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262 books match the query 'Love' and 44 start with t

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Tales and Trials of Love, Concerning Venus’s Punishment of Those Who Scorn True Love and Denounce Cupid’s Sovereignty

Jeanne Flore

Iter Press, 2014

Kelly Peebles’s excellent translation and edition of Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux / Tales and Trials of Love (Lyon, 1542) puts Flore back on the map of important French female authors, both for English-speaking readers and for scholars interested more broadly in early modern French print culture. The transcription of the French text, complete with bibliographic details from the first edition, pairs beautifully with Peebles’s dynamic and engaging translation. Peebles’s introduction elegantly shows how Flore’s text stands as a significant textual and material representative of one of the most artistically rich and culturally tumultuous times in early modern France. Her edition and translation will no doubt become a principal reference for future scholarly work not only on Jeanne Flore, but also on female authorship, gender, and print culture in early modern France and Europe.

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Talk of Love

How Culture Matters

Ann Swidler

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.

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Tea, Coffee & Chocolate

How We Fell in Love with Caffeine

Melanie King

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015

There are few things in the world more pleasing than a decadent cup of hot chocolate, a steaming mug of one’s favorite tea, or that first wonderful sip of freshly brewed coffee. Three of the great culinary obsessions of the twenty-first century, tea, coffee, and chocolate are long-time favorites of both casual diners and foodies, But how did we become so enamored of the big three?

In her mouthwatering new book, Melanie King offers a concise cultural history. All three beverages hail from faraway places: tea came first from China, coffee from the Middle East, and chocolate from Central America. Physicians and politicians alike were quick to comment in newspapers and popular periodicals on their supposed perils or health benefits. Readers learn that coffee was recommended in the seventeenth century as protection against the bubonic plague. Tea was thought to make women unattractive and men “unfit to do their business,” while a cup of chocolate was supposed to have exactly the opposite effect on the drinker’s sex life and physical appearance. As consumption of these newly discovered delicacies grew, merchants seized on the opportunity by setting up coffee houses or encouraging ever-more-elaborate tea-drinking rituals.

Filled with fascinating and often funny anecdotes—from a goatherd whose flock became frisky after eating coffee berries to a duchess with a goblet of poisoned chocolate, Tea, Coffee & Chocolate shows how the rowdy initial reception of these drinks forms the roots of today’s enduring caffeine culture.

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Teaching Kids To Love The Earth

Marina Lachecki

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Teaching Kids to Love the Earth is a collection of 186 earth-caring activities designed for use with children of all ages to help them experience and appreciate the earth. This book leads you through the authors’ Sense of Wonder Circle: curiosity, exploration, discovery, sharing, and passion. Each chapter contains a story, instructions for a main activity, suggestions for related activities, and a lsit of additional resources. Teaching Kids to Love the Earth will enable you and the children you work with to experience a “sense of wonder” about the world we share.

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Tell

Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights

Major Margaret Witt

University Press of New England, 2017

In 1993 Margie Witt, a young Air Force nurse, was chosen as the face of the Air Force’s “Cross into the Blue” recruitment campaign. This was also the year that President Clinton’s plan for gays to serve openly in the military was quashed by an obdurate Congress, resulting in the blandly cynical political compromise known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to its intent, DADT had the perverse effect of making it harder for gay servicemen and -women to fight expulsion. Over the next seventeen years more than 13,000 gay soldiers, sailors, marines, coast guard, and airmen and -women were removed from military service. That is, until Margie Witt’s landmark case put a stop to it. Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner—now wife—Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights. Tell is a testament to the power of love to transform hearts and minds, as well as a celebration of the indomitable spirit of Major Witt, her wife Laurie, her dedicated legal team, and the brave men and women who came forward to testify on her behalf in a historic federal trial. “The name Margaret Witt may join the canon of US civil rights pioneers.” —Guardian “Major Witt’s trial provided an unparalleled opportunity to attack the central premise of [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] . . . and set an important precedent.”— New York Times “A landmark ruling.”—Politico

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The Age of Beloveds

Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society

Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli

Duke University Press, 2005

The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the “Turkish Renaissance” manifested itself, to some degree, as an “age of beloveds,” in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.

The authors show that the “age of beloveds” was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different.

