Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality by James A. Schultz (review)

REVIEWS 274 Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls in his writing of a poem in the form of the demande d’amour (question of love), in which irresolution takes precedent in the ending, and where homosocial bonds between the male fowls occur as much as queer, non-heterosexual possibilities of intimacy. This subverts the tripartite structure of the escape-liberation narrative, revealing Chaucer’s indebtedness to the French tradition in lieu of the traditional critical tendency to oppose Chaucer to the French tradition. Setting up her critical voice in dialogue with those affirming the escapeliberation narrative of Chaucer the Father-poet of English poetry, Schibanoff’s Chaucer’s Queer Poetics highlights how contemporary critical interpretations of Chaucer are fundamentally shaped by traditions rooted in a nationalist, proWhig (conservative), and paternalistic-patriarchal framework. Her critical work in this monograph is groundbreaking in bucking the conservative trends of critical Chaucer studies first inaugurated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engaging with new paradigms of queer and feminist theories. It is also relevant to those interested in the “queer” or odd aspects of the original source-texts, French and Italian, of Chaucer’s dream-visionary poetry, and traces competently the dynamics of influence underlying the relationship between Chaucer and his continental-poetic predecessors. Schibanoff’s book, with its readings of the dream trio of poems, forms a good companion-piece to Glenn Burger’s Chaucer’s Queer Nation (2003), which offers a possibly “queer” reading of The Canterbury Tales. KEVIN TEO, English, University of Calgary James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2006) xxii + 242 pp. Although studies of medieval sexuality have covered marginal practices like cross-dressing and the learned traditions of theology, little attention has been paid to what have been considered the “normative” practices of monogamous pairings between a man and woman in literature. Questioning this norm and its previous interpretations, James A. Shultz introduces courtly love to the history of sexuality in a thorough analysis of the causes and attributes of courtly love. He examines the sexuality of the typical courtly lovers in the medieval German tradition such as Gottfried von Straβburg’s Tristan and Isold, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Enite, and the Minnesingers. This groundbreaking study begins by determining what sort of body causes courtly lovers to fall in love and how that body is or is not invested with erotic significance. The first section concerns the bodies of courtly lovers. He cleverly details the pitfalls of modern interpretations as he shows how the varying significations of Parzival’s penis are used in various contexts. He then determines that German courtly bodies are not determined by sex, but rather it is their nobility that makes them attractive. In the third chapter he shows how bodies in public are not distinguished by morphology but by the degree of rhetorical investment in the description and the intensity of the effect on the viewers. REVIEWS 275 In the second section Schultz asks what makes courtly lovers fall in love. He begins by clarifying the uses and misuses of the term “heterosexuality.” He concludes that it cannot be used in medieval studies because it always refers the reader to modern definitions of sexuality, which are characterized by the opposition between a normative heterosexuality and homosexuality as determined by sexual object choice. Moreover he reminds us that heterosexuality is a product of history and not a universal given. Schultz then proceeds to break down the three medieval notions usually lumped under “desire.” The first is the theological discussion of concupiscence and lust. The second is the medical and philosophical discourse of appetite and pleasure. The third is courtly love. This section concludes with his demonstration that the cause of courtly love is always external to the lover. He argues that attributes of nobility, such as reputation , clothing and radiance, cause courtly lovers to fall for one another and that gender is secondary to these noble qualities. The third section outlines how courtly lovers come into being and what they must do to fashion themselves. Schultz starts with the Minnesingers, whose...