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Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Edited by Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona)
Poets in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age constantly explored the discourse of love, and nothing seems to have
mattered more than love in the world of the courts. But what was it all about, and what did love mean? This book argues
that love then was much more than the simple exploration of an emotion. Instead, the discourse examined here from many
interdisciplinary perspectives served as a springboard for fundamental epistemological investigations into the meaning
of human life in erotic, spiritual, and philosophical terms. Words of love implied, in a chiasmic manner, love of words,
and in this sense the discourse of love aimed for the development of communication, ethics, morality, spirituality,
and the entire value system of courtly society far into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To love meant to talk
about love, and this experience led to the formation of the individual, social relations, connections to the Godhead,
hence the realization of the spiritual dimension of human existence through love, happiness, joy, harmony, and ultimately
the transformational magic of language.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Albrecht Classen
The Quest for Knowledge Within Medieval Literary Discourse:
The Metaphysical and Philosophical Meaning of Love
Chapter 1: Cynthia White
Concordia Virginitatis: Passionate Marriage in Paulinus of Nola, c. 25
Chapter 2: Robert Levine
Patronage and Erotic Rhetoric in the Sixth Century:
The Case of Venantius Fortunatus
Chapter 3: William Sayers
Fusion and Fission in the Love and Lexis of Early Ireland
Chapter 4: Raymond Cormier
Woman’s Ways of Feeling: Lavinia’s Innovative Discourse of/on/about
Love in the Roman d’Eneas
Chapter 5: Carmel Posa SGS
“Desire”: The Language of Love in the Feminine in Heloise’s Letters
Chapter 6: Bonnie Wheeler
The ‘Sic et Non’ of Andreas’s De Amore
Chapter 7: Valerie Michelle Wilhite
Language for Lovers: Lessons from Troubadours and Mystics
Chapter 8: Anna Kukulka-Wojtasik
La dame et l’amour: les mots pour dire la beauté et la passion.
D’après un choix des Chansons de Guillaume d’Aquitaine
et des Lais de Marie de France
Chapter 9: Karen K. Jambeck
“De parler bon’ eloquence”: Words of Love in the Lais of
Marie de France
Chapter 10: Karen Pratt
The Rhetoric of Love in the Romances of Gautier d’Arras
Chapter 11: Christopher R. Clason
The Bitterness of Love on the Sea: Isolde’s Amorous Discourse
Viewed through Gottfried’s Crystalline Transparency
Chapter 12: Linda Marie Zaerr
Songs of Love and Love of Songs:
Music and Magic in Medieval Romance
Chapter 13: Siegfried Christoph
The Language and Culture of Joy
Chapter 14: G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.
The Language of Love in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival
Chapter 15: Connie L. Scarborough
When your Lover is the Virgin Mary: A New Approach to the
Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X of Castile
Chapter 16: Albrecht Classen
Love of Discourse and Discourse of Love in Middle High German
Minnesang: The Case of the Post-Walther Generation from the
Thirteenth through the Fifteenth Century
Chapter 17: Tracy Adams
The Lover and His Faus Semblant: Technologies of Confession in
the Roman de la Rose
Chapter 18: Jean E. Jost
What Kind of Words are These? Courtly and Marital Words of Love
in the Franklin’s Tale and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chapter 19: Stacey L. Hahn
From Words of Love to Words of Hate in Two Medieval French
Prose Romances
Chapter 20: Harry Peters
John Gower: Love of Words and Words of Love
Chapter 21: Sanda Munjic
How Love Took Reason to Court: Diego de San Pedro’s Prison of Love
2008 / 480 + vii pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-395-2 / MR 347 / $65, £40
New Directions in Oral Theory: Essays on Ancient and Medieval Literatures
Edited by Mark Amodio (Vassar College)
In this volume, a group of leading classicists and medievalists interrogates the complex ways in which
oral and literate culture intersect with and shape one another’s contours. Rejecting the view that orality and literacy
are mutually exclusive and contradictory cultural forces, these essays focus on the mix of oral and literate poetics
discoverable in a wide range of ancient and medieval texts. In the explorations of texts produced in cultures situated
at various points along the oral-literate continuum, the authors reveal how deeply and inextricably intertwined orality
and literacy are, and they further demonstrate just how supple and powerful an interpretive tool contemporary oral theory is.
2005 / 341 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-330-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-330-3 / MR 287 / $40, £30
Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Edited by Rosalynn Voaden (Arizona State University) and Diane Wolfthal (Arizona State University)
The innovative and provocative essays in Framing the Family are not primarily concerned with
recovering the historical past, but rather seek to explore the complex relationship between history and cultural
production in relation to the medieval and early modern family. These essays focus on diverse aspects of the family:
the conjugal pair, the household, the relationship of parent to child, of the couple to the extended family, and of
the nuclear family to the community. In doing so, they make clear the richness and complexity of representations and
narratives of the medieval and Early Modern family, whose history is just now being written.
2005 / 305 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-297-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-297-9 / MR280 / $40, £30
Please note that Framing the Family shares the same volume number (MR 280) with another title in the MRTS Series,
Staging the Pastoral . When ordering either title, avoid confusion by verifying the author, title, and/or ISBN.
Discourses on Love,
Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Edited by Albrecht Classen (The University of Arizona)
"Albrecht Classen's new volume is a valuable addition
to any university library. It is, moreover, a vital one for scholars of courtly love, not only for the many
perceptive essays that appear in this volume, but even more for the essential summations of issues in the field
and the extensive secondary material in the notes. ... More joint ventures in the future by medieval and
early modern scholars are to be welcomed."—TMR
This volume attempts to reach beyond the traditional discussion of medieval courtly literature by
emphasizing the elements of transgression affecting love, friendship, and marriage. Love has as much to do with power as
with death, as much with transgression as with consolidation of society, as much with heterosexuality as with homosexuality,
as much with discourse as with the exploration of the fundamental pleasure principle and of the experience of pain.
Moreover, love is a medium to experiment with language in its myriad of meanings, functions, and expressions.
Medieval society and the individual established identity through courtly love, both confirming and deconstructing
traditional norms and ethics. Courtly love involved violence and playfulness; it provided the catalyst to transgress
all norms of medieval society and reconstituted this very society as well. The contributors to this volume examine a
wide range of literary perspectives toward friendship, marriage, adultery, domestic violence, physical and spiritual
suffering, individual happiness, the breaking of promises, vows, and oaths because of and in opposition to love,
and the destruction of traditional family relations resulting from the almost uncontrollable force of sexuality.
But courtly love also proved to be the foundation upon which courtly society could be established. This foundation was,
as we now begin to understand, not an absolute, but instead a linguistic, artistic construct, simply called "courtly love."
2004 / 374 pages / 86698-321-X / MR 278 / $40, £30
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