Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. By James A. Schultz. Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 242. $39.

During the last decades a great number of books and articles have dealt with the history of medieval sexuality. Even when scholars have elaborated on the differences between medieval and modern sexual behavior and concepts of human sexuality, most have expected some "cosmic" and "inevitable" factors like desire, drive, wish, sexual orientation, hetero- or homosexuality, to determine the actions and reactions of the heres of medieval novels as well as individuals in modern times. Schultz demonstrates that those assumptions miss the peculiar character of courtly love. Courtly love cannot be explained by sexual drives or by interior inclination. "Courtly love is exogenous" (p. 75), he writes, and the medieval terms for courtly love "ignore the sex of the participants and the clanking of their anatomophysiological machinery. They are not rooted in biology" (p. 156). Furthermore, "'Desire' like 'heterosexuality' conjures up what is, for the Middle Ages, a specious unity, vitiating distinctions among the medieval terms we must respect if we want to understand them historically and assimilating them to a modern notion with which they have only a few elements in common" (p. 76). Nevertheless, Schultz's inexorable criticism of the sexualization of medieval art and philosophy in recent scholarship and his polemics against its stylish vocabulary are no more based on the old-fashioned picture of the harmonious spirituality of medieval culture. They try to answer the questions asked by feminist or queer studies, by anthropologists and psychologists, but in a historically more adequate way.

Jan-Dirk Müller
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München