Sacrifice Your Love Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer L. O. Aranye Fradenburg		$24.00 paper ISBN: 0-8166-3646-X ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3646-4 $72.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3645-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3645-7
A long-awaited reevaluation of Chaucer through the lens of sacrifice by a major figure in medieval studies. Historicism and its discontents have long been central to the work of Louise Fradenburg, one of the world's most original and provocative literary medievalists. Sacrifice Your Love brings this interest to bear on Chaucer's writing and his world, rethought in light of a theory of sacrifice and its part in cultural production. Fradenburg writes the "history of the signifier"—a way of reading change in the symbolic order—and its role in making sacrifice enjoyable. Sacrifice Your Love develops the idea that sacrifice is a mode of enjoyment-that our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea for various problems important in medieval studies today—how to understand the religiosity of cultural forms, particularly chivalry, in the later Middle Ages and how to understand the ethics of Chaucer's famously nondidactic poetry—as well as in other fields of inquiry. A major rethinking of Chaucer, Sacrifice Your Love works in depth as well as across a broad range of topics from medievalism to psychoanalysis, advancing both the theory and practice of a new kind of historicist approach. “Sacrifice Your Love is the most sustained and powerful psychoanalytic reading of Chaucer, and indeed of medieval culture, yet produced. There is hardly room in the space of a review to touch on all the insights in this book.” —Modern Philology “I will highly recommend L.O. Aranye Fradenburg’s book to anyone in search of a serious introduction to, or refresher course in , Freudolacanian psychoanalysis as a literary theory.” —Medium Aevum “Sacrifice Your Love inspires and provokes. It is a learned book dealing with many ideas and issues bearing upon the survival of the humanities in the academy, most of which this review does not address.” —Speculum L. O. Aranye Fradenburg is professor of English, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 336 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | 2002 Medieval Cultures Series, volume 31