Chaucer's 'loveris maladye /Of Hereos', Avicenna's Risāla fī al-'ishq (Treatise on Love) and an Arabic-Islamic Metaphysics of Love
Research Seminar (in person and online) in cooperation with Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen
The effects of Chaucer’s ‘loveris maladye / Of Hereos’ inflicted upon the Theban cousin-knights in the opening romance of the Canterbury Tales reflect two energetic and vigorous debates on the nature of love that dominated late nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship: the ‘Arabic thesis’, concerned with the Hispano-Arabic origins of troubadour lyric, and the classification, conceits and deployment of amour courtois, or courtly love, in French and English poetry. Both were concerned with the same phenomenon of love, fin’amors, and both took place simultaneously, but with little or no recourse to each other largely the result of disciplinary specialisms: Hispanic, Arabist and Hebraist on the one hand, and Romance languages, English, and Latin on the other. Here, my aim is not to reopen questions of origins or influences but rather to reappraise the issue in an attempt to forge new paths in this well-trodden ground. I focus on the Persian polymath, Avicenna, and his Risāla fī al-‘ishq (Treatise on Love) in order to explore an Arabic-Islamic metaphysics of love that draws on Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Sufism read alongside a series of Arabic material that was available in Latin, including Arabic medical texts and Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitāb al-Manāzir (Book of Optics). I ask how can we explore ‘fyn lovnge’ and the many shades of love in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde -and the cultural presence of an Arabic metaphysics of love in his poetry - both with and without the thorny, colonial gaze of questions of influence, sources, and origins.
Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature. She joined the Department at York in 2019 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2023. She is a literary historian of the premodern period and specialises in the intellectual, literary, and cultural transmissions between the Islamic World and late medieval England and the Mediterranean.
- Venue
- Taylor Building A36, and online
- Contact
-
Contact Prof Karin Friedrich for the online link: k.friedrich@abdn.ac.uk.