Spicing erudition with wit, Professor Kelly takes a new look at medieval
attitudes toward love, sexuality, and marriage, and he corrects a number
of long-standing misconceptions embodied in the concept of courtly love.
Through a close examination of canon law, the common practice of
clandestine marriage, writings on mysticism, and medieval poetry -
particularly Gower's 'Confessio amantis' and Chaucer's romances and
their sources - he concludes that medieval lovers favored matrimony and
did not consider sexual passion incompatible with virtue. His evidence
contradicts the theory, closely associated with C.S. Lewis, that
extramarital love was preferred in the Middle Ages, and that the sexual
pleasures celebrated by poets were necessarily regarded as immoral by
society at large. By placing religious and cultural conventions in their
proper context, Professor Kelly shows that the hopes and fears of
medieval lovers were much the same as those of lovers of all other ages.