Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours

By William D. Paden

Overturning the myth that medieval marriages were
loveless, shown through a close analysis of troubadour poetry and historical
records

Medieval marriages
are often understood to have been loveless, due partly to assumptions about
arranged matches that have been reinforced by scholars who suggest that
troubadour poetry was not concerned with love but rather with poetic form and structure.
In this book, William Paden challenges that belief, using historical sources to
argue that the songs of the troubadours reveal an
inextricable link between desire and marriage.

Paden analyzes twelfth- through
fourteenth-century troubadour poetry from the Occitan region, which stretched across
portions of medieval France, Catalonia, and Italy; visual art, both images and
objects; a corpus of over a thousand marriage contracts; and various liturgical
manuscripts. Tracing literary and artistic output alongside the evolution of
the institution of marriage from late antiquity to the early and high Middle
Ages, Paden demonstrates that the stereotype of loveless unions reflects modern
scholarly bias more than medieval reality. Love and Marriage in the Time of
the Troubadours restores the period's complexity, showing how desire and
devotion often intertwined--and how courtly song reveals
the relationship between the two.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813079586
• ISBN13: 9780813079585
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 300 Pages