Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer

Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer

Kelly, H. a.

Paperback

Medieval & Renaissance HistoryLiterary CriticismGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $42.00

ISBN10: 1592445225
ISBN13: 9781592445226
Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published: Jan 30 2004
Pages: 360
Weight: 0.98
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.58 Depth: 8.58
Language: English
Spicing erudition with wit, Professor Kelly takes a new look at medieval attitudes toward love, sexuality, and marriage, and he corrects a number of long-standing misconceptions embodied in the concept of courtly love. Through a close examination of canon law, the common practice of clandestine marriage, writings on mysticism, and medieval poetry - particularly Gower's 'Confessio amantis' and Chaucer's romances and their sources - he concludes that medieval lovers favored matrimony and did not consider sexual passion incompatible with virtue. His evidence contradicts the theory, closely associated with C.S. Lewis, that extramarital love was preferred in the Middle Ages, and that the sexual pleasures celebrated by poets were necessarily regarded as immoral by society at large. By placing religious and cultural conventions in their proper context, Professor Kelly shows that the hopes and fears of medieval lovers were much the same as those of lovers of all other ages.

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