Disciplining the Heart: Lovesickness in Medieval Literature.

Author/Editor
Duprey-Henry, Annalese.

Title
Disciplining the Heart: Lovesickness in Medieval Literature.

Published
Duprey-Henry, Annalese. "Disciplining the Heart: Lovesickness in Medieval Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2019. 262 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.06(E) (2019). Full text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (restricted); accessed February 21, 2022.

Review
From Duprey-Henry's abstract: "This project sits at the juncture of medical humanities, disability studies, and literary studies to examine afresh the way that lovesickness is deployed in three canonical late-medieval English texts: Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde,' John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' and the 'Book of Margery Kempe.' My attempt to read medieval lovesickness manifestly, taking its claims at face value, reveals love and lovesickness as an embodied and thus imminent process that organizes relationships around culturally defined ideas of either negotiation and mutuality or hierarchy. The lability of lovesickness as a narrative tool makes it an attractive trope to think through larger ideas about the relationships of the sexes, of one individual to another, of the individual to society, and of the individual to the divine."

Date
2019

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis