Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (review)

This book addresses the long-standing question for medievalists of why French and Occitan literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries constructs heterosexual love in part as what modern readers would now term tragic and doomed passion, and why this particular idea of love has proved so enduring in modern culture. Simon Gaunt's book is, therefore, covering familiar territory, and he places his study in the tradition of Denis de Rougemont's as well as Jacques Lacan's proposals to read courtly love as a constitutive element in Western culture, with the caveat that he is a specialist in medieval literature, rather than a cultural historian. Gaunt's approach to his study is to examine canonical texts of courtly love, troubadour lyrics, Marie de France, the various narratives of Tristan and Lancelot, and the 'eaten heart' narratives, in the light of a combination of modern critical theories, most frequently the work of Lacan and Derrida. Gaunt opens his study with the question, 'Do courtly lovers make love into a religion?' (p. 3) and suggests that love-as-religion, this tired cliché of former scholarship, has been reassessed in the light of theory-driven approaches to medieval literature. He prefers to treat a dual issue, the first being the secular concept of love as martire (martyrdom or suffering), and secondly the notion, derived from religious ideology as well as a combination of Lacan and Derrida, of love as sacrifice. Both are identified as the possibility of constructing an ethical subject in a non-religious space. The first two chapters study the depiction of the troubadour's lady in the poems of Bernart de Ventadorn and three successors, tracing the slippage from Bernart's association of desire with death, to a construction of the lady as a temporal sovereign capable of mercy (the latter chapter includes a persuasive application to this material of Agamben's writings on biopolitics). Chapters three and four offer, respectively, a brisk reading of the narratives of the Chastelaine de Vergy and the Chastelain de Couci in terms of Bataille's idea of sacrifice as spectacle, and of the Charrette and Cligés as anti-Tristan narratives. Chapters five and six are in my view the strongest in this book. First, Gaunt explores the possibility that dying for love is a gendered concept by looking critically at the deaths and near-misses of a succession of heroines, from Iseut to the Demoiselle d'Escalot. Chapter six pursues this line with incisive readings of Narcissus narratives, and the queer death-for-love of Galehaut in the Prose Lancelot. This is strictly a literary study, and anyone seeking a description of the complex religious or cultural contexts for medieval notions of love, religion or indeed ethics should look elsewhere. The result is a well-balanced, focused and challenging book that should prove an accessible source of close textual readings for medievalists, and of thought-provoking interpretations of 'courtly love' literature to a broad spectrum of readers.