Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Edited by Albrecht Classen (Arizona State University)
2008 | 480 + vii pp. | Hardcover | 6 x 9 in | 978-0-86698-395-2 | MRTS 347
$65 | £40

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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: The Quest for Knowledge Within Medieval Literary Discourse: The Metaphysical and Philosophical Meaning of Love

  • 1. Cynthia White: Concordia Virginitatis: Passionate Marriage in Paulinus of Nola, c. 25

  • 2. Robert Levine: Patronage and Erotic Rhetoric in the Sixth Century: The Case of Venantius Fortunatus

  • 3. William Sayers: Fusion and Fission in the Love and Lexis of Early Ireland

  • 4. Raymond Cormier: Woman’s Ways of Feeling: Lavinia’s Innovative Discourse of/on/about Love in the Roman d’Eneas

  • 5. Carmel Posa SGS: “Desire”: The Language of Love in the Feminine in Heloise’s Letters

  • 6. Bonnie Wheeler: The ‘Sic et Non’ of Andreas’s De Amore

  • 7. Valerie Michelle Wilhite: Language for Lovers: Lessons from Troubadours and Mystics

  • 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

  • 9. Karen K. Jambeck: The Rhetoric of Love in the Romances of Gautier d’Arras

  • 10. Karen Pratt: The Rhetoric of Love in the Romances of Gautier d’Arras

  • 11. Christopher R. Clason: The Bitterness of Love on the Sea: Isolde’s Amorous Discourse Viewed through Gottfried’s Crystalline Transparency

  • 12. Linda Marie Zaerr: Songs of Love and Love of Songs: Music and Magic in Medieval Romance

  • 13. Siegfried Christoph: The Language and Culture of Joy

  • 14. G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.: The Language of Love in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival

  • 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

  • 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

  • 17. Tracy Adams: The Lover and His Faus Semblant: Technologies of Confession in the Roman de la Rose

  • 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

  • 19. Stacey L. Hahn: From Words of Love to Words of Hate in Two Medieval French Prose Romances

  • 20. Harry Peters: John Gower: Love of Words and Words of Love

  • 21. Sanda Munjic: How Love Took Reason to Court: Diego de San Pedro’s Prison of Love