, to be honest.
Annalisa: The way I try to approach it in my class is to point out that a lot of this gets sold to us as natural. Jealousy is natural. Monogamy is natural. The fact that people are drawn to physical beauty first is natural, but somebody actually wrote those down as rules and explained how they should work using a system that we recognize as completely ridiculous. You know, the humors and, you know, in the end, maybe they can understand that those things are choices. They're not hard and fast natural responses.
Emily: I do think it's so fascinating that we have all this knowledge at our disposal we have, you know, therapy speak and know that mental health is such an important thing. And we have things like feminism now as well. And yet all of this is still so prevalent. And I love the fact that we are speaking about this just again to point to the fact that what you just said, it is a choice. And somebody a long time ago decided this is the way that things should be. And it has kept up for the last millennium, which is pretty remarkable.
Annalisa: Yeah, it's definitely remarkable. I give this book full points for staying power, but I really hope that people use it as recognizing, first of all, idolizing women and putting them on a pedestal as the thing that ennobles men always leads to them being pushed off the pedestal and treated like absolute dirt. And second, that all of this stuff that goes into making the romance industry in Western culture is not inherent and that we can have relationships that are based on actual open communication, transparency, honesty, and that will create relationships that are much happier than this sort of obsessive NRE feeling. But you can't live your life that way. It's just too tiring.
Jase: Yeah, too tiring. And it is interesting, too, that when you hear his case about all crimes and terrible things coming out of love, I'm like, if we're focused entirely on this, like, obsessive, I feel miserable when I'm not with this person, I'm always becoming pale when I'm around them, I can't think of anything but them, I'm like, yeah, that's not a healthy state to stay in. And if that's what you think love is, I might agree. Yeah, that's not a good thing to do. But maybe it would come to the different conclusion of perhaps we could have relationships differently instead of just saying, let's throw them all in the garbage. Sure, we could come to different conclusions. But to a certain extent, I'm like, yeah, if you think love is this way, then your conclusion makes sense. And I think we could look at similar things with red pill, incels, MGTOW, all of that stuff today, where there often is this internal consistent logic, but it's based on these kind of fundamental assumptions of this is the thing everyone wants, or this is what's natural, or this is how this works. Just like that can't be changed, and therefore I'm going to make these decisions based on that, which feel internally consistent and logical. But are based on these underlying principles that we haven't questioned or we haven't looked at differently.
Annalisa: And I do hear in the last minute or so, we've come down pretty hard on men because men are both the focus of Andrea Capellanus and sort of are more active in the dating world today. But this stuff affects the way women think too in very negative ways. This idea that, you know, a man should propose and if he won't propose, there's a problem, he's not really loving you. He should pay for dinner. He should open doors. Some women in society still buying into this idea that a man shows he loves you by this sort of exaggerated respect. You know, you're too fragile to carry your own coat type of thing. And I think that that's just as bad for women. And it's smaller groups because of feminism. But I think that there are still a lot of women who feel like if the man doesn't pay for the first date, that he's trash.
Dedeker: Well, we've got the rise of now these cadres of young women wanting to be trad wives, right? Like the glorification of these very, very regressive gender roles. And so I guess what I'm trying to get at is it can be easy for us to look back at this and laugh at it, be amused by it, be surprised by it. And also it is important to know that there are ties to today that it's still here and still influential.
Jase: Well, this has been a fascinating journey, and I always love these opportunities when it kind of feels like the three of us get to have our own private university class about something where we get to always ask our questions and interrupt the professor whenever we want. So this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us today, Annalisa.
Annalisa: Oh, thank you. I had a great time, and I love talking about this stuff, and I love talking with you. So perfect day.
Jase: Awesome. And now for you listening at home, we would love to hear from you. We're gonna be posting our Question of the Week on our Instagram, Multiamory_Podcast. And that question is, what's a pop culture idea about love that you used to believe but don't anymore? Really curious to hear what some of those are. You can answer that anonymously on Instagram, and we'll repost some of the answers to share with all of you out there. If you wanna discuss this further with other listeners of the show, including Annalisa, who is in the community of as well. The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group, and you can access both of those by joining our community at multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share publicly on our Instagram, @multiamory_podcast.
Jase: Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Dedeker Winston, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on Multiamory.com.