The politics of love

From the ^twelfth to the ^sixteenth centuries, from one reformation to another, but also from one renaissance to another, the language of love was massively present in European literature. As a result, they became the common language of politics, defining social relationships in an affective way, between lust and reverence, fervor and veneration ? By attempting to understand what it means to love in the Middle Ages, this year's lecture will put the history of political subjectivity to the test of new historiographical approaches to gender, emotions and sexuality. This will be achieved by exploring new documentary corpuses that shed light on the articulation between the arts of governing and the arts of loving, with the politicization of amorous sentiment seen as a matrix for the literatures of the awakening of political commitment.