Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love

Medium Aevum, Spring-Summer, 2007 by Miranda Griffin

Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). vii 235 pp. ISBN 0-19-927207-7. 50.00 [pounds sterling].

This book is a triumph. Gathering together texts in two languages and over a wide range of genres (lyric, lai, verse and prose romance), it unravels the literary commonplace that love is true, real, or worthwhile if it results in or is represented by death. In so doing, Gaunt raises some crucial questions about the representation of love in western culture, and provides an array of scintillating answers. The early chapters show how the highly influential paradigm of martyrdom for love is constructed by the ethics and power-play of troubadour lyrics; the later chapters explore how characters in narrative texts enact--or refuse--this paradigm of dying (or offering, threatening, or desiring to die) for love. Unsurprisingly, given its star-crossed lovers and frequently doom-laden idiom, the Tristan story resonates throughout this book, as Gaunt examines various texts and episodes from the tradition, shedding new light on them as he does so.

There is so much to savour in this book--and this verb is used advisedly in a work which offers a provocative reading of the eaten heart motif found in Le Castelain de Coud and the razos and vidas of Guillem de Cabestanh. In the chapter examining the role of gender in the representation of dying for love, Gaunt brilliantly juxtaposes the spectacles of the dead Demoisele d'Escalot in La Mort le roi Artu and the comatose Guilliadun in Eliduc, to reveal the way in which the death of women for love troubles the fantasy of parity between the men and women in love. The dazzling final chapter brings together men who die for the love of men: Narcissus who dies for love of himself; and Galehaut, the tragic giant of Arthurian prose romance who, in what must be one of the most moving passages of the Prose Lancelot, is consumed and killed by his love for Lancelot. This queer desire seems to encapsulate so much of the fatal love examined in this book: as Gaunt suggests, pure martyrdom to love, where love has become its own object, is bound to trouble the gender categories that such untrammelled love purports to uphold.

Gaunt's winning and witty argument is articulated with recourse to a rich and challenging cluster of theoretical formulations. Derrida's theory of the gift is invoked to explore the nature of sacrifice: a gift can only be fully given if it is given in secret, without entering into any economy of exchange--even an economy of representation. This notion is exploited to fascinating effect in Gaunt's reading of La Chastelaine de Vergy, in which the chatelaine, her lover, the duke, and the duchess tread--with fatal consequences--the precarious line between secrecy and revelation upon which so much courtly literature depends. The balance of power inherent in lyrics by several troubadours is analysed using Giorgio Agamben's inflection of Foucault's dissection of sovereignty and discipline. These poets, argues Gaunt, use the rhetoric of dying for love in order to cast themselves as abject minions to their lady's sovereign desire, thereby attempting to seduce her into acknowledging their presence, yet constructing themselves as undeserving of such acknowledgement. The theories of desire formulated by Jacques Lacan are central to the interlace of love and death; Lacan's ethical injunction not to give way on one's desire can be read as a direct response to his reading of courtly love, and is central to this book. The theoretical passages take no prisoners: this is a complex and sophisticated work which is not for beginners or the faint-hearted. It is, however, an exhilarating read, as well as a reminder and demonstration of the crucial position of modern critical theory in contemporary medieval literary criticism.

MIRANDA GRIFFIN

Cambridge