Amor conspirator

This consideration of German, French and Provencal courtly narratives from the High and Late Middle Ages demonstrates how courtly love is expressed in secrecy, seclusion, and intimate spaces, through display or dissimulation. The discourse on love and its concealment emerges as a privileged terrain of literary self-reflexivity. Intradiegetic narratives, epistolary works in precious materials, and poetry that may be articulated in songs or in whispers culminate in a luxurious textuality. Such narratives generate synaesthetic, complex, or barely intimated scenarios, formulating a poetic literary theory that is flexible and situational.