Experience and Poetology in Allegorical Love Autobiographies. An Introduction into the Volume

Abstract

In the high Middle Ages, narratives emerged combining traditional literary forms in a new way: these texts are allegories written in the vernacular, narrated in the first person. This new combination was extremely successful in virtually all European literary cultures; this success was not limited to the Middle Ages, but extended into the Early Modern period in texts such as the Roman de la Rose, Dante’s Divina Comedia, Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, William Langlands Pierce Plowman, and Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la mutation de Fortune. This introductory paper asks whether this narrative pattern is universal for all topics and themes or whether allegorical first-person narratives on courtly love, for example, employ a different narrative structure than religious, philosophical, and political first-person allegorical narratives