This volume examines the treatment and expression of love in medieval literature and art. These nineteen essays, contributed by recognized authorities on medieval romantic expression, consider a wide variety of texts from the following cultures: French, Arabic, Latin, Hispanic, Hebrew, Provencal, and German. Teachers and students of medieval literature will find in this well-researched book cogent, contemporary analyses of written expressions of love in the Middle Ages.
The author explores the work of fourteenth-century writers who discussed the intellectual implications of the religious idea of Incarnation in poetical and rhetorical forms. The book then goes on to discuss how the Incarnation of Christ allowed writers to meditate on the nature of language and form.
A translation of the 1972 French analysis of the dynamics of textual production in the Middle Ages that marked a major shift in scholarly discourse about medieval literature. Integrating the tools of linguistics and textual criticism, does not come to conclusions, but proposes approaches and methods for investigation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.
As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise, or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics. Huot first investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout, rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers' characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and book-makers conceived their common project, and how they distinguished their respective roles.
This study offers a typology of the go-between across key texts from antiquity and several medieval literary traditions, analyzing the role of the third party in the poetics of love. The work provides the indispensable context for the study of the significant transformations undergone by the go-between. Legal and scientific sources are taken into account alongside Latin, French, and English literary works and literature of the medieval Islamic period for the critique of differences and intertextual links which inform the conception of the go-between. The case of the Medieval Spanish go-between is given a special attention due to the figure's complex relationship with diverse traditions. The range covered in the work provides a comprehensive view of the figure's trajectory and representation in each text.
Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in al-Andalus investigates a largely overlooked subset of Muslim and Jewish love poetry in medieval Spain: hetero- and homo-erotic love poems written by Muslim and Jewish religious scholars, in which the lover and his sensual experience of the beloved are compared to scriptural characters and storylines. This book examines the ways in which the scriptural referents fit in with, or differ from, the traditional Andalusian poetic conventions. The study then proceeds to compare the scriptural stories and characters as presented in the poems with their scriptural and exegetical sources. This new intertextual analysis reveals that the Jewish and Muslim scholar-poets utilized their sacred literature in their poems of desire as more than poetic ornamentation; in employing Qur’ānic heroes in their secular verses, the Muslim poets presented a justification of profane love and sanctification of erotic human passions. In the Hebrew lust poems, which utilize biblical heroes, we can detect subtle, subversive, and surprisingly placed interpretations of biblical accounts. Moving beyond the concern with literary history to challenge the traditional boundaries between secular and religious poetry, this book provides a new, multidisciplinary, approach to existing materials and will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of Islamic and Jewish Studies as well as to those with an interest in Hebrew and Arabic poetry of Islamic Spain.
First published in 1995. This anthology focuses on European languages, but also includes Arabic and Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain, arranged chronologically and accompanied by commentary about the poets' lives and work.
"An accurate, elegant rendering of major late-medieval texts, crucial to our understanding of the courtly tradition and of Chaucer. Ideal for classroom use."--William Calin, University of Florida "Elegant and graceful translations of the most important authors of the late Middle Ages; each work brings a new take on the topic of love. A superb resource for students and scholars in comparative literature and medieval studies."--Wendy Pfeffer, University of Louisville This very first anthology of medieval love debate poems--comprising five masterpieces of the genre--explores the many compelling mysteries raised by the experience of romantic love. Some have been translated into modern English for the first time. With wit, ingenuity, and humor, these poems suggest intriguing answers to what contemporary inquirers would call questions of gender and sexual politics: Who loves better, men or women? Are men or women more faithful in love? Are women obligated to reciprocate the attentions of an ardent male? What qualities in a lover do women most desire? The contributors provide a foundation for the love debate genre and medieval literary treatments of love, as well as pertinent facts of literary history and biographical details about the poets, whose work spans more than 100 years. The volume features works that have been recognized for centuries as central texts of the medieval tradition: Christine de Pizan's Debate of the Two Lovers, Alain Chartier's Debate of the Four Ladies, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women, and Guillaume de Machaut's Judgment of the King of Bohemia and Judgment of the King of Navarre. Each translation is appropriately annotated for student use. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University. Barbara K. Altmann is associate professor of French at the University of Oregon.
