Genre
Recent work on genre has highlighted ‘how the more immaterial aspects of narratives or texts shape our perception of them and their potential generic affiliations’; these aspects include the emotions represented in and evoked by a particular work, but also the implied attitude of a work towards certain emotions.
1 Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, ‘Hybridity’, in A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, ed. by Massimiliano Bampi, Carolyne Larrington, and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 31–45 (p. 41). See also her concept of the ‘horizon of feeling’: Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). While this book is not about emotion
per se, it contributes to scholarly work that emphasises how generic configurations shape perceptions of love, desire, and sex – all concepts with strong emotional components. Medieval literature offered a variety of generic contexts within which love, sex, and marriage were portrayed. While this book focuses exclusively on romance, attending to other genres only where romances display generic hybridity, it may be useful to survey briefly different generic approaches to romantic and sexual relationships to highlight the extent to which romance may be seen as distinct.
In literature with an explicit religious focus, whether hagiographical, mystical, or instructional, virginity was valued in and of itself (though marital chastity could also be praiseworthy), and desire and love were directed primarily towards God.
2 See further Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001). As the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century
Hali Meiðhad puts it (in one of its milder formulations), ‘meithhad is Heovene cwen ant worldes alesendnesse, thurh hwam we beoth iborhen, mihte over alle mihtes ant cwemest Crist of alle’ [maidenhood is the queen of Heaven and the world’s redemption, through which we are saved, strength over all strengths and of all things most pleasing to Christ], while the fifteenth-century
Book of Margery Kempe records Margery’s vision of God telling her ‘thu mayst boldly, whan thu art in thi bed, take me to the as for thi weddyd husbond’.
3 ‘Hali Meithhad’, in The Katherine Group (MS Bodley 34), ed. & trans. by Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), pp. 189–219 (8. 9); Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 36 (lines 2951–2). While religious works directed desire towards God, conduct literature tended to emphasise the importance of chastity and what Mary Flannery has described as shamefastness, a model of behaviour that involved constantly guarding oneself against sin and disgrace.
4 See Mary C. Flannery, Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Exempla also condemn extra-marital sex, sometimes illustrating its eternal consequences in hell, as in ‘The Adulterous Falmouth Squire’.
5 ‘The Adulterous Falmouth Squire’, in Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. by George Shuffelton, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), pp. 351–6. In contrast, fabliaux
(a genre that is rare in Middle English outside the works of Chaucer) and other comic works often depicted lustful (and usually extra-marital) sexuality in explicit ways, sometimes to make a moral point rather than glorify such behaviour. The
pastourelle also depict sexuality, desire, and rape explicitly, at times conflating desire and love not only with sex but also with rape, an uncomfortable combination for the modern reader.
6 See Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, ‘Introduction: Recovering the Pastourelle’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance, pp. 1–14; Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov, ‘Reassessing the Pastourelle: Rape Culture, #MeToo, and the Literature of Survival’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance, pp. 17–28; Carissa M. Harris, ‘Pastourelle Encounters: Rape, Consent, and Sexual Negotiation’, in Obscene Pedagogies, pp. 103–49. Love lyrics often align with romance in positioning a woman’s love as rightfully due to a worthy man, frequently dramatising moments where this obligation is disrupted and unrequited (as I will discuss in further detail, suggesting this may offer a source for resistance to love in romance). The generic terms I deploy here are often post-medieval, but the recognisable similarities of works now classified together suggest that medieval authors wrote with an awareness of other similar texts, regardless of whether they would have categorised them precisely as we do today.
7 For discussion of how vernacular writers theorised their work, see Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c.1120–c.1450, ed. & trans. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert W. Russell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016). Medieval literary works were thus situated within particular ‘horizon[s] of expectations’ (the set of generic and cultural conventions through which readers understand and writers construct their works) that shaped their portrayals of love, sex, and marriage.
