The Flight from Desire Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer

This book seeks to reformulate the master narrative of erotic discourse in medieval literature. Starting from the traditions initiated by Augustine's Confessions and Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, it resituates the love doctrine of medieval texts in a literary dialectic with desire--including fresh readings of Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, Jean de Meun, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. In these writers, desire emerges as both a topic capable of sustained moral reflection and a source for private and social identity.

Robert R. Edwards is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in Chaucer’s Early Narrative, Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative, and The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama. He is the editor of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Troy Book: Selections and the editor and translator of The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli. He has edited essay collections on late-medieval English narrative and co-edited collections on marriage, friendship, and sexuality in the Middle Ages. Edwards has held fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Clare Hall, Cambridge. His previous book from Palgrave Macmillan, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2002.