"The Romantic period was characterized by a new historical self-consciousness in which history, and in particular the medieval, became an important screen for comprehending the present. Recent scholarship has proposed contending theories for understanding how the historical is used to symbolize the political in the period.".

"Romantic Medievalism takes an original position in proposing a critical difference in how the medieval was used to interpret the present, arguing that, whereas conservative writers identified with the knight of romance, radical writers identified with the troubadour of the courtly love lyric. The troubadour poet was resurrected by the Delia Cruscan school of poets, but without political implications, from the popular eighteenth-century poetry of Spenserian and Petrarchan imitators.

He offered the Romantics a useful figuration of history because, as they realized, the twelfth-century courtly love poet was already politically radicalized, pitting himself against knight, competitor poets, and the lady who threatens to sing of her own desire."--BOOK JACKET.