Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of door tickets remain available.
Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “The Invention of Romantic Love,” on how medieval love poetry gave life to passion as an end in itself and to lyrical traditions that live on today, with Marisa Galvez, professor of Italian and French at Stanford University, director of Stanford Center for Poetics, and author of a book on medieval songbooks.
Romantic love as we know it today didn’t always exist. First it had to be invented in art and culture.
Come to Bartlett Hall this Valentine’s Day to learn about the early authors of the book of love, the troubadours of medieval France, and how their ideas about romance continue to influence both our affairs of the heart and artists like Taylor Swift.
Taking us on this romantic excursion through time will be Professor Marisa Galvez, a scholar of medieval literature and culture who has extensively studied the troubadours’ lyrics and influence.
We’ll go back to southern France in the period from 1100 to 1300, when the first love poetry in Europe emerged in the region’s aristocratic courts. The troubadours of that time invigorated vernacular poetry as a competitor for Latin and, along the way, sought to come up with something other than the usual verse focused on war, religion, or ideas of love promoted by the Church.
From them sprang love songs and other forms of poetic expression that discussed passionate longing, emotional turmoil, love at first sight, and subject matter such as adulterous, illicit love. Their verse combined desire and song, passion and restraint, and it shaped the lyrical traditions of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and England for centuries to come.
Professor Galvez will fast-forward from the troubadours to Taylor Swift to discuss how and why songs about unrequited love continue to move us. Among the questions she will tackle: Why are song and performance essential for celebrating unrequited love? How is poetry about this subject a form of self-improvement and self-discipline? Is Taylor Swift more of a troubadour than Bob Dylan? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30. Parking available nearby at the Mason O'Farrell garage.)
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