The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature (Toronto 1983) - Hardcover

42 papers on all aspects of court-orientated culture, ranging from the period of the earliest troubadour, William of Poitiers, in the twelfth century, to the Renaissance and beyond.

The Spirit of the Court represents a selection of a little over a quarter of the papers presented at the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society in 1983, chosen by an editorial board from those submitted for consideration after the congress. The selection of papers is wide-ranging, and is intended to be representative of the multi-disciplinary interests of the Society, which was founded in 1973 to encourage the study of all aspects of court-orientated culture, centring on the medieval period of western Europe. The forty-two papers presented here range in time from the period of the earliest troubadour, William of Poitiers, at the beginning of the twelfth century, to the Renaissance and beyond H.A. Kelly's paper engages the topic of 'courtly love' itself, as formulated in the late nineteenth century by Gaston Paris, and examines its significance for us in 1984 on the hundredth anniversary of its birth as a term of literary criticism. The three plenary papers, by E. Baumgartner, D. Green and B. Stock, range over the topical and methodological concerns that are of immediate interest to all scholars in the field, and the other papers take up a wide variety of more specialised topics in the literary cultures of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, using traditional critical techniques as well as more recent methodologies.