What is love? The question as to what love is, is an age-old question that men and women have pondered since the beginning of time. Dictionary.com tells us that love is "A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness." We still wonder if love can be described in a simple dictionary definition. In The Art of Courtly Love Capellanus gives us a straightforward definition much like this one in the beginning of the book. It says "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 be common desire to carry out all love's precepts in the others embrace. As we read on there are many more definitions, some more complex, some that would be seen as ridiculous in the twenty- first century and some that contradict them selves. Capellanus leaves it up to his readers to decide for themselves the true definition of love.
             Before we look at what love is, how to approach it and how to keep it Capellanus gives the reader specific guidelines on who can love. He tells us that there can be no love between people of the same sex or men or women whom have not reached full maturity. (p.30) Later, he also says that love may not exist within religious officials and that love from a woman who is too concerned with greed and money is a "deadly enemy" (p.145). From these statements one would fall under the impression that there is no love between a mother and a daughter or a father and a son. No person under God, even in the High Middle Ages has the right to judge on whether or not love between homosexuals is proper or improper. All of these statement that Capellanus has made leads the reader to believe that there is only one kind of love, the love between a man and a wo...