Download or read book The Art of Courtly Love written by Andreas (Capellanus.) and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Courtly Love written by Jean Markale and published by Inner Traditions / Bear & Co. This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive examination of the rituals and philosophies that created and sustained medieval troubadour culture • Debunks the myth of the platonic nature of courtly love, showing the many sexual similarities to the Tantric practices of India • Reveals how the roots of courtly love go back to the matriarchal cultures of neolithic times The widespread turmoil that shook Western Europe as it entered the new millennium with the year 1000 prompted a vast reevaluation of the chief tenets of society. Foremost among these was a new way of looking at love and the place held by women in society. The Christian-inspired tradition that at best viewed women with contempt--and often with outright fear and loathing--was replaced by a new perspective, one in which women enjoyed a central role as the inspiration for all male action. For several hundred years courtly love, with its emphasis on adultery, carnal pleasures, and the power of the feminine, dominated European culture despite its flouting of conventional Christian morality. Medieval historians by and large have tended to regard courtly love as a sterile parlor game for the upper classes. To the contrary, Jean Markale shows that the stakes were much higher: the roots of the ritual re-created here go all the way back to the great mother goddess. In addition, the platonic nature attributed to these relationships is based on a misunderstanding of courtly love; underneath the refined poetry of the troubadours' verses flourished a system of sexual initiation that rivaled Indian Tantra.
Download or read book Love and its Critics written by Michael Bryson and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.
Download or read book The Reign of Chivalry written by Richard W. Barber and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Barber, author of Holy Grail: The History of a Legend and King Arthur: Hero and Legend, has written an engaging and intriguing book on one of the most original concepts of the medieval mind. Profusely illustrated and redesigned for a new generation of readers. Profusely illustrated and redesigned for a new generation of readers, Richard Barber's classic The Reign of Chivalry presents a broad picture of the chivalric world, and shows how chivalry affected or was affected by greatsocial movements, great writers and great events, and analyses the legacy it passed down to later ages. The opening chapter looks at the central figure of the whole chivalric world, the knight, and asks why he is such a different figure from other fighting men. Following sections deal with chivalry in relation to the main themes of medieval literature, especially the vast cycle of Arthurian romances, and discuss the attitudes towards chivalry of writers such as Jean Froissart, whose pages cast a golden glow over the harsh realities of war. Later sections look at chivalry's influence on the Renaissance and later culture, beginning with the knight's transition to gentleman. The element by which chivalry is now most remembered, its respectful, even adoring, attitude towards women, is the subject of a wide-ranging discussion, covering both medieval reality and modern ideals. Richard Barber, author of Holy Grail: History of a Legend, Myths and Legends of the British Isles and King Arthur: Hero and Legend, has written an engaging and intriguing book on one of the most original concepts of the medieval mind.
Download or read book Troubadours and Love written by L. T. Topsfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1975-05-22 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first known troubadour, Guilhem IX of Aquitaine, VII Count of Poitou, was a versatile man who fought against the Moors in Spain, lost an army on his way to the First Crusade, and for a time, like his great-grandson Richard Cœur de Lion, possessed more land and power in France than the king himself. His poetry reflects the hatred of convention and love of the unexpected that marks his life. In its easy swing between self-mockery and seriousness, idealised love and bawdy laughter, it introduces into troubadour poetry a sense of conflict which, after Guilhem's death in 1127, found a different and wider expression in an opposition between the metaphysical poetry of troubadours who sang with 'dark', 'rich' words and the love songs of poets who composed in a clear, 'easy' style on the single plane of their courtly experience. Dr Topsfield examines the work of a number of the greatest troubadours from the viewpoint of their attitudes to love.
Download or read book Giving Voice to Love written by Judith A. Peraino and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lyrics of medieval "courtly love" songs are characteristically self-conscious. Giving Voice to Love investigates similar self-consciousness in the musical settings. Moments and examples where voice, melody, rhythm, form, and genre seem to comment on music itself tell us about musical responses to the courtly chanson tradition, and musical reflections on the complexity of self-expression.
Download or read book Eleanor of Aquitaine Courtly Love and the Troubadours written by Ffiona Swabey and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author offers an accessible overview of the vibrant personal and intellectual developments in the medieval court and monasteries during Eleanor of Aquitaine's lifetime. Primary documents, biographical material and thematic chapters bring this unique period to life. Eleanor of Aquitaine lived in a remarkable age. The 12th century saw significant advances in both the intellectual and emotional spheres. Scholars explored new areas of philosophy and science and also began to reflect on relationships and what it meant to be human and an individual. For the troubadours and the writers of the new romances, who composed in vernacular language, the focus of their works was the expression of personal feelings and the image of the feminine. Women had had more significant parts to play in the first millennium than in the second, because with the militarization of Europe and the emergence of universities, from which women were excluded, they lost much of their influence. This created an imbalance in society and it is within this context that Eleanor's life should be reviewed. The period is sometimes called the Twelfth Century Awakening due to the outpouring of extraordinary intellectual inquiry and discovery. Cathedral schools and universities, Islamic influence on European thought, the classical revival, vernacular literature, and Gothic architecture all exerted powerful pulls on the era's culture and politics. Accounts of Eleanor of Aquitaine's life provides a rare glimpse into women's lives during the medieval period, and though an admittedly extraordinary figure, we are able to draw some general conclusions about marriage and motherhood. Troubadours and courtly love, which revolved around declarations of service, devotion, and passion, and an emerging sense of the self. Thematic chapters hit the major topics, laying them out in clear and easy-to-follow writing. Nineteen biographical sketches bring to life the topics, and 15 primary documents, including songs, letters, and poems provide a close-up glimpse of how the people of the time saw their own world. Genealogical tables, maps, chronology, and a timeline provide useful and information quickly. The book concludes with an annotated bibliography and an index.