8 See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 20–32.Romance, while a medieval term (albeit first a linguistic rather than generic designation), is a varied and capacious genre that sometimes intersects with those discussed above. Hagiographical romances place greater value upon virginity and often appear more uncomfortable with sexuality, as I suggest at various points in this book. Some romances seem to educate their readers about appropriate conduct, including marital fidelity but also perhaps ways of negotiating relationships. In the fabliaux-romances of Chaucer (such as The Merchant’s Tale), desire can become more important than marital chastity, though this is not usually the case in the works I explore. Romances like The Wife of Bath’s Tale also integrate pastourelle episodes and their violence into broader romance narratives. Romance’s affinities with other genres leads to intra-generic variation, a diversity I hope to have conveyed in this book. However, most romances, and most Middle English romances in particular, value love, marriage, and sexuality within marriage.
In Middle English romance, virginity is not typically an absolute good in its own right: it is rather fidelity that matters. Romances often depict characters (especially women) trying to preserve their virginity for or chastity to their beloved, but not generally for its own sake: Ydoine and Josian, for example, remain virgins throughout their unwanted marriages, but do so primarily to save their virginity and sexual fidelity for their true love, Amadas or Bevis. The desire to remain a virgin does not often feature as a reason for resisting love in romance, outside of the Grail Knights’ rejections of sex or Emelye’s plea to retain her virginity in Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale. However much at odds this may seem with its wider valuation in medieval Christian culture, in most romances, as Peggy McCracken notes, ‘the chaste body’ – or, I would argue, the virginal body – ‘is unusual’ and can even be threatening.
9 Peggy McCracken, ‘Chaste Subjects: Gender, Heroism, and Desire in the Grail Quest’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 123–42 (p. 136). In place of valuing virginity and devoting love primarily to God, one of romance’s key ‘horizon[s] of feeling’ is the expectation that a worthy knight and a noble lady will ultimately fall in love and marry.
10 The term is Ríkharðsdóttir’s: see her definition in Emotion in Old Norse Literature, pp. 18–19. This has often been acknowledged as a core trajectory within romance, though my application of this particular label is new.
11 See, for example, Sara V. Torres, ‘Sans merci: Affect, Resistance, and Sociality in Courtly Lyric’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent’, ed. by Harris and Somerset, 325–34 (p. 333); Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (London: Tauris, 2006), p. 115; Cooper, ‘Desirable desire’; Dhira Mahoney, ‘“Ar ye a knyght and ar no lovear?”: The Chivalry Topos in Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. by Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 311–24. While the balance does shift over time (from early works in which love may be found outside of marriage), in accordance with adherence to sources, and in relation to generic hybridity, the majority of Middle English romances anticipate love and marriage to be the correct fulfilment of a relationship between a knight and a lady. This normative trajectory positions resistance to love as a problem or disruption, highlighting the subversive potential of this motif. This may especially be the case in Middle English romance because of its prioritisation of marriage, but given the value placed upon
fin amor in earlier French works, resistance to love may still have played a disruptive role in the earlier history of the genre.
Literary Precedents: Latin and French Sources
The primary focus of this book is Middle English romance, but the motif of resistance to love as it appears there builds on earlier precedents. Understanding its prior literary history, particularly its portrayal in the works of Ovid and in French romances, illuminates this motif’s specific role and implications in Middle English romance.
Ovid’s works were widely read as school texts in the Middle Ages and were known to some of the authors discussed in this book: there are clear allusions to Ovid in Marie de France’s
Lais and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, while William Caxton was the first English translator of the
Metamorphoses (from the French
Ovide moralisé).
12 On Ovid and Marie see, for example, Tracy Adams, ‘“Arte Regendus Amor”: Suffering and Sexuality in Marie de France’s Lai de Guigemar’, Exemplaria, 17.2 (2005), 285–315; SunHee Kim Gertz, ‘Transforming Lovers and Memorials in Ovid and Marie de France’, Florilegium, 14 (1995), 99–122; R. W. Hanning, ‘Courtly Contexts for Urban Cultus: Responses to Ovid in Chrétien’s Cligès and Marie’s Guigemar’, Symposium, 35.1 (1981), 34–56. Much has been written about Ovid’s influence on Chaucer: for a summary of some of the most important work in this field, see Jamie C. Fumo, ‘Ovid: Artistic Identity and Intertextuality’, in The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer, ed. by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 219–37. Ovidian literature offers a variety of different models for resistance to love. The
Amores portrays love as an experience that conquers the heart against one’s will, advising that it is wise to yield to love because
acrius invitos multoque ferocius urget
quam qui servitium ferre fatentur Amor.
