Allegories of Love

This seminar centers on a reading of five great storytellers and poets: Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, and Spenser. The powerful and complex fictions of these five contributed crucially to the ongoing “invention of love,” that profound and profoundly problematic passion that has seemed for more than two thousand years of Western civilization to lie at the heart of human existence. Additional readings drawn from Homer, Plato, Catullus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Roman de la Rose, and Arthurian romance will help us establish cultural contexts and provide some sense of both continuities and revisions in the literary imagining of love from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.