Download or read book The Troubadours written by Simon Gaunt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.
Download or read book Songs of the Women Troubadours written by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers an edition and translation of some 30 poems by the trobairitz, a remarkable group of women poets from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who composed in the style and language of the troubadours. Introductory essays and notes by specialists in the field place the poems in literary, linguistic, historical, social and cultural contexts. English versions facing Occitan texts elucidate the original language and themes, while supplying poems that can be enjoyed by contemporary readers . The varied corpus includes love songs (cansos), debate poems (tensos), political satires (sirventes) and other lyrical sub-genres (including dawn-song, lament, ballad, chanson de mal mariee). To represent the range of female voices available in the lyric corpus of the troubadours, the editors have selected songs consistently attributed to historically documented women poets, as well as songs whose authorship is open to question. The latter may be presented by the manuscripts with or without a named woman poet, but all offer female speakers personae characteristic of troubadour poets in general.
Download or read book Troubadours written by Richard Lee Price and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guillaume, an Austin musician, has a problem. He loves whole-heartedly, but he does not know how to "unlove." Haunted by the phantoms of lovers and friends, he is imprisoned by the past. To Guillaume, all love stories are ghost stories in the end. When he learns that his love has been murdered, he journeys to Oaxaca, Mexico, to uncover the circumstances of her death. He meets a Zapotec curandero in the mist-enshrouded Sierra and learns the rhythms of a good life - and a good death.
Download or read book Andreas Capellanus on Love written by Andreas (Capellanus.) and published by Bristol Classical Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus (André the Chaplain), composed in France in the 1180s, is celebrated as the first comprehensive discussion of theory of courtly love. The book is believed to have been intended to portray conditions at Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine's court at Poitiers between 1170 and 1174, and written the request of her daughter, Countess Marie of Troyes. As such, it is important for its connections to themes of contemporary Latin lyric, in troubadour poetry and in the French romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Thereafter its influence spread throughout Western Europe, so that the treatise is of fundamental importance for students of medieval and renaissance English, French, Italian and Spanish. In this comprehensive edition, P.G. Walsh includes Trojel's Latin text with his own facing English translation with explanatory notes, commentary and indexes, along with introduction which sets the treatise in its contemporary context and assesses its purpose and importance.
Download or read book Troubadour Poems from the South of France written by William Doremus Paden and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love for Sale written by William E. Burgwinkle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1997 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.
Download or read book The Courts of Love written by Jean Plaidy and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-05-23 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When I look back over my long and tempestuous life, I can see that much of what happened to me—my triumphs and most of my misfortunes—was due to my passionate relationships with men. I was a woman who considered herself their equal—and in many ways their superior—but it seemed that I depended on them, while seeking to be the dominant partner—an attitude which could hardly be expected to bring about a harmonious existence. Eleanor of Aquitaine was revered for her superior intellect, extraordinary courage, and fierce loyalty. She was equally famous for her turbulent relationships, which included marriages to the kings of both France and England. As a child, Eleanor reveled in her beloved grandfather’s Courts of Love, where troubadours sang of romantic devotion and passion filled the air. In 1137, at the age of fifteen, Eleanor became Duchess of Aquitaine, the richest province in Europe. A union with Louis VII allowed her to ascend the French throne, yet he was a tepid and possessive man and no match for a young woman raised in the Courts of Love. When Eleanor met the magnetic Henry II, the first Plantagenet King of England, their stormy pairing set great change in motion—and produced many sons and daughters, two of whom would one day reign in their own right. In this majestic and sweeping story, set against a backdrop of medieval politics, intrigue, and strife, Jean Plaidy weaves a tapestry of love, passion, betrayal, and heartbreak—and reveals the life of a most remarkable woman whose iron will and political savvy enabled her to hold her own against the most powerful men of her time.
Download or read book Love in the Last Days written by D. Nurkse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary requiem--an earthy yet elegant reconsideration of the Tristan and Iseult story, from the former poet laureate of Brooklyn. In D. Nurkse's wood of Morois, the Forest of Love, there's a fine line between the real and the imaginary, the archaic and the actual, poetry and news. The poems feature the voices of the lovers and all parties around them, including the servant Brangien; Tristan's horse, Beau Joueur; even the living spring that flows through the tale ("in my breathing shadow / the lovers hear their voices / confused with mine / promising a slate roof, / a gate, a child . . . "). Nurkse brings us an Iseult who has more power than she wants over Tristan's imagination, and a Tristan who understands his fate early on: "That charm was so strong, no luck could free us." For these lovers, time closes like a book, but it remains open for us as we hear both new tones and familiar voices, eerily like our own, in this age-old story made new again.
Download or read book Love Songs written by Ted Gioia and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers the unexplored history of the love song, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day, and discusses such topics as censorship, the legacy of love songs, and why it is a dominant form of modern musical expression.
Download or read book The Making of Romantic Love written by William M. Reddy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent—or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900-1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.
