Medieval marriages are often understood to have been loveless, due partly to assumptions about arranged matches that have been reinforced by scholars who suggest that troubadour poetry was not concerned with love but rather with poetic form and structure. In this book, William Paden challenges that belief, using historical sources to argue that the songs of the troubadours reveal an inextricable link between desire and marriage.

Paden analyzes twelfth- through fourteenth-century troubadour poetry from the Occitan region, which stretched across portions of medieval France, Catalonia, and Italy; visual art, both images and objects; a corpus of over a thousand marriage contracts; and various liturgical manuscripts. Tracing literary and artistic output alongside the evolution of the institution of marriage from late antiquity to the early and high Middle Ages, Paden demonstrates that the stereotype of loveless unions reflects modern scholarly bias more than medieval reality. Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours restores the period’s complexity, showing how desire and devotion often intertwined—and how courtly song reveals the relationship between the two.

William D. Paden, professor emeritus of French at Northwestern University, is the author of many books, including An Introduction to Old Occitan and A Troubadour Reader.

Table des matières :

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1. Looking Ahead

2. Art: Depicting Desire

3. Laws: Principles of Marriage

4. Contracts: Practice of Marriage

5. Church: Celebrating Marriage

6. Partings: When Marriage Fails

7. Poetry: Singing Desire

8. Looking Beyond

Appendix A. Marriage Contracts

Appendix B. Troubled Marriages

Appendix C. Ritual Manuscripts

Manuscripts Cited

Works Cited

Index

Informations pratiques :

William D. Paden, Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2026 ; 1 vol., 370 p. ISBN : 978-0-81307-958-5. Prix : USD 100,00.

Source : University Press of Florida