14th and 15th Centuries

This third and last part of the work, spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, explores the transformation of the topic of love in late medieval literature, demonstrating how the once-revered ideals of gentle love were exposed to parody, doubt, and criticism in lyric poetry, verse romances, and prose, epistolary as well as fictional. A typical case would be the anonymous romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , written in Middle English in the second half of the fourteenth century, in which the young hero’s resistance to his hostess’s advances highlights the characteristic clash between desire and faith. Fourteenth-and fifteenth-century writers such as Francis Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, the Archpriest of Hita, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Thomas Malory were all prone, each in their own way, to demystify gentle love, presenting it in a tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted manner.