Making of Romantic Love
Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE
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.
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE The Emergence of Courtly Love in Europe
1. Aristocratic Speech, the Gregorian Reform, and the First Troubadour
2. Trobairitz and Troubadours and the Shadow Religion
3. Narratives of True Love and Twelfth-Century Common Sense
PART TWO Points of Comparison
4. The Bhakti Troubadour: Vaishnavism in Twelfth-Century Bengal and Orissa
5. Elegance and Compassion in Heian Japan
Conclusion
Appendix: Transliterated South Asian Words
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
"'The Making of Romantic Love' is the first serious attempt to situate three richly documented traditions of romantic love – developed in medieval France, India, and Japan – from a critically informed, yet historically sensitive, comparative perspective. William Reddy's analyses range across contexts with impressive dexterity and erudition bringing brilliant insight to these cultural formations and connecting to the wider history of emotions and sexuality. The book will be as relevant to historians and literary scholars as to cultural critics and anthropologists" – Daud Ali, University of Pennsylvania
"Let the debates begin! Drawing on an astonishing panoply of sources, from European courtly and troubadour literature to Heian Japanese poetry, from canon law to Puri temple dancing, William M. Reddy's important new book, 'The Making of Romantic Love', challenges our basic assumptions about eroticism, heroism, the nature of marriages, and the legacy of the Middle Ages in modern culture. Is there a 'sex drive'? Or is this, too, a western construct? Like one of Reddy's 'emotives', reading this impressive study will leave you a different person" – Barbara H. Rosenwein, Loyola University Chicago
