Medieval Studies/Literary Theory

“Fradenburg continues to prove herself the most innovative analyst of late medieval texts. Our foremost Lacanian, she now poses fresh and urgent questions about the ethics and politics of chivalric desire. Uncompromising in her demands, she never fails to repay her reader with exceptional rewards.” Paul Strohm, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English, Oxford University

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 our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea, advancing both the theory and practice of a new kind of historicist approach.

L. O. Aranye Fradenburg is professor of English, women’s studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Percolator
Cover art: Detail from Martirologio de Usuardo, MD 273, folio 13 verso, used by permission of Museo Diocesano de Girona, courtesy of M. Moleiro Editor, S.A., Barcelona.