Courtly Contradictions

Where does courtly literature come from? What is the meaning of courtly love? What is the relation between religious and secular culture in the Middle Ages, and why does it matter? This book addresses these questions, as its title indicates, by way of contradiction. Contradiction is central both to medieval logic and to most modern protocols of reading; it therefore informs both the production and the reception of medieval texts. Yet contradiction itself is rarely analyzed, serving more often as a spur to interpretation than as its object. This book works between the complex philosophical culture of the twelfth century (principally the traditions of Aristotle and of philosophical Neoplatonism, which diverge significantly in their treatment of contradiction) and the no less complex thought of Lacan (which is just as bound up with contradictoriness). Situating twelfth-century Anglo-Norman, French, and Occitan literature within this philosophical embrace, the author studies the interaction of three major literary genres hagiography, troubadour lyric, and romance an interaction that, in the course of the century, generates what we now call courtly literature.