The court exercised an enormous amount of influence on the culture of the middle ages, as the essays collected here demonstrate. They examine a wide variety of different areas of medieval courtly culture, from the history of the book through courtly music to the theory of courtesy and courtly love. While some authors deal with the central texts of courtly literature, such as Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Marie de France's Lais, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and the corpus of courtly lyric in various languages, others consider less-studied works like Galeran de Bretagne, or the French version of the Disciplina Clericalis. Several contributions take a comparative approach to courtly texts outside the Western tradition, while others point to the courtly nature of chronicle literature and to courtly influences on religious-didactic works. The volume as a whole thus presents an overview of medieval court culture.
Contributors: GLORIA ALLAIRE, LAURA D. BAREFIELD, ANNE BERTHELOT, BERT BEYNEN, JEAN BLACKER, WALTER BLUE, MAUREEN BOULTON, FRANK BRANDSMA, EMMA CAYLEY, MARCO CEROCCHI, CHRISTOPHER R. CLASON, ALAIN CORBELLARI, IVY A. CORFIS, PAUL CREAMER, EVELYN DATTA, JUDITH M. DAVIS, FIDEL FAJARDO-ACOSTA, YASMINA FOEHR-JANSSENS, STACY L. HAHN, CAROL HARVEY, C. STEPHEN JAEGER, KATHY M. KRAUSE, JUNE HALL MCCASH, MATTHIAS MEYER, EDWARD J. MILOWICKI, JEANNE A. NIGHTINGALE, CHRISTOPHER PAGE, ANA PAIRET, WENDY PFEFFER, RUPERT T. PICKENS, MARIA PREDELLI, SILVIA RANAWAKE, PAUL ROCKWELL, SAMUEL, N. ROSENBERG, JUDITH RICE ROTHSCHILD, MARY ROUSE, RICHARD ROUSE, MARIANNE SANDELS, SUSAN STAKEL, ALEXANDRA STERLING-HELLENBRAND, JOSEPH M. SULLIVAN, YUKO TAGAYA, RICHARD TRACHSLER, ADRIAN TUDOR, MARION UHLIG, LORI J. WALTERS, LOGAN E. WHALEN, VALERIE M. WILHITE, MONICA L. WRIGHT.