In the contemporary bible of love language that is A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes attempts to construct a discourse on the experience of love by embodying the voice of the loving subject. This discourse, necessarily fragmentary and incomplete, draws from literature as well as Barthes’ own reflections to offer a theorisation of different facets of love. Yet the fragments do not offer a language of love’s joy. Or rather, they suggest the impossibility of such a language. As he approaches love’s fulfilment (Comblement), Barthes produces a negative discourse of love’s joy:

The fulfilment of love silences the lover; it signals a transport to an extraordinary realm that exists beyond language. The language of love, according to Barthes, is a language of desire and frustration and cannot therefore accommodate joy: ‘a fulfilled lover has no need to write, to transmit’.² The first-person discourse of love presupposes the absence of the loved object; the Fragments thus construct the voice of the loving subject through his desire for an image of the other. In his section on love’s ‘ravishment’, Barthes describes the act of falling in love as a ‘hypnotic episode’ where the subject is ravished by an apparition of the other and submits to the captivating image.³ The medieval language of love, which is the object of this book, similarly embodies a wounded subject, ‘frustrated by unfulfillable desire for an image (phantasm or other)’.⁴ The lyrical language of the troubadours that revolutionises love poetry in the twelfth century is predicated on the deferral of fulfilment in the endless prolongation of desire. And yet it is, as this book will show, the place of birth of a specific discourse on love’s joy, or joie d’amour, which will be continuously reinvented throughout the European Middle Ages.

The present study on the language of love’s joy is grounded in the paradox that love’s joy is beyond language. It traces a poetic and vernacular tradition from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and spanning France, Italy and England, which originates in a lyrical language that, like Barthes’ Fragments, presupposes the impossibility of a discourse of fulfilment. The troubadours’ lyrics of fin’amors, which are the point of departure of this book, sing the absence of love’s fulfilment and yet the troubadours are singers of joy. They sing of an insatiable desire which becomes joy itself. The troubadour Jaufré Rudel, famous singer of ‘l’amour de loin’, love from afar, operates a seamless shift from desiring a faraway love to enjoying it: ‘e deziros d’amor de lonh,/que nulhs autres joys tan no’m play/Cum jauzimen d’amor de lonh’ (44–46 ‘longing for a faraway love/since no other joy pleases me as much/as enjoying a faraway love’).⁵ Love’s joy here is not fulfilment but the enjoyment of desire. It is the phantasmatic nature of fin’amors, the form of love exalted by the troubadours, which allows a language of love that ‘at once enjoys and defers, negates and affirms’ its joy.⁶ This conception of love, as Giorgio Agamben has shown, relies on the medieval theory of phantasm, where the image of the other is first impressed sensorily and ‘is then received by the phantasy, or imaginative virtue, which conserves it even in the absence of the object that has produced it’.⁷ The phantasm is stored in the lover’s heart and thus outlasts the moment of vision in memory and desire. It is through this integration of memory and desire, of past and future, that the joy of love can exist without the accomplishment of desire. In the words of Jacques Lacan, ‘le fantasme fait le plaisir propre au désir’ (‘the phantasm makes the pleasure proper to desire’).⁸ The phantasmatic nature of love, epitomised in the allegorical lover of the Roman de la Rose who falls in love with the reflection of a rosebud glimpsed in Narcissus’ fountain, is what characterises the language of joie d’amour. This book shows how this language of phantasmatic joie d’amour is first constructed in French and Occitan literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and how it is then adopted and transformed into the interconnected European literary traditions of the fourteenth century. It charts the changing semantics of love’s joy – that is, the feeling of the real or imagined presence of the beloved – as it gets translated in new languages, integrated within narratives and confronted with intellectual discourses on happiness. By determining the main features of the medieval language of love’s joy, such as its inherent lyricism and ability to arrest or escape linear narrative, its opposition to self-sufficiency and its excessive quality, I am able to trace its continuity and reinvention across different linguistic traditions and alternative vocabularies. Crucially, I show how fourteenth-century authors move beyond phantasm and onto transcendent and metaphysical realms to accommodate love’s joy in a poetic and narrative language of desire.

