Identifying a Literary Antecedent to the Siege of the Castle of Love in Gothic Ivories.

The Siege of the Castle of Love was a popular motif in the art of medieval Europe and was depicted on a group of composite caskets—ivory boxes presenting a medley of subjects related to medieval love—produced in northern France in the first half of the fourteenth century. This essay identifies, for the first time, a literary antecedent to the Siege motif: Andreas Capellanus's De amore (On Love , ca. 1185). In this text, Andreas describes a palace of Love occupied by maidens who, like the garrisoned maidens in the Siege motif, defend a castle against prospective lovers and "repulse the unworthy far from the court of Love." While the ivory carvers who produced the caskets may not have engaged directly with Andreas's text, they inhabited a cultural milieu steeped in the love literature produced at the court of Marie de Champagne, Andreas's patron. This essay argues that the identification of a textual precursor affords new insights into the semiotics of ivory—whereby heat signs carnality and cold signs chastity—and the reception of the composite caskets by medieval handlers/viewers. It also challenges the traditional assumption that the Siege was necessarily understood as an allegory of seduction, suggesting that, for a sophisticated patron such as Queen Clémence de Hongrie (1293–1328), it would have been read as an affirmation of the decision-making power exercised by maidens dwelling inside the castle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]