Medieval Love-Fashioning

Medieval Love-Fashioning examines the topic of fin'amor, "gentle love", in poetry, verse romances, and prose from the European High and Late Middle Ages.

It shows how fin'amor was established in twelfth-century troubadour poetry, then modified, parodied and critiqued through four centuries of imaginative literature. This approach aims to do justice to the diversity of literary representations and interpretations of love in the Middle Ages, while at the same time maintaining a strict focus on fin'amor (rather than the tried-and-tested but historically cumbersome concept of "courtly love"). In this book, fin'amor is treated as a malleable trope (rather than a fixed concept), a metaphorical cluster incorporating classical (Ovidian) commonplaces, feudal phraseology, and liturgical formulae. A brief background survey is followed by presentations of poets such as the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn, covering the twelfth century in some detail. The account continues, more synoptically, with enquiries into mostly canonical works from the later Middle Ages, such as Dante's Comedy (early fourteenth century) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (mid 1380s). The rationale for this arrangement is to allow the isolation of a well-defined and carefully delimited topic through four centuries of medieval literature, demonstrating its mobility across borders, languages and genres.