Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours

Overturning the myth that medieval marriages were loveless, shown through a close analysis of troubadour poetry and historical records

Medieval marriages are often understood to have been loveless, due partly to assumptions about arranged matches that have been reinforced by scholars who suggest that troubadour poetry was not concerned with love but rather with poetic form and structure. In this book, William Paden challenges that belief, using historical sources to argue that the songs of the troubadours reveal an inextricable link between desire and marriage.

Paden analyzes twelfth- through fourteenth-century troubadour poetry from the Occitan region, which stretched across portions of medieval France, Catalonia, and Italy; visual art, both images and objects; a corpus of over a thousand marriage contracts; and various liturgical manuscripts. Tracing literary and artistic output alongside the evolution of the institution of marriage from late antiquity to the early and high Middle Ages, Paden demonstrates that the stereotype of loveless unions reflects modern scholarly bias more than medieval reality. Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours restores the period’s complexity, showing how desire and devotion often intertwined—and how courtly song reveals the relationship between the two.