The Spirit of the Court represents a selection of a little over a quarter of the papers presented at the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society in 1983 chosen by an editorial board from those submitted for consideration after the congress. The selection of papers is wideranging and is intended to be representative of the multidisciplinary interests of the Society which was founded in 1973 to encourage the study of all aspects of courtorientated culture centring on the medieval period of western Europe. The fortytwo papers presented here range in time from the period of the earliest troubadour William of Poitiers at the beginning of the twelfth century to the Renaissance and beyond H.A. Kellys paper engages the topic of courtly love itself as formulated in the late nineteenth century by Gaston Paris and examines its significance for us in 1984 on the hundredth anniversary of its birth as a term of literary criticism. The three plenary papers by E. Baumgartner D. Green and B. Stock range over the topical and methodological concerns that are of immediate interest to all scholars in the field and the other papers take up a wide variety of more specialised topics in the literary cultures of Britain France Germany Italy and Spain using traditional critical techniques as well as more recent methodologies.