Book Description

Excerpt from The Art of Courtly Love This translation was originally undertaken, some fifteen years ago, for the use of students in a course in medieval literature in transla tion. It is now published in the hope that it may prove useful to others who desire some acquaintance with one of the significant books of the Middle Ages, but who are unable to read the medieval Latin in which it is written. My primary aim has been to preserve the ideas of Andreas, and to keep close to what he says, even though it has been necessary, at times, to use somewhat awkward English in doing so. My secondary aim has been to reproduce something of his style. This is in general colloquial, but it is colored with Biblical expres sions, and at times it becomes almost pompous when he tries to re produce the speech of the upper classes. In one respect, however, it seemed best not to follow him. Andreas is very fond of loose, strag gling sentences strung together with and, but, for, so, or some similar connective. Medieval rhetoric was much more tolerant of such sentences than modern readers are, but Andreas seems to go beyond the practice of his contemporaries. In my translation such sentences have been broken up into shorter, more manageable units. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.