Life & Wisdom Quote by Andreas Capellanus

The line lands like a medieval mic drop: opulent imagery (earth and sea transmuted to gold) marshaled in service of a small, sharp punchline about women and money. Capellanus isn’t describing women so much as performing a clerical culture’s anxiety about them. The hyperbole is the point. By making female “avarice” cosmically insatiable, he turns a social fear into a natural law, something as fixed as the hardness of a diamond. That pseudo-scientific flourish - “by any human ingenuity” - mimics reasoned observation while smuggling in prejudice.

Context matters. Andreas Capellanus, writing in the orbit of courtly love, helped codify romantic behavior for aristocratic audiences while also undercutting it. His work notoriously oscillates between celebrating love’s rituals and diagnosing them as traps. This quote belongs to the diagnosis: women appear not as agents in a complex economy, but as moral hazards, the glittering obstacle between men and virtue.

The subtext is transactional. Courtly love depended on gifts, patronage, and status performance; it was a system where desire often moved through property. Mocking women as hoarders quietly reframes men’s economic obligations as victimhood: if giving is demanded, it’s because women are bottomless pits of appetite; if women won’t “consent” to give, it’s proof of their essential selfishness. The gendered barb does cultural work: it licenses resentment, polices female control of resources, and reassures male audiences that their own acquisitiveness is normal - even noble - compared to the monstrous thrift he pins on women.