The Flight from Desire revises our understanding of love in literary texts from the high and late Middle Ages. Starting from the traditions of Augustine and Ovid, it traces the interplay of medieval theories about love with the unruly and uncontainable workings of desire. Individual chapters offer fresh readings of the letters of Abelard and Heloise, the Lais of Marie de France, the Roman de la Rose, Dante's Vita nuova, and the Troilus story told by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In these works, desire powerfully affects ideas of selfhood and social identity, the terms of moral judgment, and even the role of authorship.