The association of love poetry with desire, or what Lee Patterson has called the ‘coextensive’ nature of writing and complaint, the ‘permanent link between poetry and loss’, is deeply ingrained in medieval culture.⁹ But the equation goes deeper than that. In a religious culture where true joy can only be found in a lost Eden or a future heaven, human life – and language – amounts to a long complaint. In his essay on the vernacular language, De vulgari eloquentia, Dante Alighieri suggests that all postlapsarian language is a form of lament. As he imagines what Adam’s first words may have been, Dante sees only one possibility:

Dante argues that the first human word was one of joy, a joy that belongs not to the uttering subject but to the ultimate other, God. The equation of human joy with God suggests its alterity: if there is no joy outside of God, every human joy is, somehow, other and exterior. Joy represents the complete lack of self-awareness that constitutes prelapsarian fulfilment and communion with the beloved Other. After the Fall, language becomes an expression of sadness and desire for that lost state. Dante’s theory of language implies that joy, as union with the divine, does not belong to human language. All language of joy thus suggests an impossibility; it must express its own ineffability and therefore always evokes a form of transcendence, of the human language and of the self. Within the earthly condition of desire, every joy is a glimpse of a long-lost memory of plenitude and a hopeful anticipation of a faraway, future state of union. The language of joy must therefore also express a form of atemporality as it escapes the linear narrative of human desire.

In his spiritual memoir recounting his experience of being ‘Surprised by Joy’ – and by the Christian faith – C. S. Lewis exposes the non-linearity of joy’s temporality: ‘All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still “about to be”.’¹¹ Lewis defines joy as an imaginative experience but one which he distinguishes from ‘fantasies’. Although it belongs to his own imaginative life, joy is not self-constructed; it cannot be controlled nor premeditated. It is triggered by music or books or nature, and through the memory of these triggers. Joy, for Lewis, is out of ordinary life, ‘in another dimension’ and, unlike pleasure, ‘never in our power’.¹² Crucially, and like the troubadours’ joy, it is not satisfaction but an unsatisfied desire. As a desire that is ‘itself desirable’, joy ‘makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have.’¹³ Eventually, in this stabbing joy that disrupts notions of desire and fulfilment, anticipation and memory, Lewis recognises a want for ‘something other, outside, not you or any side of you’. Joy points towards the ‘road out of the self’, this ‘region of awe’, this absolute Other.¹⁴ In recognising joy as his desire for spirituality and religion, for ‘something other and outer’, Lewis equates joy to a form of love – one which does not, at first, have a clear object. Like in Dante’s theory of language, joy is both the origin and the desired end of spiritual love and of the human language of desire. In the medieval literature of love surveyed in this book, joy indeed appears to be always past or future, found in the phantasmatic conjunction of memory and desire. But love’s joy, especially when found in actual union rather than phantasm, also escapes or transcends the language of desire.

Roland Barthes, in failing to write love’s comblements, suggests the excessive and overflowing nature of joy. While the term comblement, like fulfilment, refers to the act of filling in, of becoming full and complete, love’s fulfilment is not about being filled but overflowed. Barthes defines love’s joy not as the satisfaction of desire, but as what exceeds one’s every desire.¹⁵ This form of excess is what Barthes elsewhere names jouissance. Jouissance is different from pleasure because instead of contentment and self-consistency, it represents a rapture and loss of self.¹⁶ Here too therefore, in the context of human, sexual love, joy acts as a signal of the transcendent. In defining jouissance, Barthes in fact repeatedly turns to the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic John Ruusbroec. The mystic provides Barthes with a language of joy as transport, excess and annihilation. Ruusbroec belongs to the apophatic tradition of mysticism or ‘negative theology’. The apophatic discourse is a model of theology that accepts the unknowability and unnameability of God and the transcendent and that performs it through a form of ‘unstable and dynamic discourse’ where ‘any saying … demands … an unsaying’.¹⁷ In the apophatic tradition, the subject typically does not seek to understand and define the transcendent but to love and merge with it in an act of self-transcendence. One key actor of the medieval apophatic tradition is the French beguine Marguerite Porete. In a book that will lead her to be condemned for heresy and burned at the stake, she writes the union of the soul with God as a swimming and merging into joy: ‘et si nage et flue en joye, sans sentir nulle joye, car elle demoure en Joye, et Joye demoure en elle’ (‘and so she swims and flows in joy without feeling any joy, for she dwells in joy and joy dwells in her’).¹⁸ For Porete, as for Ruusbroec, the act of self-loss in union with the Other is an entering into ineffable and excessive joy. Instead of being contained within the body, the joy of love becomes the place in which the soul floats. The mystical joy of union conceptualises a ‘permeable self’: instead of a filling of the bounded self, love’s joy exceeds and permeates the self which is ‘both container and contained’.¹⁹ The language of entering joy used by Porete suggests love’s joy’s excessive nature – it exists beyond the self – as well as the notion of complete union, or ‘coinherence’, which characterises both the spiritual and secular languages of love.²⁰ The present book shows how the secular language of love’s joy shapes its own apophatic discourse of love’s joy, the ineffable feeling of love’s union, and thus presents joy as an important point of convergence between divine and carnal love. As the human feeling of the transcendent, love’s joy works as a hinge between the physical and the spiritual, between erotic and mystical concepts of fulfilment.

