
Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways: If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian. If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.Įnter your library card number to sign in.

These singers typically employ a powerful operatic vocal style and are often juxtaposed with male death metal singers in a twin lead vocal pairing referred to as beauty and the beast, a term that not only describes the vocal tones but also hints at the gendered roles these singers enact. Bands of this nature often present the female singer as an ethereal and spiritually powerful force, effectively embodying the deified aristocratic lady of the fin’amor tradition. The fin’amor dynamic is also considered from the opposite side, through female-fronted Gothic metal bands like Within Temptation, Nightwish, and Theatre of Tragedy. Fin’amor poetry and literature, developed primarily by French troubadours in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, typically involves the objectification of a married aristocratic or royal lady as a quasi-deified figure before which the male troubadour performs a kind of worshipful self-debasement.

This chapter explores a particular manifestation of heavy metal medievalism through the echoes of fin’amor and courtly love poetry in the music of doom metal and Gothic metal bands like My Dying Bride and Cradle of Filth.
