The Making of Romantic Love

William M. Reddy’s fascinating, original, carefully argued, well-written, and intellectually challenging book argues that romantic love, as the West (and the rest of the globalised world) knows it today, developed out of one specific context—western Europe at the time of the Gregorian reforms. There are two parts to the argument: the idea that the emotions, especially the emotion of love, are historically contingent, and the particular context in which he locates the origin of romantic love. Reddy provides a brief account of the relation between emotion and cognition, which he has discussed more thoroughly elsewhere. He notes that neuroscience demonstrates a close, yet content-free, relationship between emotion and thought; affect and cognition work together in the brain, but the range of possible thoughts or feelings depends on what is culturally familiar and available. No neuroscientific evidence indicates that sexual desire, sexual arousal or romantic love ‘are caused or orchestrated by hard-wired brain systems’ (p. 15). The cases from Heian Japan and from Bengal and Orissa are presented mainly to contrast with medieval Europe by demonstrating that the conflict between desire-as-appetite and true love is absent there. The argument about the historical and cultural contingency of forms of ‘longing for association’ is convincing

Human sexuality · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Psychology