The Erotics of Consolation Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages

by Léglu, Catherine; Milner, Stephen J.

• ISBN13: 9781403976192
• ISBN10: 1403976198
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

What is consolation and why is mourning so often bound up with erotic desire? This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I. The contributors consider how they remodeled the discourse of consolation through parody and satire, interrogating the limits of a consolatory rhetoric.

Author Biography

Catherine E. Léglu is Reader in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, University of Reading.



Stephen J. Milner is Serena Professor of Italian, University of Manchester.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Encountering Consolation	p. 1
Consolation and Desire
Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French dit	p. 21
The Doubled Joys of Troilus and Criseyde	p. 39
The Consolation of Beatrice and Dante's Dream of the Siren as Vilification Cure	p. 61
Yearning and Learning: Spaces of Desire in Jean Lemaire de Belges' Concorde des deux langages (1511)	p. 79
Coming Together: Consolation and the Rhetoric of Insinuation in Boccaccio's Decameron	p. 95
Consolation and Loss
Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch's De Remediis	p. 117
Tamainte consolation / me first lymagination: A Poetics of Mourning and Imagination in Late Medieval dits	p. 141
Horizons of Loss: Consolation and the Person in the Ackermann by Johannes von Tepl	p. 165
Maternal Consolatio in Antoine de La Sale's Le Reconfort de Madame de Fresne	p. 185
Boethius Goes to Court: The Consolatio as Advice to Princes from Chaucer to Elizabeth I	p. 205
Select Bibliography	p. 227
Notes on Contributors	p. 235
Index	p. 237
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