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.

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.