The Joy of Love in the Middle Ages

Joy in literature and culture remains a little-studied subject, one sometimes even viewed with suspicion. Here, Lucie Kaempfer reveals its place at the crux of medieval discourses on love across the philosophical, spiritual and secular realms. Taking a European and multilingual perspective stretching from the twelfth century to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth, she tells a comparative literary history of the writing of love's actual or imagined fulfilment in medieval Europe. Kaempfer attends to the paradox of the endlessness of desire and the impossibility of fulfilment, showing the language of joy to be one of transcendence, both of language and of the self. Identifying, through close analysis of many arresting examples, a range of its key features – its inherent lyricism, its ability to halt or escape linear narrative, its opposition to self-sufficient happiness – she uncovers a figurative and poetic language of love's joy that still speaks to us today.

• Brings the rich yet neglected medieval tradition of love's joy to the fore, opening up a fresh perspective on the central theme of love for contemporary scholars and researchers
• Provides a broad historical survey of an important medieval literary tradition, engagingly tracing its permutations throughout both canonical and lesser-studied texts
• Explores connections between French, Italian and English medieval literature, bringing key authors into conversation and contributing to understanding of how the emotion of joy was cognitively and culturally structured throughout medieval Europe