Half ingenious scholarly commentary, half disquisition on the rot of modernity (which, of course, extends through to the Middle Ages and beyond), this book takes aim at contemporary political discourse which ridicules the medieval period as irrelevant, celebrates it as racist and homophobic, or makes it a strategically child-like evocation of the American dream. Taking Guilhem IX as a figure through whom to examine the universal appeal and message of Occitan poetic production as well as the tragic ironies of modern subjecthood, Fajardo-Acosta finds early vestiges of capitalism and the current debased view of the past, of truth, and of literature in the cynical and theatrical 12th-century comtal court of Guilhem IX in Poitiers. Fajardo-Acosta offers us in this study a refreshingly polemical intervention into cultural studies and an altogether exhilarating read.

Bill Burgwinkle, University of Cambridge-King's College

This is a quite remarkable study of the ideological origins of modern love, which Fidel Fajardo-Acosta locates in the poetry of the earliest poet—William IX of Aquitaine—in the earliest European literary tradition in a modern language, Old Occitan troubadour lyric. This fearlessly contrarian, cynical, and brutally polemical broadside provides a strikingly new paradigm for understanding the significance of fin’amor (so-called “courtly love”—more accurately, "refined love”); at the same time, the book asserts that we who live in the 21st century are incarcerated in the same political/ideological prison-house that generated troubadour love lyric around 1100 CE. With a relentless, unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and amusing prose style reminiscent of Nietzsche’s, Fajardo-Acosta launches a fierce attack—fortified by superlative philological expertise—on our current way of living.

Gregory B. Stone, Louisiana State University

In lucid, often eloquent prose, Fajardo-Acosta takes up the challenge of understanding Europe’s millennium-long articulation of its identity through erotic writing — so-called “courtly love” — beginning with the poems of William IXth of Aquitaine in the early 12th century. He unmasks this identity as a politics of power through a process of “civilizing” otherwise rogue agents and their petty states constantly jockeying for wealth and influence under the guise of serving the Lady, “midons,” who is frequently a cipher for controlling the bodies and property not only of women but also the populace of local subjects. His research is extensive and his arguments penetrating. I recommend this book enthusiastically for all that it can teach us.

R. Allen Shoaf, University of Florida