The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France

Gerald Bond explores the rise of a new secular identity that took place in French elite culture at the turn of the twelfth century. While the period is widely recognized as pivotal, and much revisionary work has been done on it, Bond notes that in order to see the changes in the conception of the private secular self the focus must be shifted away from epics and saints' lives, the traditional targets of literary inquiry, to lyric, letters, and marginal texts and images.

Such texts and images...