The Arrow of Love examines visual encounters in medieval lyrics, exploring the ways in which poets employed contemporary optical theory both to revitalize classic topoi, such as Cupid's arrow, and to construct and develop subjectivities and gender roles. In the unconfessed or unrequited love that is so frequently the focus of medieval lyrics, an exchange of glances is often the primary contact between the lover and the beloved. As medieval poets sought new ways to describe visual interactions, many turned to the rapidly growing field of optical theory, which offered not only an array of images and metaphors but also models for the perceiving subject that could be adapted to poetic use. In particular, optical imagery and paradigms afforded poets a new approach to the roles of the languishing male and his powerful beloved.

Issues such as the relationship between the eyes and the heart, the power of the beloved's glance, and the image of the beloved cherished by the lover in his heart have received attention from love poets since Classical Antiquity; this book shows how such themes are reinterpreted in medieval poetry in terms of contemporary advancements in the science of optics. In addition, many medieval poets wrote of light, rays, or spirits exiting from and/or entering the yees of lyric lovers and their ladies; this study provides parallel accounts of these phenomena in contemporary works on optics and natural magic, and discusses the extent to which poets drew upon these non-literary descriptions.

Optical material did not merely server to make poetry more technically detailed; frequently, it was employed to develop subjectivity and to portray power relations between the poet-lover and his beloved. For example, in some medieval optical treatises, vision is portrayed as an outwardly directed or even aggressive action; in others, it is described as a sort of painful intrusion upon the eye. This study explores how poets appropriate one or, in some cases, both of these models, often utilizing techni