“Manners” alternates between the portrayal of self-reliant “gentlemen” like Montaigne, Socrates, and El Cid, who are “original and commanding” and “fashion,” an imitative “hall of the Past” where “virtue [has] gone to seed.” But near the end of the essay he turns away from forms of aristocratic morality by introducing two new heroes: a woman, “the Persian Lilla,” who reconciles “all heterogeneous persons into one society”; and then “Osman,” a poor beggar at the gates of the Shah who is a “great heart … so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country,” and whose wealth lies in his ability to “harbor” madness without sharing it. The introduction of Lilla and Osman late in “Manners” raises the question of how they align with its other heroes. Are they part of a turn or contrary tendency showing up late in the essay, or a deeper exploration of forms of virtue – especially love – already introduced?

Chapter 4 brings together the works of French poet and lyricist Guillaume de Machaut with those of bilingual English poet John Gower, as well as some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s lyrics. These authors take part in the ‘intellectualisation’ of love poetry that sees the language of phantasmatic love’s joy be confronted with that of Boethian happiness and sufficiency. This confrontation, I argue, demonstrates the incompatibility of love’s joy with happiness: the latter is a form of self-mastery whereas the former fragments the subject in self-delusion. This chapter also traces the transmission of the French language of joie d’amour into Middle English and its relationship with the native blisse, which I show to be at the convergence between philosophical, mystical and erotic languages of love. While Gower foregoes the native blisse, Chaucer’s lyrics bring the languages of joie and bliss together to build a new form of love’s joy as the consummation of desire and an escape from earthly temporality.

This book on the language of love’s joy starts with the acknowledgement that such a language has repeatedly been expressed as impossible. The poetic and vernacular tradition of joie d’amour originates in the lyrics of the troubadours, which famously sing the absence of fulfilment in the endless prolongation of desire: it is thus born in a lyrical language that presupposes its impossibility. This study on the language of love’s joy is thus grounded in the paradox that love’s joy is beyond language. The elusive nature of the emotion has resulted in a lack of studies on love’s joy. If there is an important scholarly tradition on the semantics of Old Occitan joi, this critical interest has been confined to the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and has not been picked up by the field of emotion history nor by more recent studies on medieval love literature.

Chapter 2 traces the genesis of the literary tradition of vernacular love’s joy in the Occitan lyrical tradition, Chrétien de Troyes’ narrative romances and the allegorical Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. It explores the capacity of the language of lyrical joy, which is at once nothing – an absence, a dream – and everything – the lover’s direction and life force, a capacity embodied in its recurrent patterns of spatiality, enclosure and exteriority. In Chrétien’s romances, the spaces of joie are multiplied. If joie d’amour is enclosed in the chamber and in the irretrievable feeling of two bodies and souls coming together, joie de cour embodies the communal joy of the Arthurian court to which love’s intimate joy is often opposed. In writing the phantasmatic and oneiric nature of love’s joy, both imagined and experienced, these influential twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrical and narrative works construct a language of love’s joy which breaks down the boundaries between exterior and interior and between self and other.

The book concludes with a reflection on one of the main features of the joy of love, its unreality: joy is or feels like it is out of this world. For many of the authors surveyed in this book, joy’s unreality does not suggest its naivety or foolishness but its very power to bridge phantasm and reality, the transcendent and the immanent. The conclusion opens up onto the European Renaissance: while the language of phantasmatic love’s joy is taken up by Petrarchist poetry, it is in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry that is found the continuation of a language of love’s joy as the arresting and expansion of the present moment. John Donne and Thomas Traherne write of a joy that is here and now yet experienced as an everywhere, they write of its power to bring us out of ourselves and to reveal the transcendent within human love.

If the first Italian vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century seamlessly translates the lyrical concept of joi into gioia, the trecento authors Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio transcend the lyrical language of phantasmatic joie d’amour and deploy a new vocabulary. Both Dante and Petrarch create a new form of lyricism in attempting to place lyrics within linear narratives that lead to a form of happiness (beatitudine) or self-knowledge. Moments of love’s joy, however, are characterised by their self-forgetfulness and their lyrical or atemporal escape from narrative. The chapter shows how the three authors posit joy at the crux of important poetic and epistemological questions of concealment and revelation, reinventing the language of love’s joy as one of transcendence. In Dante’s Paradiso, the feeling of joy is the key to Dante’s apprehension of the inapprehensible, whereas Boccaccio uses the phantasmatic nature of lyrical joy to parallel it with spiritual revelation.

Chapter 5 is a study of Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that showcases Chaucer’s transformation of the language of blisse into that of erotic and transcendent joy. Chaucer constructs a new language of love’s joy indebted to the French and Italian traditions while at the same time shaped around an innovative semantics of love’s blisse. This language, crucially, constructs itself in opposition to philosophical felicity: in quasi-apophatic discourse, the poem expresses the ‘passing’ quality of the lovers’ joy, which exists beyond the conceptual language of philosophical happiness. This last chapter focuses on the writing of love’s joy within tragedy: the bliss of love is what it is because of its precarity, because it is surrounded by death. But if Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers an exceptionally memorable scene of joy, it is because of its use of a transcendent language of bliss that arrests, albeit briefly, the passage of time.

