Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love After Aristotle

This Valentine’s Day, flip through cable TV listings, and you’ll see a bevy of romances whose common themes and conflicts can be traced back to medieval times. What is considered “romantic” in contemporary Western society — love from afar, willingness to suffer, idealization of the love object — is partly a legacy of themes in medieval romantic poetry, says Jessica Rosenfeld, PhD, assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences and author of the book Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love After Aristotle.