LECTURE
Courtly love, courtly love poetry, and the troubadours
The South: Bordeaux, Poitiers, Toulouse
Eleanor and the world of courtly love
Eleanor, Henry, and the Angevin empire
The Angevins and the Matter of Britain
Bernart de Ventadorn (fl 1150-1180)
See below link to PDF copy of lecture week 14
REQUIRED READING
Items that will be available in class:
- Most famous poem of courtly love: Bernart de Ventador (email)
- Joyce Carol Oates, "Love in the Western World" (email)
- Mother Teresa (email)
This article by the great novelist Joyce Carol Oates is the best summary ever written of that unique phenomenon that we study this week: Western ideas of love.
RECOMMENDED READING
If you want to read more about Courtly Love there is no better place to begin than in C. S. Lewis's brilliant Allegory of Love especially the first chapter. Lewis and the whole circle of Medievalists of whom he was a part (Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers), blazed a trail of research in this field and we are still in their debt.
The one book that has had a greater influence on our ideas of love in the West than any other book is the brilliant Love in the Western Worldby Denis de Rougemont. De Rougemont (1906-1985) was one of the most influential European intellectuals of his generation. His book came out first in 1939 and then was revised several times with the 1972 edition being the definitive final edition. This book simply changed the way people thought about Western cultural history. It was of extraordinary importance and is still the beginning point for any study of the unique phenomenon of love in the Western world.
