ABSTRACT
This chapter includes extracts from some of the best-known works of medieval literature – Beowulf, The Romance of the Rose, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales – alongside a selection of less well-known texts across a range of genres and contexts. Love, sex, and marriage are prominent themes in later medieval literature in particular: these topics are thematically important in later medieval genres such as lyric, romance, and fabliau. The classification of texts as ‘literary’ or otherwise here is far from a hard-and-fast distinction, and the people can trace overlaps between texts in this chapter and those quoted elsewhere, where each can help the reader think about ways of reading the other. Overall, then, medieval literary texts have a great deal to say about love, sex, and marriage, and what they have to say overlaps with non-literary texts in ways that can provide the modern reader with a much broader sense of thinking about these subjects in medieval culture.
