Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (review)

Tracy Adams’s study of love in the twelfth-century Old French romance offers much of interest to Arthurian scholars. In addition to her analysis of Tristan et Iseut and two of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, Adams’s larger argument about the representation of love in twelfth-century romance clearly has the potential to influence studies of other Arthurian texts. The volume is divided into six chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, bibliography, and index.

The main premise of Adams’s argument is that, as portrayed in twelfth-century Old French romances, Love is neither an unreservedly positive force nor is it idealized or idealizing. Rather, she argues, the texts she considers attempt to grapple seriously with passionate love, depicting it as an overwhelming emotion, and as a personal and societal problem that requires solving by being channeled into an acceptable and productive form. As she puts it in her introduction, ‘romances do not offer a distillable doctrine, but rather a wide array of different possibilities for recuperating sexual desire. Thus they should be seen as laboratories wherein passionate love is analyzed and different ways of integrating that emotion into a society that officially eschews it are tested’ (p. 3). This summary of her view of romance presents two major facets of her argument: first, that romance authors actively worked through the ‘problem of love’ in their texts and second, that passionate love was officially eschewed by both clerical and feudal culture—by clerical culture because of its ever-greater emphasis on celibacy, and by feudal culture because the politics of marriage left little or no space for passion. Both points are clearly debatable, but Adams’s well-argued monograph does an extremely effective job of substantiating her position and challenging many of our received notions about ‘courtly love’ in romance.

After a short introduction presenting her methodology, Chapter One lays out Adams’s primary argument. The first part of the chapter critiques earlier work on love in Old French verse romance, in particular the concept of courtly love, arguing that love episodes in the Old French verse romances of the late twelfth century ‘should not be read as products of an idealizing discourse of courtly love, but rather as sophisticated responses to uncritical ecclesiastical condemnations of sexual desire’ (p. 2). The bulk of the chapter then discusses the ‘problem’ of love in clerical writings, passing in rapid review Church teaching (from Augustine to the Gregorian reform to Anselm, among others) and medical writings.

Chapter Two turns to the major alternate authoritative voice on love in the Middle Ages, that of Ovid. Here, Adams argues that medieval romance authors read Ovid as a serious neoplatonic philosopher of love as well as the magister amoris of the Amors, et. al. The combination of the two Ovidian voices Adams calls the ‘super Ovid’ (an un happy choice of terms), and this key figure becomes a dominant thread, structuring most of the book’s readings of romance texts. Analyzing the lais reworked from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Pyramus et Tisbé, Narcisus, and Philomena et Procné), Adams demonstrates effectively that they represent love as a violent emotion, as one nearly impossible to control and thus in need of repression, yet they demonstrate simultaneously that this concept of love is not sufficient in a secular context.

Chapter Three continues laying out the philosophical and historical groundwork for Adams’s thesis. ‘Marriage and Amor’ proposes reading the love-stricken romance hero as an almost direct response to imposed clerical celibacy, and the romance genre more generally as a ‘safe’ place in which to present the argument for passionate love. Although Adams’s survey of twelfth-century clerical celibacy and aristocratic marriage must needs be sketchy, she generally makes a compelling argument, particularly when she turns to the romance as counterpoint to the authoritative doctine. Sentences like ‘As the Church defined members according to the degree to...