Comparative Literature 591L - S-Love&Marriage/Middle Ages

This course explores representations of passion, obligation, and love from the ancient Roman world to sixteenth-century France, in a broad range of literary and historical texts read in translation. In particular, we focus on the formal ways in which relationships were organized under the rubric of "marriage", on the relationship (or lack thereof) between marriage, love, and sexual passion, and the role of homosocial and homosexual desire within this complex set of relationships.