Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages

HELEN COONEY is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance English, Trinity College, Dublin. She is the editor of Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin, 2001) and of several articles on Chaucer and Spenser.

'This account of Middle English love literature, also of its historical background and continental context, is impressively comprehensive and illuminating. Beside lively discussions of English representations of the characteristically medieval but hotly debated courtly love mode other hitherto less recognized modes are brought into focus, especially in valuable essays dealing with early Middle English and Anglo-Norman romances.Among many excellent chapters in this volume is the editor's own subtle and beautifully written contribution on love and aesthetics at the end of the Middle English period.' - Thomas G. Duncan, University of St Andrews 'Cooney has here assembled a distinguished array of medievalists who, in a wide-ranging series of essays, address the big questions surrounding the debate on love in the Middle Ages. This is a very strong collection and will certainly be widely consulted.' - J. A. Burrow, Emeritus Professor, University of Bristol 'The term 'courtly love' will not be readily recuperated from the scorn that has been heaped upon it and the misrepresentations to which it has been subjected, but the medieval cult of idealized sexual love is here, in this book, definitively restored to its central position in the understanding of medieval English literature. A series of probing essays demonstrates how the courtly cult of 'being in love,' in all its multiplicities, variously expressive of male or female subjectivity, and oriented according to whatever moral and cultural conventions, overrode constraint and gave narrative its very heart-beat.' - Derek A. Pearsall, Harvard University (retired) 'This collection of essays presents a series of lively reassessments of English and Scottish writings on love in the Middle Ages. It is both insightful and accessible.' - Douglas Gray, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language Emeritus, University of Oxford

• CONTENTS: Introduction; Helen Cooney The Reality of Courtly Love; Bernard O'Donoghue Love before Troilus; Helen Cooper Love and Loyalty in Middle English Romances; Corinne Saunders 'The Unequal Scales of Love': Love and Social Class in Andreas Capellanus' De Amore and Some Other Texts; John Scattergood Troilus and Criseyde: Love in a Manner of Speaking; Barry Windeatt The Wisdom of Old Women: Alisoun of Bath as Auctrice; Alastair Minnis 'Nat that I chalange any thing of right': Love, Loyalty and Legality in the Franklin's Tale; Neil Cartlidge The Floure and the Leafe and the Cultural Shift in the Role of the Poet in Fifteenth-Century England; Helen Cooney Romancing the Rose: the readings of Chaucer and Christine; Martha Driver Entrapment or Empowement? Women and Discourses of Love and Marriage in the Fifteenth Century; Carol M. Meale Writing about Love in Late Medieval Scotland; Priscilla Bawcutt