Wounded Knights
Violence, Masculinity, and Medieval Courtly Love
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Beschreibung
This broad-ranging book draws on Freudian and post-Freudian theory to offer a new and original perspective on courtly love from its origins in eleventh-century Occitania to its transformation into conflicting chivalric and courtly discourses in the later Middle Ages. Comparative and transnational in scope, it explores the role of masculinity and violence in the romance, love lyric and saints’ lives written in French, English, German, and Czech between 1200 and 1400. Whereas conventional studies of medieval courtly love have emphasized the positive and idealistic relationship between the knight and the lady, this book highlights the dark side of medieval masculinity and how displaced male violence toward women and male masochism in these texts are transfigured into more explicit violence in modern horror films.
Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. His most recently published books include The Czech Legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria: The Text and its Context (2024), Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 (2022), The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Art and Literature in the Age of Chaucer and the Gawain Poet (2020), Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rights (2018), and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience (2015).
This broad-ranging book draws on Freudian and post-Freudian theory to offer a new and original perspective on courtly love from its origins in eleventh-century Occitania to its transformation into conflicting chivalric and courtly discourses in the later Middle Ages. Comparative and transnational in scope, it explores the role of masculinity and violence in the romance, love lyric and saints’ lives written in French, English, German, and Czech between 1200 and 1400. Whereas conventional studies of medieval courtly love have emphasized the positive and idealistic relationship between the knight and the lady, this book highlights the dark side of medieval masculinity and how displaced male violence toward women and male masochism in these texts are transfigured into more explicit violence in modern horror films.
Emphasizes the dark and violent side of medieval courtly love Offers a broad and comparative approach to medieval romance and lyric Includes material not only from England and France but also from Germany and the Czech Lands
Autor*in
Alfred Thomas
Themen in »Wounded Knights«
Courtly Love Medieval Masculinity Knights Medieval Romance Lyric Poetry
Stimmen zu »Wounded Knights«
“Wounded Knights is a well-researched, ambitious, and compelling contribution to the topic of masculinity and violence in medieval romance, horror film, and beyond. Alfred Thomas explores a rich range of texts in multiple languages, including French, Middle English, Czech, German, and Latin, and his Freudian analyses are both illuminating and inspiring. His multimedia approach to the topic is also worthy of praise, from F. W. Murnau to Alfred Hitchcock, casting a spell of interdisciplinary and rewarding insights. This book is sure to delight film buffs, newcomers to film studies and medieval literature, and seasoned academics alike.” (Curtis Runstedler, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of English Literature and Cultures, University of Stuttgart, Germany)
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