In her Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete († 1310) aims at paving the way for the annihilated soul to find its ideal self back in the mystical union with God. However, by doing so, she also draws on the feeling of nostalgia by heralding the discrepancy between the usual state of the soul, where it stands forlorn and bereft of the source of its longing, and its state of fulfillment where words are no longer relevant. Hence the Mirror as a speculative tractate builds on a rich literary imagery – images of mountains and valleys, of sea and rivers and sunshine, depicting a country of life vs one of estrangement, as well as a sense of lost time that cannot be recovered – to embark its readers on a spiritual journey while making them aware of the shortcomings of ordinary language.

“We are dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants,” this famous image that John of Salisbury attributed to Bernard of Chartres was very popular throughout the Middle Ages, and far beyond, until it became the motto of Google Scholar. First, it expresses the respect and admiration that the masters of the twelfth century had for the authors of Antiquity whose works they commented on. But the formula is more complex than it seems and is not reduced to its nostalgic and backward-looking dimension, it is also forward-looking and allows to affirm the idea of progress, the cumulative dimension of knowledge and translatio studii, since the dwarf perched on a giant sees farther than the one who supports him.

The subject matter of the analysis is an interesting poem by Jean Molinet. This paper focuses on the aspect of a certain nostalgia for the ideal which aims at both the semantic and poetic aspects of the poem. The existential ideal ‒ conceived from a spiritual perspective – is transmitted through a refined metaphorical system, conveying complex ideas and equivocal meanings, and covers two eponymous aspects, one of which turns out to be denied by the second. From an eschatological perspective, the author demonstrates how insignificant the old “worldly” ideal and alleged intellectual ideal will be in the eyes of God at the moment of Judgment. The opposition within the same metaphor of the two antithetical ideals is a process accentuating a revalorization of the existential perspective of the poet.

The concept of fin’amor in Thomas’ Tristan is traditionally subject to two interpretations: either it is glorified as a religion, with lovers as its martyrs, or it is criticized within the framework of Christian principles. This paper proposes an alternative to such interpretative dichotomy: it attempts to prove that glorifying the fin’amor as an ideal does not mean idealizing the lovers. In fact, Thomas judges severely his characters not in the name of Christian religion but in the name of an entirely profane, yet highly spiritual ideal of courtly love. The lovers, although far from being its embodiment, still aspire and refer to it, suffering from their own imperfection. This tension is highlighted by the aesthetics of doubling characterizing Thomas’ writing.

Along with the Hellenistic novel and the pastoral novel, the chivalric narrative constitutes one of the three forms of premodern idealism. In close connection with the ineffable anthropomorphism of the novel, the narratives of chivalry distinguish themselves by placing the transcendent source at the heart of the society of men (T. Pavel, La Pensée du roman). The article investigates the part that nostalgia takes in the manufacture of the chivalric and courtly ideal starting from human resources (love, war), according to two principal poetics: the enchantment, the unpredictable, the desire (Yvain, le Chevalier au lion of Chrétien de Troyes) vs. the disenchantment, the irreversible, the regret inherent in the nostalgic charm (La Mort le Roi Artu).