Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Here is a roundup of UTP books that discuss love in various literary and scholarly contexts. Check them out below and have a wonderful day!
Love at a Crux: The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages (coming in August 2023)
By Cameron Cross
Love at a Crux presents the emergence of versified love stories in the New Persian language as a crucial event in the history of romance. Using the tale of Vis & Rāmin (w. 1054) as its focal point, the book explores how Persian court poets in the eleventh century reconfigured “myths” and “fables” from the distant past in ways that transformed the love story from a form of evening entertainment to a method of ethical, political, and affective self-inquiry.
The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales
By Manish Sharma
The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an “insoluble.” Through a series of detailed and rigorously “non-judgmental” readings, Manish Sharma provides new insight into each of the prologues and tales and intervenes into scholarly debates about their collective import.
Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes
Edited by Ana Laguna and John Beusterien
Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures.
Dialogues of Love
By Leone Ebreo
Translated by Damian Bacich
Edited and translated by Rosella Pescatori
First published in Rome in 1535, Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love is one of the most important texts of the European Renaissance. Leone’s Dialogues consists of three conversations – ‘On Love and Desire,’ ‘On the Universality of Love,’ and ‘Onthe Origin of Love’ – that take place over a period of three subsequent days.
The Grammar Rules of Affection: Passion and Pedagogy in Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson
By Ross Knecht
Renaissance writers habitually drew upon the idioms and images of the schoolroom in their depictions of emotional experience. Memorable instances of this tendency include the representation of love as a schoolroom exercise conducted under the disciplinary gaze of the mistress. Drawing on the philosophical approaches to emotion, theories of social practice, and the history of education, this book argues that emotions appear in Renaissance literature as conventional, rule-guided practices rather than internal states.