13 ‘More bitterly far and fiercely are the unwilling assailed by Love than those who own their servitude’: Ovid, Heroides. Amores, trans. by Grant Showerman, rev. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 41, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), i. 2. 17–18, trans. p. 323.This trope of love as warfare that besieges the resistant lover more stubbornly recurs in romance, particularly in works influenced by the
Roman de la Rose. The
Ars Amatoria offers a different, gendered model, portraying resistance as a tactic deployed by the female love-object. Ovid’s
praeceptor claims ‘vir male dissimulat: tectius illa cupit’ [‘the man dissembles badly: she conceals desire better’],
14 Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. by J. H. Mozley, rev. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 232 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), i. 276, trans. p. 33. suggesting
Vim licet appelles: grata est vis ista puellis:
Quod iuvat, invitae saepe dedisse volunt.
15 ‘You may use force; women like you to use it; they often wish to give unwillingly what they like to give’: Ibid., i. 673–4, trans. p. 59.While the Ars Amatoria justifies the use of force by claiming that women secretly enjoy it and only feign their resistance, the Metamorphoses perhaps more closely parallels the subtler explorations of coercion and resistance in Middle English romance. Within the Metamorphoses, Daphne, Syrinx, Caeneus-Caenis, and Pomona are all highly sought after but averse to suitors, perhaps providing a model for the proud lady in love discussed in Chapter 2. Atalanta imposes an impossible condition upon her suitors, prefiguring the recurrence of this strategy in romance, although the condition she sets differs from romance models: it is hard to imagine a romance heroine suggesting that her suitor must defeat her in a race. Anaxarete follows a different pattern, scorning Iphis’s courtship until he despairs and commits suicide. In the Metamorphoses, these women often meet tragic endings involving rape, transformation to avoid rape, or, in Anaxarete’s case, transformation as punishment for scorn. Such conclusions are very different to the most common outcome for resistant women in romance literature – marriage – although there are perhaps more similarities between these figures than is initially evident.
An Ovidian source that may have influenced portrayals of men’s resistance to love also includes a tragic outcome that does not tend to recur in romance contexts. The myth of Narcissus is narrated in its earliest extant forms in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Konon’s Narratives: Konon’s is potentially earlier, but the Metamorphoses was known and widely read in medieval Europe. Ovid describes how
namque ter ad quinos unum Cephisius annum
addiderat poteratque puer iuvenisque videri:
multi illum iuvenes, multae cupiere puellae;
sed fuit in tenera tam dura superbia forma,
nulli illum iuvenes, nullae tetigere puellae.
16 ‘Narcissus had reached his sixteenth year and might seem either boy or man. Many youths, and many maidens sought his love; but in that slender form was pride so cold that no youth, no maiden touched his heart’: Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 1–8, trans. by Frank Justus Miller, rev. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 42, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), i, iii. 351–5, trans. p. 149. Narcissus’ youth and desirability may offer a model for the men discussed in Chapter 1, while Narcissus’ pride resurfaces but is particularly associated with women in romance. There were several medieval rewritings of the story of Narcissus, which may have offered additional points of influence. The
Roman de la Rose, discussed below, incorporates the story of Narcissus, specifically describing him as proud and asserting that his self-love and resultant death are Love’s just punishment for his earlier resistance. Other medieval rewritings include the twelfth-century French lay of
Narcisus et Dané, which William Burgwinkle argues may have influenced Marie’s
Lais.
17 William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 142. See also Penny Eley, ‘Introduction’, in Narcisus et Dané, ed. & trans. by Penny Eley, Liverpool Online Series, Critical Editions of French Texts, 6 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2002), pp. 7–30 (pp. 11, 20 n. 25). Narcisus et Dané is particularly interesting for its curious combination of what we would now recognise as heterosexual and queer desire. All Ovid’s references to homosexual desire are removed, to the extent that Narcisus thinks his own reflection is a woman. This, coupled with the increased and active role of Dané in the poem, enacts a kind of heterosexualisation of the myth, though one that coexists with Narcisus’ gender fluidity.