The alterity and transcendence of joy – its capacity to exceed the self – is what distinguishes it from both pleasure and happiness. In a 2013 essay, British author Zadie Smith wonders what joy is. It is not, she argues, simply a more intense version of pleasure, but something else entirely, an emotion that ‘doesn’t fit with the everyday’. In her attempt at defining it, she lists the rare episodes which she has identified as joy. The one she describes in most details happens in a club, on ecstasy:

While pleasure is a sensory gratification, something one can acquire and have, joy is not had but results from a surrender of the self to the emotion. Like with Marguerite Porete’s sea of joy, the emotion is a place exterior to the self that the subject enters and turns into. For Zadie Smith, this out-of-body experience is not accessed through mystical union but through drugs and communion. In both cases, joy results from an altered state of consciousness and a feeling of union with others. It also comes after a struggle because joy is perceived as a grace, a relief and release from torment. Smith realises that this egoless experience may have only been an imitation of joy when she is confronted with what she identifies as true joys, always caused by the love she feels for her husband and her child. She ends her essay by pondering on this ‘human madness’ that is love’s joy, a joy that rests on something whose eventual loss is a certitude. This is the particularity of joy and what distinguishes it from happiness, whose invention in classical philosophy coincides with a quest for a pleasure that cannot be lost, found in the action of virtue.²² Smith’s writing of joy as a drug-induced state of evasion and intimacy goes against the discourse of happiness as a practice of self-sufficiency and self-help; joy is found in a loss of self, an abandonment to its precarity.

Where Is the Joy? A Review of Literature

The cultural and literary history of joy remains understudied. While the recent and ongoing scholarly activity around emotions has produced a great number of studies on different emotions in medieval culture and literature, joy remains conspicuously absent.²³ Medievalists have thus done little to dispel ‘the popular stigma of a joyless era in which only violence, plague, and suffering took place’.²⁴ More broadly, Darrin McMahon has diagnosed a ‘negative bias’ in the field of emotion history, one that rests on ‘the belief, nourished in Western culture at least, by centuries of Christian reflection, that pain is deep and ennobling, and that pleasure, where not sinful, is often shallow and trite’.²⁵ There is something indecent about the expression of joy: while melancholy has long been heralded as a mark of genius, joy evokes the foolishness and naivety of unreality. Charles Baudelaire, the quintessential melancholy poet, thus offers, in Fusées, a personal definition of beauty that is correlated with sadness: ‘Je ne prétends pas que la Joie ne puisse pas s’associer avec la Beauté, mais je dis que la Joie [en] est un des ornements les plus vulgaires, tandis que la Mélancolie en est pour ainsi dire l’illustre compagne, à ce point que je ne conçois guère … un type de Beauté où il n’y ait pas du Malheur’ (‘I do not claim that Joy cannot belong to Beauty, but I affirm that Joy is one of its more vulgar ornaments, while Melancholy is its illustrious companion, so much so that I cannot conceive of a type of Beauty in which there is no Misery’).²⁶ This glorification of melancholy as the source of beauty and poetic inspiration may be at the root of the intellectual snubbing of joy. Such preconceived notions of the triviality of joy, I argue, ignore its particular power, explored throughout this book, to expand the self beyond its limits and to act as a bridge between human feeling and spiritual transcendence.