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The Altruism Reader

Selections from Writings on Love, Religion, and Science

Thomas Oord

Templeton Press, 2007

This anthology brings together, for the first time, leading essays and book chapters from theologians, philosophers, and scientists on their research on ethics, altruism, and love. Because the general consensus today is that scholarship in moral theory requires empirical research, the arguments of the leading scholars presented in this book will be fundamental to those examining issues in love, ethics, religion, and science.

The first half of The Altruism Reader offers essential selections from religious texts, leading contemporary scholars, and cutting-edge ethicists. Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are represented. Among the highly respected writers are Thomas Aquinas, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Polkinghorne, Stephen Pope, Louis Fischer, Amira Shamma Abdin, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and Daniel Day Williams.

The book’s second half features primary readings on love and altruism from the sciences. Here the focus is on anthropology, psychology, sociology, biology, and neurology, with material written by Daniel C. Batson, David Sloan Wilson, Robert Wright, Stephen G. Post, Robert Axelrod, Richard Dawkins, Holmes Rolston III, and other renowned scientists and philosophers.

“Virtually all people act—and often talk—as if they have some clue about love. We speak about loving food, falling in love, loving God, feeling loved, and loving a type of music. We say that love hurts, love waits, love stinks, and love means never having to say you’re sorry. We use the word and its derivatives in a wide variety of ways . . . . My definition of love is this: To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote well-being.” —Thomas Jay Oord

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The Arc of Love

How Our Romantic Lives Change over Time

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Is love best when it is fresh? For many, the answer is a resounding “yes.” The intense experiences that characterize new love are impossible to replicate, leading to wistful reflection and even a repeated pursuit of such ecstatic beginnings.

Aaron Ben-Ze’ev takes these experiences seriously, but he’s also here to remind us of the benefits of profound love—an emotion that can only develop with time. In The Arc of Love, he provides an in-depth, philosophical account of the experiences that arise in early, intense love—sexual passion, novelty, change—as well as the benefits of cultivating long-term, profound love—stability, development, calmness. Ben-Ze’ev analyzes the core of emotions many experience in early love and the challenges they encounter, and he offers pointers for weathering these challenges. Deploying the rigorous analysis of a philosopher, but writing clearly and in an often humorous style with an eye to lived experience, he takes on topics like compromise, commitment, polyamory, choosing a partner, online dating, and when to say “I love you.” Ultimately, Ben-Ze’ev assures us, while love is indeed best when fresh, if we tend to it carefully, it can become more delicious and nourishing even as time marches on.

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The Audacity of a Kiss

Love, Art, and Liberation

Leslie Cohen

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Shortlisted for Lesbian Memoir/Biography Lammy Award

Rendered in bronze, covered in white lacquer, two women sit together on a park bench in Greenwich Village. One of the women touches the thigh of her partner as they gaze into each other’s eyes. The two women are part of George Segal’s iconic sculpture “Gay Liberation,” but these powerful symbols were modeled on real people: Leslie Cohen and her partner (now wife) Beth Suskin.

In this evocative memoir, Cohen tells the story of a love that has lasted for over fifty years. Transporting the reader to the pivotal time when brave gay women and men carved out spaces where they could live and love freely, she recounts both her personal struggles and the accomplishments she achieved as part of New York’s gay and feminist communities. Foremost among these was her 1976 cofounding of the groundbreaking women’s nightclub Sahara, which played host to such luminaries as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Pat Benatar, Ntozake Shange, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, Patti Smith, Bella Abzug, and Jane Fonda. The Audacity of a Kiss is a moving and inspiring tale of how love, art, and solidarity can overcome oppression.

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The Bonds of Love

St. Peter Damian's Theology of the Spiritual Life

Gordon Mursell

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

St Peter Damian (1007-1072) is an exceptional example of a paradox that is found in many saints and thinkers through the ages (St Jerome, St Bernard, St Bridget of Sweden, St Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton come to mind) – of a lifelong tension between two competing vocations: the call to solitude and holiness and the call to prophetic social and ecclesial engagement. The author has explored this tension throughout his adult life, both in his published work and in his own life as an Episcopalian/Anglican priest and later bishop. Damian’s “The Book of ‘The Lord be with you’” is a profound exploration of the spirituality of solitude, whereas his “Book of Gomorrah” is an intense attack on clerical sexual abuse which has helped to give Damian a new recent prominence in the light of the huge challenges facing the Church today. The Bonds of Love shows that the paradox at the heart of Damian's life and everything he cared about was rooted in the remarkable theology of love which finds expression across the whole of his work and gives it both coherence and dynamism. His life and spirituality are of far more than academic interest, and will make a major contribution, not only to those committed to ecclesial reform and renewal, but to all who struggle to live with the kind of competing tensions that made St. Peter Damian who he was.

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The Book Keeper

A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy

Julia McKenzie Munemo

Ohio University Press, 2020

“A fiercely felt memoir about family shame and the transformative power of love even as it’s also an ongoing meditation on privilege and race in twenty-first-century America. This is a debut striking in its empathetic imagination, observational acuity, and emotional intelligence.” — Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway.

In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history.

When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.

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The Color of Love

Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families

By Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman

University of Texas Press, 2015

Winner, Section on the Sociology of Emotions Outstanding Recent Contribution (Book) Award, American Sociological Association, 2016
Charles Horton Cooley Award for Recent Book, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, 2017
Best Publication Award, Section on Body and Embodiment, American Sociological Association (ASA), 2018

The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families.

Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvador’s inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the “blackest” in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

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The Empire of Love

Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Duke University Press, 2006

In The Empire of Love anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli reflects on a set of ethical and normative claims about the governance of love, sociality, and the body that circulates in liberal settler colonies such as the United States and Australia. She boldly theorizes intimate relations as pivotal sites where liberal logics and aspirations absorbed through settler imperialism are manifest, where discourses of self-sovereignty, social constraint, and value converge.

For more than twenty years, Povinelli has traveled to the social worlds of indigenous men and women living at Belyuen, a small community in the Northern Territory of Australia. More recently she has moved across communities of alternative progressive queer movements in the United States, particularly those who identify as radical faeries. In this book she traces how liberal binary concepts of individual freedom and social constraint influence understandings of intimacy in these two worlds. At the same time, she describes alternative models of social relations within each group in order to highlight modes of intimacy that transcend a reductive choice between freedom and constraint.

Shifting focus away from identities toward the social matrices out of which identities and divisions emerge, Povinelli offers a framework for thinking through such issues as what counts as sexuality and which forms of intimate social relations result in the distribution of rights, recognition, and resources, and which do not. In The Empire of Love Povinelli calls for, and begins to formulate, a politics of “thick life,” a way of representing social life nuanced enough to meet the density and variation of actual social worlds.

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The Erotic Phenomenon

Jean-Luc Marion

University of Chicago Press, 2006

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself.

Marion begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love.

A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, The Erotic Phenomenon is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love.

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The Inability to Love

Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature

Agnes C. Mueller

Northwestern University Press, 2014

The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.

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The La Follettes of Wisconsin

Love and Politics in Progressive America

Bernard A. Weisberger

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

The La Follettes of Wisconsin—Robert, Belle, and their children, Bob Jr., Phil, Fola, and Mary—are vividly brought to life in this collective biography of an American political family. As governor of Wisconsin (1901–06) and U.S. Senator (1906–25), "Fighting Bob" battled relentlessly for his Progressive vision of democracy—an idealistic mixture of informed citizenry and enlightened egalitarianism.

By contrast, the private man suffered from intense, isolated periods of depression and relied heavily on his family for survival. Together, "Old Bob" and his beloved wife, Belle Case La Follette—a lawyer, journalist, and Progressive leader in her own right—raised their children in the distinctly uncompromising La Follette tradition of challenging social and political ills. Fola became a campaigner for women's suffrage, Phil was governor of Wisconsin, and "Young Bob" became a U.S. senator.

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The Language of Love

An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus

Stanley Rosen

St. Augustine's Press, 2016

Stanley Rosen completed The Language of Love in the early 1970s, but the manuscript was put aside and only rediscovered in 2013, the year before his death. The Language of Love is an interpretation of the Phaedrus that was meant to follow and complete Rosen’s Symposium commentary. Only two articles have been previously published. Rosen’s frequent references to the central passages and second half of the Phaedrus were more important in pointing up the importance of his absent full interpretation of the dialogue.
     Here Rosen’s argue for the possibility of philosophy or the retrieval of human self-knowledge on the basis of a renewed argument for the partial intelligibility of ordinary experience or, in other words, for the Platonic Ideas. His book on the Symposium was an important contribution to the subsequent sea change in Plato scholarship that returned attention to the dialogue form and to the poetic side of philosophy even in its quarrel with philosophy. That change allowed us search for understanding in the light of the whole, a whole which is otherwise, as Rosen has shown elsewhere, fragmented by the scientism of analytical philosophy or the historicism of “Continental” philosophy.
    The Language of Love represents a missing key to Stanley Rosen’s work and, much more significantly, to the rediscovery of philosophy in our time. The title of the book is not merely a play on words. It points to the incommensurability between the constructed or historical nature of language or culture and the pre-discursive apprehension of things that is necessary if speech is to make sense and be understood, as opposed to being mere nonsense.
     Among many valuable insights along the way, Rosen unites the dialogue in two parts, treating both eros and rhetoric, showing the linkage between eros and writing, as between myth and analysis. He connects the comic attempt to subject eros to diaeresis in the Phaedrus with the attempt to understand non-being as an eidos in the Sophist. In both cases, the inadequacy of a technical understanding of philosophy returns us to the pre-technical world of ordinary experience.
    Rosen’s interpretation is an expression of the Socratic claim that we can’t speak beautifully without knowing the truth and that whatever truth we speak or write is a reflection of the silent invisibility of beauty as the unity of form. However, “Like every good teacher, it does not simply state that link for us to memorize. Instead, we must recollect it.”

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The Law of Love

From Autonomy to Communion

Stephen F. Brett, SSJ

University of Scranton Press, 2010

With an interdisciplinary combination of philosophy, theology, and family law, The Law of Love explores the impact of secular conceptions of autonomy on sexuality and family. Drawing from the thought of Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and the modern theologian Servais Pinckaers, Stephen F. Brett argues that the divorce of freedom from virtue has caused cultural relativism, and that a potent and healthy mix of temperance, chastity, and modesty is the antidote. Styled accessibly and quite cleverly with a broader audience in mind, The Law of Love will appeal to intellectuals of all faiths who are interested in facing the ambiguities and problems of contemporary life in a secularized society.

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The Making of Romantic Love

Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE

William M. Reddy

University of Chicago Press, 2012

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.

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The Medieval Risk-Reward Society

Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages

Will Hasty

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

The Medieval Risk-Reward Society offers a study of adventure and love in the European Middle Ages focused on the poetry of authors such as Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg—showing how a society based on sacrifice becomes a society based on wagers and investments. Will Hasty’s sociological approach to medieval courtly literature, informed by the analytic tools of game theory, reveals the blossoming of a worldview in which outcomes are uncertain, such that the very self (of a character or an authorial persona) is contingent on success or failure in possessing the things it desires—and upon which its social identity and personal happiness depend. Drawing on a diverse selection of contrasting canonical works ranging from the Iliad to the biblical book of Joshua to High Medieval German political texts to the writings of Leibniz and Mark Twain, Hasty enables an appreciation of the distinctive contributions made in antiquity and the Middle Ages to the medieval emergence of a European society based on risks and rewards.

The Medieval Risk-Reward Society: Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages takes a descriptive approach to the competitions in religion, politics, and poetry that are constitutive of medieval culture. Culture is considered always to be happening, and to be happening on the cultural cutting edge as competitions for rewards involving the element of chance. This study finds adventure and love—the principal concerns of medieval European romance poetry—to be cultural game changers, and thereby endeavors to make a humanist contribution to the development of a cultural game theory.

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The Metaphysical Foundations of Love

Aquinas on Participation, Unity, and Union

Anthony T. Flood

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

The Metaphysical Foundations of Love: Aquinas on Participation, Unity, and Union offers a systematic treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of the metaphysical relations of unity-to-union and unity-to-participation in God as the key structuring elements to the nature of love and friendship. In general, Aquinas identifies love as the source and summit of the life of each human being. Everything in the created realm issues forth from God’s creative love, and the ultimate end of all human persons is the greatest possible union with God. Aquinas contends that the love of friendship allows for the greatest union between two persons; thus, the greatest union with God takes the form of friendship with him.

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The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo

Love, Agon, and the Grotesque

Mary E. Barnard

Duke University Press, 1987

The transformation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne in literary treatments from Ovid through the Spanish Golden Age are studied in theme and variation, showing how the protean figures of the myth meant different things to different ages, each age fashioning the lovers in its own image. The Myth of Apollo and Daphne focuses on the themes of love, agon, and the grotesque and their transformations as the writers, through a kind of artificial mythopoeia, invent variants for the tale, altering the ancient model to create their new, distinctive visions.

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The Nature and Nurture of Love

From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America

Marga Vicedo

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The notion that maternal care and love will determine a child’s emotional well-being and future personality has become ubiquitous. In countless stories and movies we find that the problems of the protagonists—anything from the fear of romantic commitment to serial killing—stem from their troubled relationships with their mothers during childhood. How did we come to hold these views about the determinant power of mother love over an individual’s emotional development? And what does this vision of mother love entail for children and mothers?

In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo examines scientific views about children’s emotional needs and mother love from World War II until the 1970s, paying particular attention to John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. Vicedo tracks the development of Bowlby’s work as well as the interdisciplinary research that he used to support his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s studies of imprinting in geese, Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of children and mothers in Uganda and the United States. Vicedo’s historical analysis reveals that important psychoanalysts and animal researchers opposed the project of turning emotions into biological instincts. Despite those substantial criticisms, she argues that attachment theory was paramount in turning mother love into a biological need. This shift introduced a new justification for the prescriptive role of biology in human affairs and had profound—and negative—consequences for mothers and for the valuation of mother love.

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The Nature of Love

Dietrich von Hildebrand

St. Augustine's Press, 2009

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The Nature of Love, Volume 3

The Modern World

Irving Singer

University of Chicago Press, 1987

"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love. . . . [T]he bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are effectively executed, and they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."—Frederick A. Olafson, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Irving Singer . . . has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the philia and agape of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic. . . . [This] final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret. . . . This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

"This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love. . . . Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."—Ethics

"In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century. . . . Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer . . . links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love. . . . Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."—Mark V. Chaffee, Contemporary Psychology

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The Offense of Love

Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Tristia 2

Ovid, A verse translation by Julia D. Hejduk, with introduction and notes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Ovid's Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) and its sequel Remedies for Love (Remedia Amoris) are among the most notorious poems of the ancient world. In AD 8, the emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to the shores of the Black Sea for "a poem and a mistake." Whatever the mistake may have been, the poem was certainly the Ars Amatoria, which the emperor found a bit too immoral.
In exile, Ovid composed Sad Things (Tristia), which included a defense of his life and work as brilliant and cheeky as his controversial love manuals. In a poem addressed to Augustus (Tristia 2), he argues, "Since all of life and literature is one long, steamy sex story, why single poor Ovid out?" While seemingly groveling at the emperor's feet, he creates an image of Augustus as capricious tyrant and himself as suffering artist that wins over every reader (except the one to whom it was addressed).
Bringing together translations of the Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Tristia 2, Julia Dyson Hejduk's The Offense of Love is the first book to include both the offense and the defense of Ovid's amatory work in a single volume. Hejduk's elegant and accurate translations, helpful notes, and comprehensive introduction will guide readers through Ovid's wickedly witty poetic tour of the literature, mythology, topography, religion, politics, and (of course) sexuality of ancient Rome.

Finalist, National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

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The Other Jonathan Edwards

Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice

Gerald McDermott

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Widely regarded as perhaps America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards still suffers the stereotype of hellfire preacher obsessed with God's wrath. In this anthology, Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story seek to correct that common view by showing that Edwards was also a compassionate, socially conscious minister of the first order.

Through a selection of sermons and primary writings, McDermott and Story reveal an Edwards who preached love toward all humanity regardless of belief or appearance; who demanded private and public charity to the poor; who criticized hard-hearted business dealings as impious and socially destructive; and who condemned envy and status-seeking as anti-Christian and anti-community. This “other” Jonathan Edwards preached about grace and the love of God but also about responsive constitutional government, the iniquities of hypocrisy and corruption, and the nature of wise leadership. He acknowledged the need for national defense but left room for popular revolt from tyranny. He anticipated a millennial age of peace and prosperity and believed that people should live in the world as they would live through grace in heaven.

Jonathan Edwards was, in sum, a worldly as well as spiritual reformer who resisted the materialistic, acquisitive, and individualistic currents of American culture. For these reasons, McDermott and Story think he may have lessons to teach us today.

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The Passion Book

A Tibetan Guide to Love and Sex

Gendun Chopel

University of Chicago Press, 2018

The PassionBook is the most famous work of erotica in the vast literature of Tibetan Buddhism, written by the legendary scholar and poet Gendun Chopel (1903-1951). Soon after arriving in India in 1934, he discovered the Kama Sutra. Realizing that this genre of the erotic was unknown in Tibet, he set out to correct the situation. His sources were two: classical Sanskrit works and his own experiences with his lovers. Completed in 1939, his “treatise on passion” circulated in manuscript form in Tibet, scandalizing and arousing its readers.

Gendun Chopel here condemns the hypocrisy of both society and church, portraying sexual pleasure as a force of nature and a human right for all. On page after page, we find the exuberance of someone discovering the joys of sex, made all the more intense because they had been forbidden to him for so long: he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy in his youth and had only recently renounced it. He describes in ecstatic and graphic detail the wonders he discovered. In these poems, written in beautiful Tibetan verse, we hear a voice with tints of irony, self-deprecating wit, and a love of women not merely as sources of male pleasure but as full partners in the play of passion.

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The Passion of Love in the <i>Summa Theologiae</i> of Thomas Aquinas

Daniel Joseph Gordon

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

This book is an introduction to three questions on love according to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I–II, qq. 26–28). These three questions reflect on the nature of love (q. 26), the causes of love (q. 27), and the effects of love (q. 28). It is thus an introduction to the entire phenomenon of love, both as a bodily passion and an act of the will. The purpose is to present the Thomistic and broadly scholastic account of human and divine love from a philosophical and theological perspective. It aims to be a theological and philosophical study of the topic, useful both for a graduate/professional audience, as part of an undergraduate or graduate course, and perhaps for the educated reader. The thesis of the book is that, contrary to contemporary conceptions, not all loves are created equal. Some loves perfect us and some loves corrupt us. The worth of a love depends on its object and end. St. Thomas thus presents an objective and teleological account of human and divine love that is of philosophical and theological interest. The method is broadly exegetical, presenting a careful reading of the text and supplying the philosophical and theological background which the text of Aquinas assumes. The scope of the work is limited to three questions (ST I–II, qq. 26–28). References to interpretative disputes of Aquinas and references to further resources in the secondary literature will be mostly limited to the footnotes, making the body of the text accessible to more readers.

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The Plain Language of Love and Loss

A Quaker Memoir

Beth Taylor

University of Missouri Press, 2009

On November 16, 1965, Beth Taylor’s idyllic childhood was shattered at age twelve by the suicide of her older brother Geoff. Raised in an “intentional community” north of Philadelphia—a mix of farm village, hippie commune, and suburb—she and her siblings were instilled with nonconformist values and respect for the Quaker tradition. With the loss of her beloved brother, Taylor began her complicated journey to understand family, loss, and faith.

Written after years of contemplation, The Plain Language of Love and Loss reflects on the meaning of death and loss for three generations of Taylor’s family and their friends. Her compelling portrait of Geoff reveals a boy whose understanding of who he was came under increasing attack. He was harassed by schoolmates for being a “commie pinko coward” and he tried to appease fellow Boy Scouts after he abstained from a support-the-troops rally. Touching on the timely issues of bullying, child rearing, and nonconformity, Taylor offers a rare look at growing up Quaker in the tumultuous 1960s.

Taylor tells how each stage of her life exposed clues to the subtle damage wrought by tragedy, even while it revealed varieties of solace found in friendships, marriage, and parenting. As she struggles to understand the complexities of religious heritage, patriotism, and pacifism, she weaves the story of her own family together with the larger history of Quakers in the Northeast, showing the importance of family values and the impact of religious education.

Beth Taylor says that she learned many things from her childhood, in particular that history is alive—and shapes how we judge ourselves and choose to live our lives. She comes to see that grief can be a mask, a lover, and a teacher.

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The Politics of Love

Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Maxime Foerster

University of New Hampshire Press, 2018

What would love be if heterosexual couples were no longer assigned gender and sexual norms?

Maxime Foerster examines the “heterosexual trouble” between men and women in nineteenth-century French Romantic and Decadent literature. Key works by authors ranging from George Sand to Charles Baudelaire persistently demonstrate that heterosexuality did not work: these authors, and many others, investigated the struggle that men and women alike waged against patriarchal norms. Whereas Romantic fiction dedicated itself to the reinvention of love, Decadence promoted sexual and gender deviance.

In expertly evaluating the discord afflicting fictional heterosexual couples, male and female dandies, and doctors and their female patients, Foerster shows the crucial role that literature played in the fashioning of alternative identities. A concluding look at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu traces the legacy of heterosexual trouble in the twentieth century.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

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The Republic of Love

Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music

Martin Stokes

University of Chicago Press, 2010

At the heart of The Republic of Love are the voices of three musicians—queer nightclub star Zeki Müren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu—who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Their fame and ubiquity have made them national icons—but, Martin Stokes here contends, they do not represent the official version of Turkish identity propagated by anthems or flags; instead they evoke a much more intimate and ambivalent conception of Turkishness.

Using these three singers as a lens, Stokes examines Turkey’s repressive politics and civil violence as well as its uncommonly vibrant public life in which music, art, literature, sports, and journalism have flourished. However, Stokes’s primary concern is how Müren, Gencebay, and Aksu’s music and careers can be understood in light of theories of cultural intimacy. In particular, he considers their contributions to the development of a Turkish concept of love, analyzing the ways these singers explore the private matters of intimacy, affection, and sentiment on the public stage.

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The Secret

Love, Marriage, and HIV

Jennifer S. Hirsch

Vanderbilt University Press, 2009

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2010

For many women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with the very person with whom they are supposed to have sex: their spouse. The Secret situates marital HIV risk within a broader exploration of marital and extramarital sexuality in five diverse settings: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. In these settings, the authors write, men's extramarital sex is an officially secret but actually widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice, rather than something men do because their bodies demand it and women can't stop them.

Drawing on research conducted as part of an innovative comparative ethnographic study, and modeling a novel approach to collaborative anthropological scholarship, the authors show men's extramarital sex to be a fundamental aspect of gendered social organization. Through theoretically sophisticated yet lucid writing and vivid ethnographic description, drawing on rich data from the marital case studies conducted by research teams in each country, they trace how extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, and concerns about social risk facilitate men's participation in extramarital sex. Also documented throughout is the collision between traditional ways and the new practices of romantic companionate marriage.

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The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

Jeanne Heuving

University of Alabama Press, 2016

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, the exploration of love by poets—long a fixture of Western poetic tradition—is thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more “real” entities of physical sex and desire.

In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, and others lies significantly in their engagement with the synergistic relations between being in love and writing love. These poets, she argues, have traded the clichéd lover of yore for impersonal or posthuman poetic speakers that sustain the gloire and mystery of love poetry of prior centuries. As Robert Duncan writes, “There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call ‘falling in love.’”

Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’s Cantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. She draws attention to how the prevailing concept of language as material is inadequate to the ways these poets also engage language as a medium—as a conduit—enabling them to address love afresh in a time defined through preoccupations with sexuality. They engage love as immanent and change it through a writing that acts on itself.

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics ascribes the waning of love poetry to its problematic form: a genre in which empowered poetic speakers constitute their speech through the objectification of comparatively disempowered subjects, or beloveds. Refusing this pervasive practice, the poets she highlights reject the delimiting, one-sided tradition of masculine lovers and passive feminine beloveds; instead, they create a more nuanced, dynamic poetics of ecstatic exploration, what Heuving calls “projective love” and “libidinized field poetics,” a formally innovative poetry, in which one perception leads directly to the next and all aspects of a poem are generative of meaning.

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The Trouble with Men

Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power

David Shields

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint. While unashamedly intellectual, it’s also irresistibly readable and extremely moving. Over five increasingly intimate chapters, Shields probes the contours of his own psyche and marriage, marshalling a chorus of other voices that leaven, deepen, and universalize his experience; his goal is nothing less than a deconstruction of eros and conventional masculinity. Masterfully woven throughout is an unmistakable and surprisingly tender cri de coeur to his wife. The risk and vulnerability on display are in the service of radical candor, acerbic wit, real emotion, and profound insight—exactly what we’ve come to expect from Shields, who, in an open invitation to the reader, leaves everything on the page.

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The Tunnel of Love

A Novel

Peter De Vries

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. De Vries’s classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig—all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one another’s private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.

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The Unchanging God of Love

Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology on Divine Immutability (Second Edition)

Michael J. Dodds, O.P.

