For over twenty years I have been delivering courses related to the amorous lyric of imperial Spain, one of the most significant bodies of verse in European literature. During that time I have fielded questions across the whole range of the ‘frequently asked’ and, on occasions, I have risen and fallen to the more idiosyncratic intervention. One query, however, stands out for the complexity at the core of its very obviousness, and because it has dogged me ever since. Simply put: ‘what has love got to do with it?’ This book takes that nagging question as its starting point and revolves around it.

The intelligibility of the question is secured, as Charnes has observed, by our awareness of the ‘love story’, or story of love, as an authoritative and authorising epistemology; a coercive ideological apparatus behind which a range of other narratives find cover: ‘one of the most effective smokescreens available in the politics of cultural production.’ It would seem appropriate, therefore, that we should consider the lyric utterances of Renaissance love poetry, the foremost genre of European literature in the period, within the larger arena of the cultural politics in which they were conceived. Roland Greene set a persuasive precedent for just such an approach over a decade ago, in a study that established the significance of unrequited love (as framed within the Petrarchist tradition), as a ‘staging area’ for a variety of problems that beset the lived history of European imperialism.