It is outside of the field of emotion history, and inspired by similar movements in the fields of psychology, politics and economy, that happiness studies have started to approach the history of positive emotions.²⁷ The eudaimonic turn in literature, as James O. Pawelski and D. J. Moores define it, is an approach that goes against the common critical attitude of suspicion towards the representation of happiness in literature, an attitude that sees happy stories as ‘intellectually lightweight because they lack the seriousness of actual life’.²⁸ While the present book relates to this happiness turn in that it argues for the need to take positive emotions at face value, I believe that an exploration of joy cannot inhere within happiness studies. Pawelski and Moores frame their approach within a practical effort to help shape individual and global policies on happiness by producing knowledge on the ‘causes and constituents of well-being’.²⁹ In a more recent volume participating in this eudaimonic turn, the editors explain their interest in ‘regimes of happiness’ as correlated with notions of social success. Regimes of happiness represent different social configurations of the ethical goal of personal happiness, defined here primarily as Aristotelian eudaimonia – that is, as a self-sufficient act of virtue that is key to self-determination.³⁰ Such a framework is not fit for the study of joy which either runs counter to or exists outside of patterns of personal and collective productivity.

As I will argue in the first chapter of this book, the philosophical definition of happiness as both an act of human flourishing and the end goal of human desire is in opposition with the language of joy, which is neither an act nor an end, but a gift of love. While joy tests linguistic expression, happiness is the frequent object of scientific discourses where it is defined, measured and quantified. From that of classical philosophy, it has entered the modern discourses of positive psychology and self-help, which have turned happiness into a ‘performance indicator’ and an individual responsibility.³¹ The modern industry of happiness markets it as a form of self-fashioning.³² Joy, on the other hand, as Zadie Smith’s essay intimates, might be seen as an escape from the injunction of happiness. It is an egoless release, and, crucially, is not found in self-sufficiency but in the love one carries for others. Joy is by definition precarious: it is joy because it is fragile and ephemeral, because it can be lost. Against a theory of happiness as self-development and personal responsibility, this book presents a language of joy which suggests a lack of agency in complete surrender to love and the other.

In opposing joy to happiness, I am indebted to Adam Potkay, the one scholar to have studied the history of joy in literature. He argues: ‘Happiness insofar as it harkens back to ancient eudaimonism, is opposed to the loss of self that is always, to some degree, involved in joy.’³³ In his literary and intellectual history of joy, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism, he explores joy’s numerous paradoxes, which are grounded in this ‘commonplace of European literature’, joy’s ineffability.³⁴ The story of joy, he shows, is that of the gratuitous and always surprising experience of reunion, or its anticipation. In this joy of union, the boundaries between self and other, between self and world dissolve, so much so that Potkay describes joy’s paradoxical nature as both a loss of self and a narcissistic instinct to ‘sense everything as one’s (non)-self’: joy is a feeling of interconnectedness rather than self-awareness.³⁵ Potkay also advances joy as a fitter object of narrative than happiness, which tends to foreclose narrative possibilities.³⁶ He claims that joy ‘requires a narrative context’ and is ‘enmeshed in storytelling’.³⁷ My study of the medieval language of love’s joy instead suggests poetry and lyricism as the privileged vectors of joy. The non-linear, not end-oriented quality of lyrics makes them better suited for the atemporal nature of joy described earlier in this introduction. Instead of uncovering a story of joy, I argue that one crucial feature of the language of joy is that it exceeds linear narrative. The present book situates the genesis of the language of love’s joy in medieval European literature in the lyrical language of the troubadours. The lyrical language of phantasmatic joy that they construct will influence poets for centuries and pervade even narrative works where love’s joy somehow always seems to arrest time in lyrical stasis.

