FFS 332 - Literature and Society in Pre-Revolutionary France

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2024/25b: Making Love in the Middle Ages: Sex, Desire, and Gender in Medieval France. The Western notion of romantic love has a history—one that begins, as many scholars have maintained, at a particular place and time. Western ideas of what love is, how lovers behave, and what lovers say are often claimed to have taken root in twelfth-century France and Occitania (the southern third of modern-day France). This course examines the literature that played a central role in constructing—and deconstructing—this erotic imaginary. Alongside foundational texts like the love songs of the troubadours, the lais of Marie de France, and the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, we consider works that challenge the gender norms of “courtly love” (the female trobairitz and Christine de Pizan), salaciously mock its strictures (the fabliaux), and give voice to queer forms of desire and identity (Yde et Olive and saints’ lives). Key lines of inquiry include marriage, adultery, and consent; the lover’s body (pain, pleasure, violence, and virginity); and critiques of normative sexual practices and romantic configurations. We also read across cultures, tracing the possible influence of poems from Al-Andalus on the burgeoning ideology of love in southern France, and across media, paying close attention to the original manuscript forms of these texts as well as their settings in medieval and twenty-first-century music. Terrence Cullen.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS