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The History of Love: Ritual, Romance, Revolution
Paperback
Series: History
Literary CriticismReligion General
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 5 2025
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.41 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
What if love isn't a feeling, but a battlefield? This book traces 5,000 years of romance, marriage, and forbidden passion, from Mesopotamian temple rites to Victorian boudoirs. Along the way, it reveals how priests, poets, and patriarchs shaped everything we think we know about love, desire, and commitment.
This large print edition follows the history of love and marriage through every era, culture, and contradiction. Egyptian wives writing steamy poetry on papyrus over a thousand years before Shakespeare. Spartan newlyweds sneaking conjugal visits because marriage was considered a threat to military discipline. Roman wives drinking mandrake potions to fake pregnancies or face divorce. Troubadours singing adultery anthems punishable by castration. Medieval nuns experiencing ecstatic bridal mysticism visions. Knights worshipping noblewomen in courtly love traditions while committing violence against peasant girls. Victorians using secret flower dictionaries to arrange illicit affairs while their laws allowed husbands to demand sex and doctors labeled any refusal as hysteria. Each chapter connects the private lives of ordinary and powerful people to the larger forces of religion, law, and politics that have always shaped what love is allowed to look like.
What's inside:
- Ancient love and law: Mesopotamian divorce courts, Egyptian love poetry, and the sacred and legal frameworks that controlled desire from the earliest civilizations
- Greece and Rome: Spartan marriage as military sabotage, Roman sex manuals and mandrake potions, and the philosophical debates that tried to define love's purpose
- Medieval contradictions: troubadour adultery anthems, courtly love's violent underside, bridal mysticism in convents, and the chastity belt myths that turned out to be Victorian inventions
- Renaissance through Enlightenment: artists painting mistresses as the Virgin Mary, baroque royalty trading spouses at treaty signings, and the feminists who called marriage legalized prostitution
- Victorian oppression and rebellion: secret flower dictionaries, marital rape laws, the hysteria diagnosis, and the flappers of the 1920s who fought back on their own terms
Reader review:
I blushed through the Roman chapters and was genuinely angry by the Victorian ones. The way this book connects ancient marriage laws to modern assumptions about romance is fascinating. Every chapter dismantles a different love myth with real sources behind it. The large print made it easy to read through in a weekend. Dr. Elena R.
Love has never been simple, and it has never been free from politics, religion, and power. This book traces 5,000 years of passion, control, and rebellion to show how everything we feel about love was shaped by forces most of us never think about. Large print edition for comfortable reading.
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