The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy

Recent research suggests that emotions are largely constructed and performed and that narrative is one of the most important practices through which people become emotionally aware.  Narrative literature thus offers a privileged means of exploring the emotional standards and styles of the past. The essays collected here explore medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives in French, Spanish, and Italian texts ranging from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. By following these women characters in their considerations, we can hope both to learn something about the times the women were writing in, while to enriching and enlarging our own emotionologies.