Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (review)

This volume's twenty-one articles, based on papers presented at a 2005 University of Arizona symposium, represent a broad range of perspectives on texts produced from Late Antiquity through the fifteenth century. All essays, however, share a common thematic focus on how authors from that period display both an interest in amatory language as well as in a love of language. While the volume does not completely succeed in demonstrating that words of love and love of words represent an organic dyad in pre-modern European literature, as implied in the title and the lengthy introduction, the compilation is successful in proving how absolutely central and multifaceted amatory language and a love of words are in texts before 1500.

Quite commendable here is the breadth of traditions treated, with contributions on vernacular works from medieval Spain, Italy, France, and Provence, from Germanic literatures including those of England and Germany, and from the Irish-Celtic tradition. Additionally, the volume includes contributions on Latin language literatures from the late Roman Empire and the High Middle Ages. Despite such heterogeneity, the collection hangs very well together, and one notices everywhere the hand of a very active and skillful editor. For instance, the essays consistently, and with welcome frequency, cross-reference each other wherever they treat similar concepts. Additionally, the essays refer to secondary literature outside of the national traditions treated in the individual articles. Thus, for example, readers of the several contributions touching on troubadour lyric will find also many useful references to secondary literature by Germanist scholars working on Minnesong. Interestingly, the essays here also regularly refer to scholarship by the editor, and in this regard it probably does not go too far to view the collection as a promotion of Albrecht Classen's own research program, much of which over the past decade has been concerned with words and communication. Classen must also be credited with ensuring that all the collection's essays are of at least decent academic quality, with that appropriate incorporation of secondary literature that is often missing in essays collected in conference proceedings. Nevertheless, as must be the case in any anthology of essays, some of the pieces here are more noteworthy than others.

Among the contributions on works originating in Germanic countries, the most significant is probably that by Christopher R. Clason who shows for the avowal scene in Gottfried's Tristan that Isolde acts with great autonomy to teach the hero about the language of love. Thus she urges Tristan to see the value of linguistic ambiguity, generally, and to preserve ambiguity in the word lameir, specifically, when he tries to restrict its meaning to 'love' alone. Taking the Joie de la curt episode of Hartmann's Erec as his case study, Siegfried Christoph conducts an intelligent cultural and philological analysis of joy in medieval culture. He reaches the quite useful conclusion that the representation of joy in medieval courtly literature is characterized by its expressiveness, energy, and its nature as something to be shared rather than as an emotion to be merely contemplated. For Parzival, G. Ronald Murphy speculates that the five names of central female characters that Wolfram does not borrow from Chrétien but rather invents, correspond to progressive stages in the appreciation of love that the hero experiences on his path toward emotional maturity. Murphy offers new etymologies of those names based on their contexts, suggesting, for example, that Cundrie is related to the root kund, as is appropriate for Parzival's very aware, very knowing ugly maiden. In his own contribution, Classen throws light on several understudied thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century Minnesingers. Also focusing on understudied sources, Harry Peters analyzes John Gower's Cinkante Balades, offering the significant observation that the author drew them from a store of his poems written over an extended period of time. And Jean E. Jost focuses on the mixing...