Nickolaus provides the readers with a concise critical discussion of the "courtly love" debate, broad historical and comparative analysis, and a model that explains, at the level of plot, rhetoric, and ideology, the proper place of amorous motifs in the context of prevailing Christian doctrines and attitudes.

Nickolaus provides the readers with a concise critical discussion of the "courtly love" debate, broad historical and comparative analysis, and a model that explains, at the level of plot, rhetoric, and ideology, the proper place of amorous motifs in the context of prevailing Christian doctrines and attitudes.

First book-length treatment of a fascinating medieval French romance, underlining its influence in the genre. Partonopeus de Blois is one of the most important works of twelfth-century French fiction; it shaped the development of romance as a genre, gave rise to adaptations in several other medieval languages and even an opera (Massanet's Esclarmonde). However, partly because of its complicated transmission history, and partly due to the fact that it has been overshadowed by the works of Chrétien de Troyes, it has been unjustly neglected. This firstfull-length study of the romance brings together literary, historical and manuscript studies to explore its making as it evolved through seven medieval "editions", the earliest of which probably predated most of Chrétien's romances. The book's thematic analyses show how the Partonopeus poet applied established techniques of rewriting to a wide range of classical, vernacular and Celtic sources, combining this literary fusion with political subtexts to create a new and influential model of romance composition. Detailed studies of the Continuation reveal more ambitious experimentation by the original author, as well as the activities of a series of "editors" who continued to modify the text for over a century. A final discussion of patronage proposes a new reading of the poem's distinct narratorial interventions on women and love, and suggests a link between Partonopeus and a disturbing episode in the history of Blois. Penny Eley is Professor of Medieval French at the University of Sheffield.

An indepth examination of the presentation of Constantinople and its complex relationship with the west in medieval French texts. Medieval France saw Constantinople as something of a quintessential ideal city. Aspects of Byzantine life were imitated in and assimilated to the West in a movement of political and cultural renewal, but the Byzantine capital wasalso celebrated as the locus of a categorical and inimitable difference. This book analyses the debate between renewal and utopia in Western attitudes to Constantinople as it evolved through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a series of vernacular (Old French, Occitan and Franco-Italian) texts, including the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, Girart de Roussillon, Partonopeus de Blois, the poetry of Rutebeuf, and the chronicles by Geoffroy de Villehardouin and Robert de Clari, both known as the Conquête de Constantinople. It establishes how the texts' representation of the West's relationship with Constantinople enacts this debate between renewal andutopia; demonstrates that analysis of this relationship can contribute to a discussion on the generic status of the texts themselves; and shows that the texts both react to the socio-cultural context in which they were produced, and fulfil a role within that context. Dr Rima Devereaux is an independent scholar based in London.

This book re-evaluates the perception of "courtly love" in Old French verse. Adams traces how these verses explore the emotional trials of amour and propose coping methods for the lovelorn.

This study concerns the earliest English literature encouraging women not to marry, the Katherine Group. It is a set of five early thirteenth-century devotional texts, a sermon called "Hali Meidhad" ("Holy Virginity"), the lives of three early Christian virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana, and an allegory "Sawles Warde" ("Care of the Soul"). All of the texts celebrate virginity, but they do so in a novel way. Unlike other virginity literature, which focuses on the sacred benefits that come to women who do not marry, these texts argue that marriage harms women, and they focus on the material advantages of not marrying. They are profoundly non-mystical, articulating the values of self-sufficiency and self determination. Placing the Katherine Group within the male clerical tradition of Jerome and Peter Abelard, a tradition whose concerns about marriage and domesticity have not been much appreciated before, the author shows how the texts of the Katherine Group operate not as part of a female mystical tradition, but within the male clerical tradition of anti-matrimonial literature.