Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204) is one of the most important and well-known figures of the Middle Ages; she exercised a huge influence on both the course of history, and on the cultural life, of the time. The essays in this collection use her as a point of entry into wider-ranging discussions of the literary, social, political and religious milieux into which she was born, and to which she contributed; they address many of the misconceptions that have grown around both Eleanor herself and the medieval Midi in general, and open up new areas of debate. Topics explored include the work of the...

Parody marks the troubadour lyric from the outset, informing composition, performance and reception. This ground-breaking study moves away from courtliness, the focus of most previous studies, and places troubadour parodic practice in the context of the social and spiritual debates of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitania. LEglu analyses the complex relationship between troubadour verse and the Aquitainian para-liturgical Latin corpus. She charts the development of a chain of texts linked by a common formal model derived from this Latin sequence and traces patterns of rewriting, ranging...

This collection of essays explores consolation and mourning in the varied, sometimes provocative, readings of Boethius and of Stoic consolation by French, English, Italian and German authors, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Chaucer, Wyatt and Queen Elizabeth I.