Description
Book SynopsisRichard, Duke of Aquitaine, son of the King of England, remained with Philip, the King of France, who so honored him for so long that they ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the King of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the King of England was absolutely astonished at the vehement love between them and marveled at what it could mean.
Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? An extraordinary amount, as Stephen Jaeger demonstrates.
Unlike current efforts to read medieval culture through modern mores, Stephen Jaeger contends that love and sex in the Middle Ages relate to each other very differently than in the postmedieval period. Love was not only a mode of feeling and desiring, or an exclusively private sentiment, but a way of behaving and a social ideal. It was a for
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"Scholars of the Middle Ages can hardly afford not to pay serious attention to Jaeger's clear, cogent arguments that cut across genders, genres, and all orders of the aristocracy. . . . An excellent choice as a required 'practical theory' text for advanced undergraduates and graduate courses." * Speculum *
"A cogent and engrossing social history of the evolving Medieval attitudes toward civic and erotic love, virtue, and spiritual friendship. . . . The Author . . . has shrewdly plotted a story in which we can almost hear our own age about to be born, where noble love loses its innocent identity. . . . Ennobling Love is both a reader's pleasure and a scholar's treasure." * Foreword magazine *
"This is a book of vast scope, challenging comparison with Auerbach's Mimesis and Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. . . . All medievalists and students of European (love) literature in general will want to profit from this tour de force." * John O. Ward, Arthuriana *
