{"product_id":"9780801471520","title":"The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature","description":"\u003cp\u003eA sport and a military exercise, hunting involved aggressive action with weapons and dogs, and pursuit to the point of combat and killing, for the sake of recreation, food or conquest. \u003cem\u003eThe Stag of Love\u003c\/em\u003e explores the body of erotic metaphor that developed from the hunt together with Ovid's flourishing legacies.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile representing a range of human experience, the metaphor finds its dominant expression in the literature of love. As Marcelle Thiébaux demonstrates, the hunt's disciplined violence represented sexual desire, along with strategies and arts for getting love, the joys of love, and love's elevating mystique. The genre gave rise to a lavish imagery of footprints and tracking, arrows, nets, dogs and leashes, wounds, dismemberment and blood, that persisted to Shakespeare's day.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThiébaux opens with an account of a medieval chase and its ceremonies. She introduces hunt manuals that defined and gentrified the sport, in stages from the party's departure to the ferocity of the struggle to the animal's death. These stages adapted readily to narrative structures in the love chase, showing pursuit, confrontation with the beloved, and consummation. In English literature, Thiébaux considers \u003cem\u003eBeowulf\u003c\/em\u003e, Aefric's \u003cem\u003eLife of Saint Eustace\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eSir Gawain and the Green Knight\u003c\/em\u003e, and the works of Chaucer. Within continental European literature, she discusses \u003cem\u003eAucassin and Nicolete\u003c\/em\u003e, Chrétien de Troyes' \u003cem\u003eErec\u003c\/em\u003e, Gottfried von Strassburg's \u003cem\u003eTristan\u003c\/em\u003e, the \u003cem\u003eNibelungenlied\u003c\/em\u003e, and Wolfram von Eschenbach's works. She concludes with a scrutiny of newly recovered or little-known narratives of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOriginally published in 1974, \u003cem\u003eThe Stag of Love\u003c\/em\u003e brings to life a theme of perennial interest to medievalists, and to all readers intrigued by the imaginative treatment of love in the Western world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47118357627120,"sku":"9780801471520","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780801471520_p0.jpg?v=1763667513","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780801471520","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}