The Flight from Desire revises our understanding of love in literary texts from the high and late Middle Ages. Starting from the traditions of Augustine and Ovid, it traces the interplay of medieval theories about love with the unruly and uncontainable workings of desire. Individual chapters offer fresh readings of the letters of Abelard and Heloise, the Lais of Marie de France, the Roman de la Rose, Dante’s Vita nuova, and the Troilus story told by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In these works, desire powerfully affects ideas of selfhood and social identity, the terms of moral judgment, and even the role of authorship.

Robert R. Edwards is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in Chaucer’s Early Narrative, Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative, and The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama. He is the editor of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Troy Book: Selections and the editor and translator of The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli. He has edited essay collections on late-medieval English narrative and co-edited collections on marriage, friendship, and sexuality in the Middle Ages. Edwards has held fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Clare Hall, Cambridge. His previous book from Palgrave Macmillan, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2002.

"The very elusiveness of desire-whose objects are always already substitutes and which therefore operates by a logic of deferral and supplementarity-, its continual reaching beyond presence, past need, and even past gratification into a realm in which the desiring subject is both agent and victim, makes it as difficult to write about as it is necessary to do so. Thus, The Flight from Desire in its very design addresses a set of important questions regarding poetic representation and writing as such. Edwards does this by a set of close readings of canonical texts arranged almost chronologically (he wisely discusses Augustine first, then Ovid) from Ovid to Chaucer by way of the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, the Lais of Marie de France, Le Roman de Rose, the Vita Nuova, and Boccaccio's Filostrato. His control of a very large body of primary and secondary work is impressive, and his readings are always intelligent, often surprising, and sometimes exhilerating.."--Robert Stein, Professor of Language and Literature, Purchase College; Adjunct Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University