The Legacy Of Courtly Literature

This fascinating volume examines the enduring influence of courtly tradition and courtly love, particularly in contemporary popular culture. The ten chapters explore topics including the impact of the medieval troubadour in modern love songs, the legacy of figures such as Tristan, Iseult, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Merlin in modern film and literature, and more generally, how courtly and chivalric conceptions of love have shaped the Western world’s conception of love, loyalty, honor, and adultery throughout history and to this day.

Table of contents

The International Courtly Literature Society aims to promote the study of courtly literature, primarily, but not exclusively, of medieval Europe. The 45 articles selected here from the papers presented at the 5th Congress center around three themes: rhetoric and courtly literature, the audience of courtly literature, and courtly literature in a comparative perspective. There are contributions by specialists in Old French Literature on such diverse topics as Adenet le Roi, Rene d'Anjou, Le Bel Inconnu, and 15th-century prose chronicles; by Provencalists on the eternal topic of courtly love; by Anglicists on Chaucer, Henryson, Malory, and others; by Germanists on Heinrich von Morungen, der Schwanritter, and Walther von der Vogelweide; by Hispanists on La Celestina and the Historia Troiana; there are also articles on Italian, Dutch, and Scandinavian literature, and two relating to Persian and Arabic courtly texts.

This revisionary study of the origins of courtly poetry reveals the culture of spectatorship and voyeurism that shaped early Tudor English literary life. Through research into the reception of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, it demonstrates how Pandarus became the model of the early modern courtier. His blend of counsel, secrecy and eroticism informed the behaviour of poets, lovers, diplomats and even Henry VIII himself. In close readings of the poetry of Hawes and Skelton, the drama of the court, the letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, the writings of Thomas Wyatt, and manuscript anthologies and early printed books, Seth Lerer illuminates a 'Pandaric' world of displayed bodies, surreptitious letters and transgressive performances. In the process, he redraws the boundaries between the medieval and the Renaissance and illustrates the centrality of the verse epistle to the construction of subjectivity.

This collection brings together twelve selected papers given at the Second Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society. Because the courtly ethos is the central phenomenon marking medieval vernacular literature, it provides a theme that serves as an ideological guide through the later Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance and as a framework for the essays collected in this volume.

Every aspect of courtly life in the 12th and 13th centuries comes to life in the history. As well as describing the details courtly life, Bumke examines its portrayal in the literature of that period.

This collection brings together twelve selected papers given at the Second Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society. Because the courtly ethos is the central phenomenon marking medieval vernacular literature, it provides a theme that serves as an ideological guide through the later Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance and as a framework for the essays collected in this volume.