Journal article
The Liber de heros morbo of Johannes Afflacius and Its Implications for Medieval Love Conventions
Speculum, Vol.62(2), pp.324-344
04/1987
PMID: 11621278
Abstract
The disease of love appears in an unbroken chain of medical treatises stretching from sixth-century Byzantium through the Middle Ages to post-Renaissance Western Europe. Lovesickness, known variously as amor eros, amor heros, or amor hereos in medieval Latin medical texts, has attracted the attention of literary scholars because many of its symptoms correspond to conventional signs of love in medieval literature. According to George Lyman Kittredge, “What to the physician were symptoms … became, in the chivalric system, duties — ideals of emotion which the true lover must live up to, and which the hypocrite takes pains to counterfeit.” In the late thirteenth century the Catalan physician Arnald of Villanova explicitly compared the disease of love and feudal service in his Tractatus de amore heroico. He claimed that this love “is called heroic as though lordly (quasi dominalis), not only because it befalls lords, but also either because it dominates, subjugating the soul and ruling a man's heart, or because the acts of such lovers toward the desired object are similar to the acts of servants toward their lords.”
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Details
- Title
- The Liber de heros morbo of Johannes Afflacius and Its Implications for Medieval Love Conventions
- Creators
- Mary F. Wack - Washington State University, Office for Undergraduate Education
- Publication Details
- Speculum, Vol.62(2), pp.324-344
- Academic Unit
- Office for Undergraduate Education
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Number of pages
- 21
- Identifiers
- 99900599649901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article