Forgivingness is virtue, a specification of generosity, a disposition to give offenders, especially against oneself, more of good and less of evil than they deserve. It is an interconnected set of sensitivities to features of situations marked by wrongdoing. The forgiving person is responsive to these features in ways that tend to mitigate, eliminate, or forestall anger in the interest of wishing the wrongdoer well and/or of enjoying a positive and harmonious relationship with him or her. The chief considerations favoring forgiveness are (1) the offender’s repentance, (2) excuses for the offender, (3) the offender’s suffering, (4) moral commonality with the offender, and (5) relationship to the offender.

Practical wisdom is caring understanding of the good in the situations of a human life. Our emotions are rational to the extent that we care about the real good and are truthful about the facts. The two main kinds of virtues – the virtues of caring and the enkratic virtues – embody different aspects of practical wisdom. On the one side, in compassion, generosity, justice, and sense of duty, we care about and understand our good in its varieties and aspects. On the other side, we know about and know our practical way around ourselves, our shortcomings and the ways they may be mitigated and repaired by use of courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. The virtues of caring form a coherent ensemble and overall picture of the good, a practical wisdom by which we see our situations in the perspective of a whole life.

The so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus highlights the importance of ethical living if Israel is to be holy as God is holy. This chapter discusses the historical-critical arguments around the composition of the Holiness Code but focuses mainly on bridge Leviticus creates between the holiness of Israel’s tent and God’s tent. Ethical purity is as important as ritual purity in Leviticus and requires holiness in every aspect of Israel’s life.

Marcus Aurelius addresses himself as sociable by nature, as someone made to belong to a political community, and as a citizen of the cosmos. The good life for him consists in obeying the gods and cooperating with his fellow citizens in service of the common interest. His fellow citizens are all beings endowed with reason, and as a human he cares for all other people, whoever they may be. The Meditations demonstrate detailed knowledge and agreement with the conceptual foundations of Stoic cosmopolitanism, but specific approaches can be identified. Marcus underscores the organismic and egalitarian nature of the cosmic community and often gives a functional account of his status as a part of the cosmos, while at the same time also suggesting a hierarchical account of degrees of sociability. His rule as emperor he conceives as a personal challenge to live up to the model of his predecessor, Antoninus Pius, also sharing the latter’s conservativism and traditionalism. Marcus’ Stoicism is more apparent in his quest for sincere and truly loving sociability, a striving that finds its limits in the aversion and disappointment Marcus often seems to experience with regard to those around him.

Explores the interaction between love poetry and philosophy in Ovid and Plato. The philosophical uncertainty that results from Ovid’s visions of fluid ontologies is not restricted to the Metamorphoses but can also be identified in his earlier elegiac work, as love too is subject to constant change. Love and desire are also frequently theorized in ancient philosophy, with Ovid’s didactic Ars Amatoria integrating and distorting elements of this tradition. Its combination of a speculative approach to love with manipulative rhetoric, all with the goal of fostering and pursuing the object of desire, has clear precedents in the philosophical tradition, most notably Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. The nature of love, however, remains fundamentally elusive, and its definition something of a paradox. The dangers of abduction and sexual assault, however, remain a dark undercurrent in both Ovid’s and Plato’s works. This danger is closely associated with poetry in the Phaedrus, which includes myths of abduction and metamorphosis that internally disrupt the philosophical dimensions of the dialogue. Comparisons are also drawn between passages from the Symposium and Phaedrus and Ovid’s narratives of Narcissus and Hermaphroditus from the Metamorphoses.

Before considering the goal of Augustine’s preaching, this chapter first of all considers Augustine’s understanding of the nature of reality and of human beings as wholly dependent upon God’s grace. In this context, it argues that the question of the goal of preaching is effectively turned on its head: that it is not so much a question of what the human preacher should say or do – of what they should give in order to achieve a particular goal – but rather a question of how they are to receive what is given to them so that their goal can be achieved. It suggests that the answer is found in Augustine’s identification of grace as the love of God, which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and demonstrates that love is the source, means, message and end, or goal, of preaching.

While the double love command permeates Augustine’s oeuvre, he develops it into a consistent pedagogy in his preaching. Augustine’s preaching locates the concomitant growth of love of God and love of neighbor within the whole Christ (totus Christus). He indicates to his hearers that the double love command actually involves three objects: God, neighbor, and the self. Augustine leads his hearers through a pattern of reflection concerning these loves: an articulation of the double love command, problematizing the love of self, relocating the self within the body of Christ, and the practical demands incurred by such a location for “neighbors” in Augustine’s and his hearers’ midst. The chapter pays particular attention to the way in which the parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan form conceptual markers for Augustine’s pedagogy. The result is a love of neighbor that includes family, friends, rivals, enemies, and the poor within the whole Christ.