Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.

"For the researcher and scholar, Noah Guynn's main argument is an important one, and his 'minor threads' are illuminating and full of potential - a small volume to be highly recommended." - Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching

'Through a series of keenly intelligent readings Guynn deftly tracks the complex interrelations of allegory and ethics in the High Middle Ages. Relentlessly ideological - at once transcendental and ambiguous- allegory, he argues, works to privilege some readers and exclude others. Guynn's clear and nimble prose invites all readers to consider afresh the machinations of this pervasive medieval discursive mode.' - Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University; Author of Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern

'Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages will give literary critics and historians of sexuality alike pause for thought. Whereas the formal and playful dimensions of allegory - and particularly sexual allegory - have received a good deal of attention recently, Noah Guynn shows that allegorical texts frequently also have a serious, indeed ethical dimension that makes them at one and the same time harshly coercive, yet troublingly indeterminate. Re-reading familiar texts such as the De planctu Naturae[NG1] , the Eneas, and the Rose with him is a revelatory experience, and his crisp close readings are always illuminating.' - Simon Gaunt, King's College London, Author of Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love

'Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages offers an original and compelling argument about the imbrication of rhetorical figuration, sexual desire, and political control in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. In a series of detailed readings, Guynn shows that medieval texts not only recognize the instability of the relationship between language and meaning, but they use that instability to construct notions of deviance and to censor and punish deviant bodies. This is an original argument; it is also a humane one, in that it is attentive to the ways in which discursive forms of coercion focus on lived bodies. Beautifully written and elegantly argued, Allegory and Sexual Ethics [NG3] offers an important new understanding not just of a genre, but of the ethical and political workings of that genre.' - Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan; Author of The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature

'Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages offers a sophisticated, theoretical analysis of the relationship between poetry, power and persecution in the the later Middle Ages. It is an innovative approach to the ethical, cultural and ideological analysis of medieval allegory.' - Journal for the Study of Marriage and Spirituality

NOAH D. GUYNN is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis, USA. He is currently preparing a book on the role of ethics in medieval and early modern farce.