18 See further Eley, ‘Introduction’, p. 26. Other aspects of the
lai focus on but also complicate gendered models for resistance to love: the prologue declares that women ‘ne soit pas […] trop fiere’ [‘should not be too haughty’] towards their lovers, although within the lay itself pride is associated with Narcisus.
19 Narcisus et Dané, ed. & trans. by Eley, line 22. Eley argues the lay ‘is designed first and foremost to serve as an exemplum of the potentially catastrophic consequences of pride in the arena of human relationships’: Eley, ‘Introduction’, p. 27. John Gower’s tale of Narcissus in his fourteenth-century
Confessio Amantis also describes how Narcissus
of his Pride a nyce wone
Hath cawht, that worthi to his liche,
To sechen al the worldes riche,
Ther was no womman for to love.
So hihe he sette himselve above.
20 John Gower, ‘Tale of Narcissus’, in Confessio Amantis, ed. by Russell A. Peck, TEAMS, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), i, i. 2275–2398 (lines 2276–80). This demonstrates the ideas about Narcissus and his relation to resistance to love that were circulating during the late fourteenth century, the time at which several of the romances discussed in this book were composed. The myth of Narcissus, both in its Ovidian form and through medieval rewritings, offers a suggestive source for resistance to love, even if this myth has a very different ending.
Ovid’s works lie behind many of the other potential sources and analogues for resistance to love in medieval romance, pointing to the layers of intertextual connections that characterise romance writing. The Ovidian-influenced troubadour and
trouvère poetry of medieval France may have offered another literary model, particularly for the proud lady in love discussed in Chapter 2.
21 Judith A. Peraino notes Ovid’s influence on the troubadours and trouvères: Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 12. Simon Gaunt notes that ‘
trouvères […] are best known for their
grands chants courtois, songs of unrequited
fine amour (“pure love”), modelled on the Occitan troubadour lyric, and addressed to a haughty noble lady’.
22 Simon Gaunt, ‘The Châtelain de Couci’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 95–108 (p. 95). Women are often presented as undesiring, hard-hearted, or as delaying the fulfilment of desire, which recurs in some romances.
23 For example, see The Troubadour ‘Tensos’ and ‘Partimens’: A Critical Edition, ed. by Ruth Harvey and Linda Paterson, 3 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), i, 160, trans. 161 (PC 77.1); 220–2, trans. 221–3 (PC 101.8a). For discussion, see Helen Dell, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 80, 89, 93; Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 11; Sarah Spence, Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 119. The trope of romance authors appealing to their indifferent ladies in narrative asides may also build upon troubadour models.
24 See, for example, The Middle English Versions of Partonope of Blois, ed. by A. Trampe Bödtker, EETS, e. s., 109 (London: Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1912; repr. New York: Kraus, 1981), lines 2310–34. However, romance literature also gives the troubadours’ and
trouvères’ lyric portrayals a narrative form, opening up different possibilities for exploring the development, experience, and effects of resistance to love. In romance, men’s resistance to love, and resistance on the grounds of differing status, race, or faith, also become more prominent, expanding this motif in new directions.
The
Roman de la Rose, itself shaped by Ovid’s writings and troubadour and
trouvère poetry, significantly influenced later romances and the works of Chaucer, including in its portrayals of
dangier, violence, and resistance.
25 Gaunt, ‘The Châtelain de Couci’, p. 104; Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, pp. 171–83; Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 304. Chaucer translated the Rose into Middle English, though only part of the fragmentary Romaunt of the Rose seems to reflect his translation. See the discussion in Philip Knox, The ‘Romance of the Rose’ and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 27, 31, 189–93. Knox observes the wealth of evidence for medieval English readers of the Rose, p. 2. The
Rose’s violent characterisation of love has often been commented upon; its imagery of love as a siege (recalling the Ovidian focus on love as warfare) may have influenced some of the more violent portrayals of subduing resistant lovers.
26 On the violence of love in the Rose see, for example, Marilynn Desmond, ‘Tote Enclose: The Roman de la Rose and the Heterophallic Ethic’, in Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 73–115. The
Rose also comments on pride in love, not only through the Narcissus story, but in the God of Love’s commandments, where he explains that
Orgueilleus fet tot le contraire
de ce que fins amant doit feire.
