Never mind Valentine's Day. Ten Honors Program students and their Pulitzer Prize-winning professor Michael Dirda are devoting the entire semester to love.

From Plato's "Symposium" and Dante's "Vita Nuova," to the Renaissance poetry of Shakespeare and Donne, to Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," Ford Maddox Ford's "The Good Soldier" and Nabokov's "Lolita," the class explores masterworks of Western culture that focus on matters of the heart.

Besides literature, the syllabus also includes the painter Bronzino's "Allegory of Passion," the operas "Nozze di Figaro" by Mozart and "Tristan" by Wagner, and modern ballads by Patsy Cline.

Despite the difficulty of the texts, students are smitten by the "Love's Mysteries" course. The subject matter is irresistible.

"Love is everyone's favorite emotion. It's the essential problem of our lives, especially the first half of our lives," says Dirda, a columnist for The Washington Post's Book World whose vivid writing earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1993. He conceived the course, as well as another on literary journalism, for his debut as visiting scholar at McDaniel. "These are books and works of art that everyone should know."

On Thursday, the scholarly Dirda was already seated at a long, gleaming conference table in the Richwine Special Collections Room of Hoover Library when his students began to arrive just before 10 a.m. Short, neat stacks of reference books stood at the ready, but Dirda rarely looked at them as he discussed the day's topic: Courtly love in the Middle Ages.

Quoting extemporaneously from Ovid—"Courtly love is sometimes said to be Ovid misunderstood," he explained—and recounting colorful examples, such as Sir Lancelot's doomed devotion to Queen Guinevere, Dirda enchanted his classroom colleagues. Then he sparked a discussion.

"Is Courtly love a good thing?" he asked. Courtly love is adulterous love that is secret, frustrated and difficult. Yet, it served as a humanizing, civilizing influence on warrior men. During a period in history when marriages were not based on love and the laws of society dictated that wives obeyed their husbands completely, the rules of Courtly love turned the tables, commanding the utter worship of women—at least the women you weren't married to.

As students each took a turn reading from "The Art of Courtly Love," by Andreas Capellanus, they groaned at some of the "rules," such as "Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved," and "Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love."

"Some of those I definitely don't agree with—and I'm sure some of the girls in class really don't agree either," sophomore Kenton Camper said later . "The texts that we've read so far, in one sense have seemed distant to my own experience. On the other hand there's some great insight. It definitely seems that there are some universalities of love."

Camper, who marveled at Dirda's "depth and breadth of literary knowledge," said he could relate to some of Plato's ideas about love. “He really saw love at a deeper level. He recognized the eros, the sexual part, but the deeper parts, too. That resonated with me, the goal of finding beauty itself that transcends those physical realities."

Sophomore Katie Hood was also passionate about the class. She's already learned that now is the best time to be a woman in love.

"I think it's kind of a good time for women. We obviously have a choice in when and who to love," said Hood, who will perform in the feminist play, "The Vagina Monologues," for the second time this spring. "It's kind of the 'yes dear, honey-do list' phase of history."

Originally printed on News@McDaniel, Issue No. 30, Feb. 8, 2005: http://www.mcdaniel.edu/news/n@marchive0405.shtml

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