Plaisir littéraire et éthique aristocratique Éclairer la philologie par l’histoire

Around 1200, while moralists and theologians still distrusted the eminently secular notion of pleasure, “literary pleasure” constituted a major poetic element in literary verse narratives in vernacular languages, particularly in the romance genre. We show that this poetic phenomenon assumes a political function and testifies to the nobility’s desire for emancipation from the supervision of the Church.