“Chaucer’s ‘loveris maladye / Of Heroes,’ Avicenna’s Treatise on Love, and an Arabic-Islamic Metaphysics of Love”

This talk explores Chaucer’s depictions of love alongside Avicenna’s Treatise on Love and related Arabic medical and philosophical texts that circulated in Latin. It explores how an Arabic-Islamic metaphysics of love shaped by Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Sufi thought can reshape our understanding of fin’amors in Middle English poetry. Rather than simply tracing “influence,” I ask how we might recognize the presence of Arabic-Islamic ideas of love in Chaucer, in ways that attend to and are critical of colonial models of ‘sources’, ‘origins’, and ‘influence’. This occurs in conjunction with Prof. Allison Kanner-Botan’s graduate research seminar “Psychoanalysis and Erotics: Rethinking Desire.”

Shazia Jagot (University of York) is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She holds degrees from Soas, University of London, and the University of Leicester, and has worked in universities and research centres in Jordan, Denmark, and the UK. Her research explores literary, historical, and cultural interactions between the Islamic world and Europe/England in the Middle Ages. She is currently working on two book projects: a monograph on Chaucer’s Arabic ‘sources’ and a book on Medieval England and the Islamic World. From 2021-2024 she served as an Editor in Chief for the journal, postmedieval, currently, she is a Book Series Editor for Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture.

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This talk is sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and co-sponsored by the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures & Comparative Literature.