This selection of extracts and inscriptions from medieval poems and songs, romances and chansons, rings and brooches is illustrated with images drawn from a wide range of beautiful objects and illuminated manuscripts in the rich collections of the British Museum and the British Library.

In particular, optical imagery and paradigms afforded poets a new approach to the roles of the languishing male and his powerful beloved."--Jacket.

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.

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 social system of 'courtly love' soon spread after becoming popularized by the troubadours of southern France in the twelfth century. This book codifies life at Queen Eleanor's court at Poitiers between 1170 and 1174 into "one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch, which explain the secret of a civilization."

Medieval Imagination examines the poetry of courtly love with unprecedented thoroughness. Douglas Kelly offers detailed analyses of numerous works within a historical, conceptual, and artistic framework to establish the underlying concept of Imagination in courtly poetry. He capitalizes the term to underscore its medieval sense: the poet's invention of significant images to represent a certain conception of truth. Imagination, thus, in its metaphorical sense of providing an idea with a suitable representation in an image, permitted an allegory of love in romance and dream vision from the twelfth century on. The techniques employed in Imagination--allegory, personification, metonymy, synecdoche--are analyzed in detail as amplification. In addition to his complete coverage of the better-known poets like Guillaume de Lorris, Machaut, and Froissart, Kelly examines the work of such rarely treated writers as René d'Anjou and Oton de Grandson, as well as the Echecs amoureux and related medieval Latin writings. The concluding chapters including Charles d'Orléans, Chartier, and Christine de Pisan. The later chapters are a rare boon to French scholars in providing a survey of Middle French courtly literature, a little-explored area of scholarship. Kelly's documentation is a fresh and useful contribution to the interpretation of this too-often neglected period.The flower of medieval French culture, the poetry of courtly love, is examined with an unprecedented thoroughness in this work. Douglas Kelly offers detailed analyses of numerous works within a historical, conceptual, and artistic framework.

This collection offers new and challenging scholarly interpretations of six major "Chaucerian" love poems from Clanvowe's Cuckoo and the Nightingale (1385) to the early Renaissance Court of Love (c. 1530). This study reveals previously overlooked subtlety and irony of these works, including an original, in-depth look at the neglected icon of this erotic poetry, the hawthorn tree. The contributors' critical approach emphasizes the texts themselves, their cultural context, and the literary tradition of the genre. The focus is decidedly on the poems' likely meaning to their original audiences; Chamberlain sketches fifteenth century literary taste in his introduction. This book contributes to the ongoing debate about the meaning of love in Middle English, and medieval, poetry. Contents: "Under the Schaddow of the Hawthorne Greene": The Hawthorn in Medieval Love Poetry, Susan Schoon Everly and David Chamberlain; Clanvowe's Cuckoo, David Chamberlain; Venus Unveiled: Lydgate's "Temple of Glas" and the Religion of Love, Bryan Crockett; "The air": The Plight of the Courtly Lover, Clair F. James; The Hope for "Pleasaunce": Richard Roos' Translation of Alain Chartier's "La Belle Dame Sans Mercy", Melissa Brown Tomus; "The Floure and the Leafe": An Alternative Approach, Cynthia Lockard Snyder; In Love's Thrall: "The Court of Love" and its Captives, Bonita Friedman.