Although courtly literature is often associated with a chivalrous and idyllic life, the essays in this collection demonstrate that the quest for love in medieval courtly literature was underpinned by

Introduction: Violence in the Shadows of the Court, 1. Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court, 2. Brutality and Violence in Medieval French Romance and Its Consequences, 3. Turnus in Veldeke's Eneide: The Effects of Violence, 4. Violence and Pain at the Court: Comparing Violence in German Heroic and Courtly Epics, 5. Violence Stylized, 6. Violence at King Arthur's Court: Wolfram von Eschenbach's Perspectives, 7. Violence in La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu (Yale 229), 8. Violence and Communication in Shota Rustaveli's The Lord of the Panther-Skin, 9. Constructive and Destructive Violence in Jean d'Arras' Roman de Mélusine, 10. The Violent Poetics of Inversion, or the Inversion of Violent Poetics: Meo dei Tolomei, His Mother, and the Italian Tradition of Comic Poetry, 11. Violent Magic in Middle English Romance, 12. Why Is Middle English Romance So Violent? The Literary and Aesthetic Purposes of Violence, 13. Destruire et disperser: Violence and the Fragmented Body in Christine de Pizan's Prose Letters, 14. Mimetic Crisis in the Medieval Mass: A Sequence for the Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury and Its Liturgical Function, ca. 1230, 15. Violence in the Spanish Chivalric Romance, Contributors, Index