Medieval scholarship has long recognised the centrality of Occitan joi in Provençal lyrics and the adoption of the lyrical concept of joie d’amour into narrative poetry. The semantic and literary study of the ambiguous Occitan joi and, to a lesser extent, Old French joie constitutes an old and perhaps old-fashioned critical tradition.³⁸ This interest, however, has been confined to the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The ‘intellectualisation of love poetry’ in the fourteenth century, which sees the integration of philosophical discourse into the vernacular language of love, may have thwarted the recognition of the continued centrality of the joy of love.³⁹ The concept of joy in medieval literature more broadly has thus not garnered significant interest nor has the scholarly tradition on joie d’amour been picked up by the field of emotion history or by more recent studies on medieval love literature.⁴⁰ The scholarship that has approached earthly happiness and joy in medieval literature has done so by analysing them through philosophical discourse.⁴¹ Jessica Rosenfeld’s study of the ethics of enjoyment traces the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy of human perfect happiness on medieval European love poetry. Spanning from the Roman de la Rose to Chaucer, her study is interested in the ‘enjoyment that acknowledges the overlap between the philosophical pursuit of happiness and the happiness pursued by lovers’.⁴² Rosenfeld’s concept of enjoyment, which she chooses as her main object because it encompasses ‘Aristotelian eudaimonia, vernacular “joy”, Christian fruitio, and even Lacanian jouissance’, is helpful in considering the multiplicity of discourses that converge in the writing of earthly love, yet problematic in the way it fuses philosophical happiness and vernacular ‘joy’.⁴³ She argues that the ‘aristotelianizing’ of Boethius in the later Middle Ages allows for philosophical happiness to be more earthly and more human.⁴⁴ This secularisation of happiness does not, however, imply its capacity to become aligned with erotic joy. Quite on the contrary, this book argues, the confrontation of philosophical happiness with love’s joy in the erotic literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries rather results in the opposition of the two concepts. The study of the language of love’s joy is therefore crucial in that it stands at the crux of philosophical, spiritual and secular discourses on love, and on humans’ last end, while, at the same time, forming its own original literary and emotional discourse.

The psychoanalytical trend of scholarship in medieval studies is another field in which the functioning of desire and enjoyment is addressed. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg has studied Chaucer in light of Lacanian jouissance, as she explores sacrifice as a form of enjoyment and the pleasure taken in negative emotions.⁴⁵ Jouissance in this context is what lies beyond the pleasure taken in suffering for love; it is pure sacrifice and ‘total and destructive loss of self’.⁴⁶ Simon Gaunt argues that the troubadours’ courtly lyric gestures towards jouissance and that the fantasised (or realised) ideal of a ‘shared death’ in love, visible, for example, in Tristan’s and Lancelot’s martyrdoms, also tends towards jouissance. While there is something of this jouissance in joie d’amour, especially in its fantasy of self-loss in total union with the beloved, psychoanalytical studies of medieval literature have used jouissance to explore the themes of sacrificial desire, martyr-like suffering and masochistic pleasure, not joy. My study is thus sensible to the concept of jouissance, especially in Barthes’ definition as mystical, excessive joy, but suggests that vernacular joy, as opposed to classical or modern theoretical notions such as eudaimonia, enjoyment or jouissance, is the key to understanding medieval conceptions of love’s fulfilment. Through an assessment of the European, vernacular languages of love’s joy that is cognisant of intellectual discourses on happiness, the present study offers a serious intervention on how we read joy in the period. The multilingual and longue durée approach of this study reveals the continuity of the prevalence of love’s joy in fourteenth-century European literature and on to the early modern period.

