ART History 340 – “Love and War in Medieval Art and Literature” Anne Harris
“Love is a kind of war, and no assignment for cowards.” Thus spoke Ovid in c. 2 B.C.E. with great pertinence to love and war in the Middle Ages and to the endeavors of this class. I propose to work with you through three forms of vernacular writing and imagery: war epic poems, Arthurian romances, and allegorical love poetry. All three of these forms were articulated in the incredibly rich 12th – 14th centuries, though often they refer to much earlier periods. All three of these forms flourished outside the purview (and approval) of the Church. And all three of these forms interacted with that most troublesome (because uncontrolled) of all entities: the secular image. As a result, they engage with issues of sex and identity, subjectivity and desire. What are the implications of war being a metaphor for love? How do we understand love letters between soldiers? Was the tremendous power that women wielded in courtly love an escapist fantasy or an indication of lived experience? What are the modern inheritances of medieval love in terms of gender roles and expectations? The course seeks to be aware of how “timeless” stories move between various verbal and visual forms, what the impacts of those forms are on the stories, and on what happens to them in our modern era (where they are still consistently translated into film and further fiction).