4 - The God of Love

Summary

Alongside the Good Woman, Alceste, the other major personage that Chaucer confronts in his dream is the spectacular deity, the God of Love. Any description of the subtleties of meaning embraced by the term ‘love’ in a given medieval context is fraught with difficulty, even leaving to one side the contrast between earthly and spiritual love. If on the one hand the God of Love, such as the one praised by Christine de Pizan in her Epistre au Dieu d'Amours, is presented as the patron of the highest secular ideals of the noble life, on the other hand in Jean de Meun's section of the Roman de la Rose he is the thinly disguised personification of sexual passion. Where does Chaucer's God of Love fit? He is clearly a more complex figure than the Cupid whose attributes Boccaccio authoritatively glosses in a moralistic and pessimistic fashion in his scholarly work, De Genealogia Deorum. Boccaccio says there that Cupid is depicted as a child to show the age of those whose passions and behaviour are under his influence; his wings indicate the instability of the passionate; he carries bows and arrows to demonstrate how suddenly the unwary are captured; he is shown blindfolded to teach us that lovers do not know where they are going and lack any kind of judgement.