On the air of not touching it

Abstract

Is love in marriage based on a division between the carnal and the spiritual, which presupposed that a woman could give herself to her husband " without any quivering of the soul " (Georges Duby) ? Despite the efforts of moralists, the Middle Ages proved the impossibility of this separation, as evidenced by the vogue for commentaries on the Song of Songs from the ^12th to the ^16thcenturies , where the desire to displace desire allegorically never silences the vehemence of love. We study certain motifs, guided by the notion of experience resulting from the exegetical effort, focusing less on the hidden meaning than on its anthropological and social effect.From the expulsion from the Garden ofEdento the internalization of an eroticized walled garden, the body appears to be the place where the poetics and politics of love come together.

Contents

• " I won't talk about God's love. And yet, how can I not talk about it " (Georges Duby, " What do we know about love in France in the ^12thcentury   ? ", in Mâle Moyen Âge, Paris, 1988)
• The historian's concerns about these " shadows, floating, elusive "
• Abbé Adam de Perseigne, the Countess of Perche and sanctification in marriage
• " Sans aucun frémissement de l'âme ", really ?
• Back to basics : Adam de Perseigne, conscience guidance andamicitia
• The moral ordering of emotions and the vehemence of love : on Richard de Saint-Victor (Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge. Une histoire des émotions dans l'Occident médiéval, Paris, 2015)
• Les quatre degrés de la charité violente, phénoménologie du mal d'aimer (Ruedi Imbach and Iñigo Atucha, Amours plurielles. Doctrines du rapport amoureux de Bernard de Clairvaux à Boccace, Paris, 2006)
• Je suis navrée d'amour (Ct 4, 9) : " The most beautiful of all songs " (Shir HaShirim)
• From ancient Near Eastern erotic poetry to Megilot : what to make of the Song of Songs ?
• Love in the face of death : on the enigma of God's name (Thomas Römer, L'Invention de Dieu, Paris, 2014)
• " You are an enclosed garden, my sister, my darling, an enclosed fountain, a sealed spring " : from the exit from the Garden of Eden to its internalization (Thomas Römer, " From the Garden of Eden to the Garden of the Song of Songs ", in Mondes clos : Cultures et jardins, Genève, 2011)
• The eroticization of a garden on the scale of a world (Françoise Joukovsky, Le Bel Objet. Les paradis artificiels de la Pléiade, Paris, 1991)
• From Adam's dominium to that of the bridegroom in the Song of Songs : naming, blazoning, telling through cutting
• The body, the place where the poetics and politics of love come together
• Canticum canticorum Salomonis : sapiential poetry and wisdom lessons
• From the ^12th to the ^16th century, the vogue for commentaries on the Song of Songs (Gilbert Dahan, Études d'exégèse médiévale. Old Testament, Strasbourg, 2017)
• On the parodic exhaustion of allegory in the bucolic tradition (Claire Placial, " Voltaire lecteur du Cantique des cantiques : de la parodie à l'émergence de la critique biblique ", in Jean-Pierre Martin and Claudine Nédélec dir., Traduire, trahir, travestir, Arras, 2011)
• The origins of analogical displacement by successive interlocking : Origen's commentary
• " It is fitting that God should strike souls with such a wound " : from Origen to Saint Teresa of Avila
• " This is how, in the speaking being, jouissance is equipped (Jacques Lacan, Encore. Le séminaire, livre XX, Paris, 1977)
• Guillaume de Saint-Thierry : love and self-knowledge (" If you don't know yourself, get out ! ")
• Guillaume de Saint-Thierry and Bernard de Clairvaux : weakness of the body, strength of the text
• " Today we read in the book of experience " : from the experience of the Cantique to the cantique of experience (Emmanuel Falque, " Experience and empathy in Bernard de Clairvaux ", Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 2005)
• Qui amat, amat et aliud nihil novit (Bernard de Clairvaux) : on the Claudelian impossibility of escaping the inferno
• Osculetur me osculo oris suis : "And indeed, how would it not make us very attentive, such a beginning without beginning, and such a novelty of expression in such an ancient book " (Bernard de Clairvaux : Cédric Giraud, " Chant individuel et geste collective : le Cantique des cantiques au ^XIIe siècle ", Communio, 2022)
• Is beauty the cause of love, or is it love that makes the bride " ma toute belle " ? On the enigma of " je suis noire mais je suis belle " (Jean-Yves Tilliette, " Nigra sum sed formosa. Le verset 1, 4 du Cantique des cantiques dans l'hagiographie des saintes pénitentes, Micrologus, 2014)
• Blazons of the Christian body : " there is nothing that the scintillating glow of the human body cannot illuminate " (Jean-Louis Chrétien, Symbolique du corps. La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des cantiques, Paris, 2005)
• These breasts are also her breasts : " when you want to grasp them, they immediately flee from you and you see them rise to the heights " (Gilbert Foliot)
• " It is not enough for God's relationship with man to be presented through the parable of the lover and the beloved; God's word must immediately contain the relationship of the lover to the beloved, there must be the signifier without the slightest allusion to the signified " (Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 1921)
• A marble woman, really ? Dénuder la nudité (Georges Didi Huberman, Ouvrir Vénus: Nudité, rêve, cruauté, Paris, 1999).