"Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, son of the King of England, remained with Philip, the King of France, who so honored him for so long that they ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the King of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the King of England was absolutely astonished at the vehement love between them and marveled at what it could mean."

Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? An extraordinary amount, as Stephen Jaeger demonstrates.

Unlike current efforts to read medieval culture through modern mores, Stephen Jaeger contends that love and sex in the Middle Ages relate to each other very differently than in the postmedieval period. Love was not only a mode of feeling and desiring, or an exclusively private sentiment, but a way of behaving and a social ideal. It was a form of aristocratic self-representation, its social function to show forth virtue in lovers, to raise their inner worth, to increase their honor and enhance their reputation. To judge from the number of royal love relationships documented, it seems normal, rather than exceptional, that a king loved his favorites, and the courtiers and advisors, clerical and lay, loved their superiors and each other.

Jaeger makes an elaborate, accessible, and certain to be controversial, case for the centrality of friendship and love as aristocratic lay, clerical, and monastic ideals. Ennobling Love is a magisterial work, a book that charts the social constructions of passion and sexuality in our own times, no less than in the Middle Ages.

About the Author
C. Stephen Jaeger is Professor of Germanics and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939-1210, and The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200, all available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reviews

"Scholars of the Middle Ages can hardly afford not to pay serious attention to Jaeger's clear, cogent arguments that cut across genders, genres, and all orders of the aristocracy. . . . An excellent choice as a required 'practical theory' text for advanced undergraduates and graduate courses."-Speculum

"A cogent and engrossing social history of the evolving Medieval attitudes toward civic and erotic love, virtue, and spiritual friendship. . . . The Author . . . has shrewdly plotted a story in which we can almost hear our own age about to be born, where noble love loses its innocent identity. . . . Ennobling Love is both a reader's pleasure and a scholar's treasure."-Foreword magazine

"This is a book of vast scope, challenging comparison with Auerbach's Mimesis and Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. . . . All medievalists and students of European (love) literature in general will want to profit from this tour de force."-John O. Ward, Arthuriana

Book Information
ISBN 9780812216912
Author C. Stephen Jaeger
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press