Description
Book SynopsisMedieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library''s Douce 308 manuscripta fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournamentElizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of courtly love had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book''s compilers, owners, and readers.
The manuscript''s lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it
