Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

The subject of sexual love in late medieval literature remains a crucial and mysterious problem for modern criticism in spite of substantial recent advances in many relevant areas of historical study. The difficulty of the problem is not surprising, for no aspect of human experience in our culture seems at once more sublime and more absurd, or is more subject to the human impulse to idealize and ridicule. Times have not changed so much in this respect that the modern critic and historian can observe with cool detachment the antics of earlier generations; the problem remains, inciting the scholar to justify his own values, to indulge his own fantasies in the pliable literary evidence of earlier ages. The limited achievement of modern inquiry into the problems of sexual desire as a dominant theme in late medieval literature has, at least, made two things certain: the individual and social values of sexual behavior in the Middle Ages differ strikingly from those of the twentieth century; and their representation in literature achieved an astonishing degree of complexity both as an expression of a profoundly felt problem of individual experience and as the figurative embodiment of a wide range of other kinds of human relationships.

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