These essays examine the central role played by Ovid in medieval amatory literature. In so doing, they address the theoretical problems of the entrenched "aesthetics of reception" long tied to the Ovidian Middle Ages, while they also seek at times to overturn many of the prior critical perceptions associated with Ovidian suasive discourse - in particular the unproblematized assertion of male will and the erasure of female voice. Responding to the great fund of critical work done on amatory literature in the Middle Ages - a literature thus far organized into an array of categories such as the rhetorical institution of persuasion and seduction, the Ovidian heritage, aetas ovidiana, the language of amatory trial, the genealogy of the romance, and the convention of courtly love - this volume seeks to provide a comprehensive look at the rhetorical and social conditions of desire.

Re-evaluating the dialogue’s place in the literary landscape of the Italian and French Renaissance, Speaking of Love presents the love dialogue at the intersection of a revival of the form and the period’s philosophies of love and desire. Between 1540 and 1580, authors such as Speroni, Tullia d’Aragona, the Venetian poligrafi, Tyard, Le Caron, Pasquier, Taillemont, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labé, feature interlocutors not only deliberating on love but imitating the experience of love in their dynamics of speaking. These love dialogues allow early modern ideologies and discourses of love to be imitated by the reader and rival lyric poetry in conveying amorous experience, validating dialogue as an authentic literary form rather than a tool of philosophical thinking.

Love and sex are preeminent subjects of Renaissance literature; however, attitudes toward these topics were hardly uniform. The discourses of desire from this period embrace works as dissimilar as sonnets on frustrated love and libertine invitations to lust. Writers both idealized and demystified sex, alternately equating it with religious transcendence or exposing it as a mere bodily itch. The fifteen essays in this volume clarify the sexual beliefs and prohibitions of the Renaissance period and examine the manifestations of those ideas in literature. Renaissance Discourses of Desire confronts important questions about the relationship of sexuality and textuality in the period using a variety of critical methods and ideological presuppositions. Some of the essays focus on the intertwining of political and sexual discourse, the difference between men and women as desiring subjects, and the erotics of criticism. The representation of homoerotics and homosexuality is discussed as is the impact of economic and social ideologies on love poetry and sexual expression. Among the texts explored are works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Carew, Herrick, Suckling, Burton, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Milton. With their varied approaches, these essays illustrate the richness of the topic and its susceptibility to a number of critical techniques. Illuminating important authors and significant texts, the essays collected here contribute to a fuller understanding of the complexities and range of seventeenth-century discourses of desire, while also helping to chart the outlines of the period's sexual ideologies and anxieties.

The complex relationship between psychic structures, social norms, and aesthetic representations is a challenge for every analysis of the historical manifestations of human desire. Pangs of Love and Longing: Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature sets out to provide a deeper understanding of this relation by an assessment of linguistic and artistic configurations of desire in European literature from Antiquity to the Early Modern period. The aim is to explore historic continuities and ruptures in attitudes towards sexuality, pleasures and bodies, as these are represented in a variety of cultural forms, in order to demonstrate the plurality of premodern desire – and, ultimately, to offer fresh perspectives on our present reality. The seventeen scholars participating in the anthology bring together theories and assessments from different areas of the Humanities – German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, and Comparative Literature, History of Ideas and of Art, Theology, Philosophy and Gender Studies. They are all engaged in cross-disciplinary activities at universities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and they all participate in the Scandinavian network “Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature” initiated in 2010.

"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." --

This book argues that current criticism tends to take the mythology of love either too innocently or too skeptically and therefore distorts the complex roles played by the god of love in longer narrative poems and discursive works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.