The Natural History of Love

ΒΟΟΚ DESCRIPTION

LOVE
—perhaps the most potent world in our language— has been almost all things to men: a voluptuous amusement...an ennobling ideal...a tool of the devil...a psychiatric cure-all...an experience of God...even a synonym for good housekeeping.

This superbly written book is wide-ranging, deeo-probing history of what love has meant in the Western world. It tells how people since early Greek times have experienced the emotion of love; how love has in its various manifestations been related to sex, courtship, marriage, social status, and romanceq and why modern love, emerging from the traditions of the past, has come to have such crucial importance for people today.

Morton Hunt draws on the letters and diaries of both famous and little-known people who, in their emotional lives, epitomized the pattern of love in their time. He marshals a splendid parade of lovers and shapers of love: Alcibiades, the insolent hero of the Greeks; Samuel Pepys, rake, husband, gossip, and philanderer; Eleanor of Aquitaine, who presided over the "court of love"; Casanova, the neurotic Don Juan; Martin Luther, the not always ascetic monk; Rousseau, whose first affair was with a woman he called "Mamma"; Saint Mary the Harlot, who waged the Christian struggle against lust; Ovid, guide to adulterers; Havelock Ellis, who found his own impassioned pleas for healthy sex difficult to follow; and many more.

As Mr. Hunt says: "This is neither a Perfumed Garden nor a historian's Kinsey Report, but primarily a history of emotional relationships between the sexes, Sexuality plays a part, to be sure, bu the thing I have wanted to show is how people have felt about each other." Intriguing, surprising, and continuously illuminating, The Natural History of Love is probably the best book yet written for everyone who seeks a more profound understanding of the bond—sometimes fragile, sometimes galling, sometimes strong and life-giving —that unites men and women.

Morton M. Hunt (1959). The Natural History of Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hardcover in colour dust jacket. xiii+416+xiii=442p.