The Joy of Love in the Middle Ages

A European Literary History

Lucie Kaempfer

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009553421
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Joy in literature and culture remains a little-studied subject, one sometimes even viewed with suspicion. Here, Lucie Kaempfer reveals its place at the crux of medieval discourses on love across the philosophical, spiritual and secular realms. Taking a European and multilingual perspective stretching from the twelfth century to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth, she tells a comparative literary history of the writing of love's actual or imagined fulfilment in medieval Europe. Kaempfer attends to the paradox of the endlessness of desire and the impossibility of fulfilment, showing the language of joy to be one of transcendence, both of language and of the self. Identifying, through close analysis of many arresting examples, a range of its key features – its inherent lyricism, its ability to halt or escape linear narrative, its opposition to self-sufficient happiness – she uncovers a figurative and poetic language of love's joy that still speaks to us today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ‘Enter into the joy of your lord’: Writing the Space of Divine Love’s Joy
• Chapter 2 The Genesis: Joie d’amour in Old Occitan and Old French Poetry
• Chapter 3 Transcending Lyrical Love’s Joy in the Italian Trecento
• Chapter 4 From Joie to Blisse: The International Language of Love’s Joy in Fourteenth-Century France and England
• Chapter 5 ‘And lat hem in this hevene blisse dwelle’: Troilus and Criseyde in Love’s Bliss
• Conclusion: Metaphysical Joy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index