By tracing the literary history of medieval love’s joy, what I am uncovering is a cultural and literary language rather than a ‘real’ emotion. The field of emotion history has often debated the nature of emotion and of its historical recoverability. While it is not my intention here to offer a definition of medieval emotion, my study is indebted to scholars who have highlighted the interconnectedness of the somatic, the affective and the cognitive in medieval affective processes. Historians have shown the complex ways in which emotions were theorised in ancient and medieval thought, nuancing any strict opposition between reason and emotion.⁴⁷ Emotions were thought to be caused either by sensory stimuli or by mental processes and had in turn both physiological and cognitive effects, participating in the activity of the intellectual will. Literary scholar Corinne Saunders has also demonstrated the ‘integration of thinking and feeling’ in medieval thought and how this integration is key to our reading of emotions in medieval literature.⁴⁸ In the introduction to their volume Medieval Affect, Feeling, Emotion, Holly Crocker and Glenn Burger have argued for an approach to medieval emotions which intersects the theoretical concepts of ‘affect’, understood as a prelinguistic, somatic intensity, ‘emotion’, which is conscious and socially inscribed, and ‘feeling’, a term that bridges sensory, affective and cognitive experience.⁴⁹ This last term is favoured by emotion scholar and medievalist Sarah McNamer because ‘it serves as a reminder of the integration of the somatic, affective, and cognitive in a pre-Cartesian universe (“to feel” can mean “to know”; see MED, “felen”, v. 1)’.⁵⁰ It is also of particular significance for my own study because it is the verb medieval poets most often use in their writing of love’s joy. Not only the Middle English felen, but also the Middle French santir and medieval Italian sentire can all refer to a sensory sensation, an affective state and a form of knowledge or understanding. When they write the feeling of joy, authors express the irretrievable quality of this feeling which truly exists only in the sensory, affective and/or cognitive experience of joy. My study of the language of joy thus participates in the ongoing interest in the representation of emotions in medieval literature, and its complex integration of cognition, emotion and sensation. Such a study involves the recognition of the specifically literary nature of this language as well as its participation in broader cultural and cognitive conceptualisations of the emotion. As cognitive linguists have demonstrated, figurative language and metaphors are an important way in which thought is linguistically formulated, in literature as well as in everyday language. ‘Conceptual metaphors’, as Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have named them, are ‘metaphors we live by’, found in every type of language.⁵¹ As embodied and psychological processes, emotions are famously hard to describe and are particularly prone to be expressed through figurative language, which expresses ways in which an emotion is conceptually thought.⁵² In saying one is ‘full of joy’, for example, the body is thought of as the container of the emotion which is akin to a liquid filling one up, whereas in the examples quoted previously the body enters the emotion, which is perceived as exterior and, in a way, dematerialised.⁵³ The conceptual semantics of emotion negotiates language, culture and the body and is therefore highly useful in the study of historical emotions.⁵⁴ By studying patterns of conceptual metaphors and figurative language my study contributes to the understanding of how the emotion of joy was cognitively and culturally structured.

***

The following chapters offer a broadly chronological narrative of the construction and evolution of the language of love’s joy in medieval European literature, from the twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth. If I do not wish to claim unnoticed direct connections between specific texts, this trajectory follows textual traditions that have evolved in conversation with each other, across different languages, and sheds new light on cross-linguistic connections. It is especially interested in paralleling the exploration of lyrical language with that of narrative poetry, where the impossibility of lyrical joy is overcome through consummation. Each chapter highlights the integration of the lyrical and narrative traditions, charting the narrative sequencing of lyrics, their incorporation in so-called romans lyriques, or the use of lyrical tropes in verse and prose narrative romances. Furthermore, while this trajectory is mostly concerned with the vernacular language of human love, Chapter 1 provides a short survey of the language of joy as it is found in philosophical, theological and mystical works that have a strong bearing upon European medieval literature as a whole. While the interconnectedness of the mystical and courtly discourses of love has been acknowledged and studied, I wish to suggest unnoticed points of convergence between the two traditions’ languages of joy. In particular, I show how some influential theoretical and mystical works shape a cognitive and conceptual language of joy as exterior to the self, a place of alterity that the human mind cannot contain within itself but must enter through love and self-forgetfulness. Through an exploration of some of the writings of St Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux, I argue that this language is constructed in opposition to that of philosophical happiness, which consists in self-sufficiency and intellectual contemplation. I end this chapter with a closer look at the beguine Marguerite Porete, whose mystical language blends the monastic and courtly discourses of love. In writing the union of the soul with God as an entering of the sea of joy, the mystic also anticipates later narratives of love’s fulfilment as an access to a higher, spiritual realm.

