The Making of Romantic Love

by Reddy, William M.

• ISBN13: 9780226706276
• ISBN10: 0226706273
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-23
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent-or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900-1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

Author Biography

William M. Reddy is the William T. Laprade Professor of History and professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of a number of historical works, including The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Emergence of Courtly Love in Europe
Aristocratic Speech, the Gregorian Reform, and the First Troubadour	p. 41
Trobairitz and Troubadours and the Shadow Religion	p. 105
Narratives of True Love and Twelfth-Century Common Sense	p. 168
Points of Comparison
The Bhakti Troubadour: Vaishnavism in Twelfth-Century Bengal and Orissa	p. 223
Elegance and Compassion in Heian Japan	p. 290
Conclusion	p. 347
Appendix: Transliterated South Asian Words	p. 393
Bibliography	p. 397
Index	p. 429
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