Catholic University of America Press, 2008

The Unchanging God of Love provides a clear and comprehensive account of what Aquinas really says about divine immutability, presented in a way that allows his theology to address contemporary criticisms

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Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love

A Summa of the Summa on the Theological Virtues

Christopher Kaczor

Catholic University of America Press, 2020

Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love is designed to make as easy as possible a first reading of key passages from the Summa theologiae. This book contains selections from the Summa that are most influential, most important, or likely to be most interesting to the contemporary reader. The text of the Summa itself is edited and arranged for beginners. Each article begins with Thomas’s answers to the question at hand and then goes to the first objection, followed by the reply to the first objection, the second objection and its reply, and so on. This arrangement provides a greater accessibility and ease in following the argument. Below the text, copious footnotes illuminate the text as a professor in the classroom might. Some notes provide historical background to figures that Thomas presupposes his reader will know such as Gratian, Dionysius, and Lombard. Other notes offer doctrinal summaries of other parts of the Summa that illuminate what Thomas says about faith, hope, or love. Thomas had an enormous influence on theologians, Church councils, and popes after his time, so some footnotes examine this influence. Thomas drew heavily on sources of wisdom before him, so other footnotes summarize the teachings of earlier authors, such as Aristotle and Augustine. This book also contains introductory essays on the Summa, on faith, on hope, and on love, which provide an overview to situate the reader and place treatment of the theological virtues in its larger context of the Summa. For those who have never read Thomas Aquinas on faith, hope, and love (and for those who teach them), this book provides ready access to the wisdom of the Angelic doctor.

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Thomas Heywood's Art of Love

The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria

Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary by M. L. Stapleton

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Thomas Heywood (ca 1573-1641) was a major Renaissance playwright who wrote or collaborated on over two hundred plays. Loues Schoole was one of his many nondramatic works that shows his fascination with antiquity. It was the standard English translation of the Ars in the seventeenth century, so popular that it was pirated almost as soon as he had written it--then printed, sold, reprinted, and resold in England and the Netherlands. It was not attributed to him during his lifetime, and he was not allowed to share in the profits that its (considerable) sales generated, two things that rankled him for the rest of his life. This is understandable because it is an excellent translation into English heroic verse, accurate without stuffiness, colloquial without indecorousness. Twenty years after Heywood's death, Loues Schoole was pirated yet again and went to six different editions during the Restoration (1662-84).
The present edition represents the first instance in which the translation has been edited in a scholarly manner. Besides a full Introduction that accounts for the history of Loues Schoole, Ovid in the English Renaissance, and the editorial method, each of the three books of the poem includes a Commentary that provides cross-references within the text; glosses for unusual, archaic, or regional forms peculiar to Heywood's English; annotations from sourcebooks that Heywood used to identify or understand characters from classical history, literature, and mythology; and explanations for any emendations the editor deemed necessary. In his efforts to make the Ars a seventeenth-century poem, Heywood contemporizes Ovid's references to dress, behavior, courtship, marriage, games, theater, agriculture, horsemanship, war, literature --all of which the Commentary explains at great length.
Loues Schoole will find readership in these areas: early modern history, literature, and culture; classical studies; Renaissance drama; the history of sexuality; and translation theory.
M. L. Stapleton is Associate Professor of English and Philosophy, Stephen F. Austin State University.

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To Russia with Love

An Alaskan's Journey

Victor Fischer with Charles Wohlforth

University of Alaska Press, 2012

Son of the famous American journalist Louis Fischer, who corresponded from Germany and then Moscow, and the Russian writer Markoosha Fischer, Victor Fischer grew up in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, watching his friends’ parents disappear after political arrests. Eleanor Roosevelt personally engineered the Fischer family’s escape from Russia, and soon after Victor was serving in the United States Army in World War II and fighting opposite his childhood friends in the Russian and German armies.

As a young adult, he went on to help shape Alaska’s map by planning towns throughout the state. This unique autobiography recounts Fischer’s earliest days in Germany, Russia, and Alaska, where he soon entered civic affairs and was elected as a delegate to the Alaska Constitutional Convention—the body responsible for establishing statehood in the territory. A move to Washington, DC, and further government appointments allowed him to witness key historic events of his era, which he also recounts here. Finally, Fischer brings his memoir up to the present, describing how he has returned to Russia many times to bring the lessons of Alaska freedom and prosperity to the newly democratic states.

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