27 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Félix Lecoy, Classiques français du moyen âge, 92, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1965), i, lines 2119–20. ‘The proud man does precisely the opposite of what the true lover should do’: The Romance of the Rose, ed. & trans. by Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 33.This suggestively parallels the association of pride with transgression against love in later Middle English romances, where, as I will argue, this becomes a gendered model. The
Rose also offers a striking example of the extent to which the consent of the beloved could become almost irrelevant in romance literature: although personifications such as Bel Acueil can consent to the lover, the rose itself, as an inanimate object, cannot.
28 See further Noah D. Guynn, Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 139. Despite – or perhaps because of – the allegorical nature of Amant’s quest, a form very different to the romances I discuss, the violence of non-consensual sex is clearly described in the graphic account of the plucking of the rose. The
Rose fostered an awareness of, as well as a backlash against, the violence that could characterise romance narratives.
29 See, for example, the discussion of the Querelle de la Rose in Desmond, ‘The Querelle de la Rose: Erotic Violence and the Ethics of Reading’, in Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath, pp. 144–64. The
Rose’s
portrayal of Dangier, the personification of a strategy of rejection as a performance of modesty, positions resistance to love as a stage within courtship; however, the romances I focus on portray such resistance as more subversive and problematic. The cultural prominence of the
Rose may explain why resistance to love has most often been viewed as merely a stage in courtship and has not, until now, received serious consideration in its own right.
30 See, for example, Crane, Gender and Romance, p. 63, discussed below.Another work influenced by Ovid (perhaps indirectly) and potentially also by troubadour poetry, Andreas Capellanus’s
De Amore, may offer an additional source or analogue.
31 P. G. Walsh, ‘Introduction’, in Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. & trans. by P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), pp. 1–26 (pp. 3, 10, 12–16, 23); Kathleen Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?: Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 5. De Amore does not seem to have been known in Britain during the Middle Ages: see Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 310. De Amore is a contentious work, with interpretations varying as to whether it is even about love at all; my reading here is limited to its surface discussions and the evidence they provide for contemporary perspectives on resistance to love.
32 On De Amore as a social critique of institutions, see Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love? For a summary of critical approaches to De Amore, see Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 25; Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, pp. 18–25. De Amore’s
dialogues, which recount attempted seductions, offer many instances of resistance. An episode within the dialogue between a noble man and woman suggestively anticipates romance representations of the proud lady in love, as the nobleman describes a vision of the God of Love’s treatment of women in the afterlife according to their responses to love on earth. The third group of women he describes faces torments and punishments because ‘omnes amoris postulantes deservire militiae abiecerunt’ [‘they repulsed all who asked to serve in the army of Love’].
33 Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. & trans. by P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 110, trans. p. 111. Although they are not directly described as proud, a variation of this episode in the anonymous
Lai du Trot claims
Or lor fait molt chier comperer
Lor grant orgoil et lor posnee.
34 ‘Now Love is making them pay dearly / For their great pride and their arrogance’: ‘Trot’, in Three Old French Narrative Lays: Trot, Lecheor, Nabaret, ed. & trans. by Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook, Liverpool Online Series, Critical Editions of French Texts, 1 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1999), pp. 13–43 (lines 268–9). While it is uncertain whether the
Lai or
De Amore is the earlier work, and whether the reference to pride was omitted by Andreas or added in the
Lai, either scenario could suggest a prominent association between pride and rejecting love characteristic of medieval romances and
lais, which is developed in greater detail in the motif of the proud lady in love.
35 For the argument that Trot may be the earlier text, see Walsh, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. For the argument that De Amore influenced Trot, see Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: édition critique de quelques lais bretons, ed. by Prudence Mary O’Hara Tobin (Geneva: Droz, 1976), p. 336.In addition to the Lai du Trot and the Roman de la Rose, other French and Anglo-Norman works are the direct sources for many of the Middle English romances upon which I focus; I discuss these sources at the relevant points throughout. I also directly attend to the representation of men who resist love in two Anglo-Norman works, Guigemar and Amadas et Ydoine, in Chapter 1, opening the book with a broader discussion before focusing on Middle English representations. Resistance to love clearly enters Middle English writing from the French tradition, but it is incorporated into and further developed within a variety of Middle English romances.