Barbara H. Rosenwein Ordine dei libri

We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgements. Drawing on philosophy, fiction, art, letters, memoirs, and evidence from everyday life, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: Like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and kaleidoscopic history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships. If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its “true” essence. But love doesn't work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences, and perhaps write our own scripts.

Tracing the story of anger from the Buddha to Twitter, Rosenwein provides a much-needed account of our changing and contradictory understandings of this emotion

This extraordinary selection of objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds illuminates the rich cultures of medieval history.

What Is the History of Emotions? offers an accessible path through the thicket of approaches, debates, and past and current trends in the history of emotions.

An exploration of emotional life in the West, considering the varieties, transformations and constants of human emotions over eleven centuries.

An exploration of emotional life in the West, considering the varieties, transformations and constants of human emotions over eleven centuries.

The Making of the West is a story of interactions — cross-cultural exchanges that span the globe, as well as the ongoing interactions between societies, cultures, governments, economies, religions, and ideas. To highlight these interactions and help students grasp the vital connections between political, social, and cultural events, The Making of the West: A Concise History presents a comprehensive picture of each historical era within a brief chronological narrative. The book also situates Europe within a truly global context, facilitating students’ understanding of the events that have shaped their own times. A full-color map and art program deepen students’ understanding of the narrative.

This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human...