Chapter 2 traces the genesis of the literary tradition of vernacular love’s joy in the Occitan lyrical tradition, Chrétien de Troyes’ narrative romances and the allegorical Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. From the ambiguous Old Occitan term joi to the Old French joie d’amour, joy becomes a key term and concept in this very influential tradition of love literature. This chapter explores the capacity of the language of a joy, which is at once nothing – an absence, a dream – and everything – the lover’s direction and life force, a capacity embodied in its recurrent metaphorical patterns of spatiality, enclosure and exteriority. Joie(e) is at once unattainably far away and always within the lover’s heart and mind. Lyrical joy is a joy of nothing (joie de néant), found in unconscious reverie, construed of as a space that is at once within the subject and yet far exceeds him. In Chrétien’s romances, the spaces of joie are multiplied. Whereas joie d’amour is enclosed in the chamber and in the irretrievable feeling of two bodies and two souls coming together, joie de la cour comes to embody the communal joy of the Arthurian court to which love’s intimate joy is often opposed. These highly influential twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrical and narrative works construct a language of love’s joy which breaks down the boundaries between exterior and interior and between self and other, paving the way for its adoption and reinvention in an Italian literature of love imbued with spirituality. Chapter 3 moves away from a monolexical approach to account for a more diverse semantics of love’s joy in the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. If the first vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century seamlessly translates the lyrical concept of joi into gioia, the trecento authors transcend the lyrical language of joie d’amour and deploy an alternative vocabulary. Both Dante and Petrarch create a new form of lyricism in attempting to place lyrics within linear narratives that lead to happiness (beatitudine) or self-knowledge. Moments of love’s joy, however, are characterised by their self-forgetfulness and their lyrical or atemporal escape from narrative: they coincide with desire and with the fragmentation of the subject, extending towards the beloved in memory and onto the afterlife. Simultaneously, joy – the feeling of the loved one’s presence – is revealed to act as a bridge to the spiritual realm. In Dante’s Paradiso, joy is the key to Dante’s apprehension of the inapprehensible: it allows him to grasp it while also keeping its true form concealed behind the remembrance of joy. Boccaccio, famed for his unabashed sensuality, also uses the phantasmatic nature of lyrical joy not only to overcome it in sensual fulfilment, but also to parallel it with spiritual revelation. The chapter shows how the three authors posit joy at the crux of important poetic and epistemological questions of concealment and revelation, reinventing the language of love’s joy as one of transcendence.

In Chapter 4, I turn to what Ardis Butterfield has called ‘the international language of love’ that takes shape in the poetry of fourteenth-century France and England.⁵⁵ This chapter brings together the works of the French poet and lyricist Guillaume de Machaut with those of the bilingual English poet John Gower, as well as some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works. These authors take part in the ‘intellectualisation’ or ‘Boethianisation’ of love poetry that sees the language of phantasmatic love’s joy confronted with that of Boethian happiness and sufficiency (souffisance/suffisaunce). This confrontation, I argue, demonstrates the incompatibility of love’s joy with happiness: the latter is a form of self-mastery and containment where the former fragments the subject in self-delusion. This chapter also traces the transmission of the French language of joie d’amour into Middle English and its relationship with the native blisse, which I show to be at the convergence between philosophical, mystical and erotic languages of love. While Gower foregoes the native blisse and adopts the semantics of joie, albeit in breaking the illusion of phantasmatic love’s joy through its moral framing, Chaucer uses both terms in his lyrics. Chaucer’s language of bliss constructs love’s joy as the consummation of desire that brings the lovers out of themselves onto a new plane of existence where earthly mutability is temporarily laid to rest. This transformation of the language of blisse into that of erotic and transcendent joy is most fully explored in his Troilus and Criseyde, the study of which is the object of Chapter 5. Chaucer constructs a new language of love’s joy indebted to the French and Italian traditions while at the same time shaped around an innovative semantics of love’s blisse. This language crucially constructs itself in opposition to philosophical felicity: in quasi apophatic discourse, the poem expresses the ‘passing’ quality of the lovers’ joy, beyond the conceptual language of philosophical happiness. This last chapter focuses on the writing of love’s joy within tragedy: the bliss of love is what it is because of its precarity, because it is surrounded by death. But if Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers an exceptionally memorable scene of joy, it is because of its use of a transcendent language of bliss that arrests, albeit briefly, the passage of time.

The book ends with a reflection on one of the main features of the joy of love, its unreality: joy is or feels like it is out of this mundane world. I wish to show that, for many of the authors surveyed in this book, joy’s unreality does not suggest its naivety or foolishness but its very power to bridge phantasm and reality, the transcendent and the immanent. The Conclusion opens up onto early modern lyricism where the language of phantasmatic love’s joy is taken up by Petrarchist poetry. In a European Renaissance obsessed with melancholy and self-introspection, however, it is in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry that, I suggest, is found the continuation of a language of love’s joy as the suspension and expansion of the present moment. John Donne and Thomas Traherne write a joy of love – erotic or spiritual – that is here and now yet experienced as an everywhere; they write joy as an escape from the boundaries of the self, musing on its power to bring us out of ourselves and to reveal the transcendent within human love.