University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Luxury, Aesthetics And Politics: The Social Lives Of Medieval Romance Lydia Yaitsky Kertz University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Aesthetics Commons, Medieval Studies Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Kertz, Lydia Yaitsky, "Luxury, Aesthetics And Politics: The Social Lives Of Medieval Romance" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2385. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2385 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2385 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Luxury, Aesthetics And Politics: The Social Lives Of Medieval Romance Abstract This dissertation project traces a cultural reception of the romance genre in England and France in the late fourteenth century. In compiling lengthy descriptions of courtly trappings, medieval romances serve as vehicles for idealized aristocratic self-presentation and thereby become complicit in associating material luxury with aristocratic power. I argue that while the changes in material technologies of medieval textual production break down the exclusivity of romance by opening the texts to wider reading publics, the positive representations of luxury in verbal ornament and visual programs of narrative art objects continue the perpetuation of aristocratic privilege. Chapter One examines the Shield of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Trojan image-texts in Chaucer’s House of Fame as imitatio of Virgilian ekphrases, theorizing medieval understanding of a Greek poetic device. Chapter Two analyzes the Tryst beneath the Tree episode from Tristan and Isolde as it is rendered on fourteenth-century Parisian ivory caskets, situating the composition within the larger visual program that teaches aristocratic women about heterosexual desire through a negotiation of sight and touch.