A Note on Sources and Languages
1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics
I. The Poetry of Love
II. Love’s Nemesis: Demands for Obedience
III. Love’s Critics: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Authoritarian Approach to Criticism
IV. The Critics: Poetry Is About Poetry
V. The Critics: The Author Is Dead (or Merely Irrelevant)
2. Channeled, Reformulated, and Controlled: Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido
I. Love Poetry and the Critics who Allegorize: The Song of Songs
II. Love Poetry and the Critics who Reduce: Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria
III. Love or Obedience in Virgil: Aeneas and Dido
IV. Love or Obedience in Ovid: Aeneas, Dido, and the Critics who Dismiss
3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry
I. Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Latin
II. Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Greek
4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor: Love, Choice, and the Individual
I. Why "Courtly Love” Is Not Love
II. The Troubadours and Their Critics
III. The Troubadours and Love
5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny
6. The Albigensian Crusade and the Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry
I. The Death of Fin’amor: The Albigensian Crusade and its Aftermath
II. Post-Fin’amor French Poetry: The Roman de la Rose
III. Post-Fin’amor English Romance: Love of God and Country in Havelok the Dane and King Horn
IV. Post-Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking "Courtly Love” in Chaucer—the Knight and the Miller
V. Post-Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking "Auctoritee” in Chaucer—the Wife of Bath
7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose, and the Reactions of the Sixteenth-Century Sonneteers
I. The Platonic Ladder of Love
II. Post-Fin’amor Italian Poetry: The Sicilian School to Dante and Petrarch
III. Post-Fin’amor Italian Prose: Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier)
IV. The Sixteenth-Century: Post-Fin’amor Transitions in Petrarchan-Influenced Poetry
8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor
I. The Value of the Individual in the Sonnets
II. Shakespeare’s Plays: Children as Property
III. Love as Resistance: Silvia and Hermia
IV. Love as Resistance: Juliet and the Critics who Disdain
9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature
I. Carpe Diem in Life and Marriage: John Donne and the Critics who Distance
II. The Lyricist of Carpe Diem: Robert Herrick and the Critics who Distort
10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey
Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading
Bibliography
Index