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  • Chapter 2 - The Genesis

  • Lucie Kaempfer, University of Geneva
  • Book:
    The Joy of Love in the Middle Ages
    Published online:
    20 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025, pp 34-67

  • Summary

    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.