Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Theories of looking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Love is a favourite theme of medieval narrative, yet in Western civilization love is a private experience, and one for which, in medieval texts especially, secrecy is often regarded as a prerequisite. How then can it be the theme of narrative, when to narrate, to tell, is to make public? This is the problem from which the present book begins; and it focuses on looking, and secondarily on listening, as the means by which private experience is brought into the public sphere. Within medieval love-narratives, secret observers, concealed from the lovers as the lovers are from society at large, are frequently represented as responsible for exposing private experience to the public gaze; as readers of or listeners to such narratives, we too can be made to feel that we are secret observers; and, in the later Middle Ages especially, the love-poet is often realized as one who looks and tells, himself a secret observer of experiences in which he does not participate. The verse-narratives I shall discuss in Chapters 3 to 14 fall into two large categories: those in the third person, in the form of romances and associated narratives, and those in the first person, in the form of dream-poems and analogous narratives or dits. Poems of other types that deal with human love might have been included; but the book is long enough already, and it seemed better to trace two connected traditions than to aim at a comprehensiveness that could only be sketchy.
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- Information
- The Medieval Poet as Voyeur , pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993