Of the litany of human emotions, perhaps no one is more powerful, yet tough to define, than love. Some argue that it is a term that has been watered down in our contemporary world, while others distinguish between different kinds of love. It is the source of both the highest reaches of ecstatic poetry and literature as well as the lowest depths of heartbreak and desperation. To be sure, one thing that unites human beings, regardless of religion, race, gender, class, or any other particular identity, is our innate desire to love and be loved. 

Yet, why do we have so much trouble defining it? Over the centuries, our understanding of love and its effects on us have undergone substantial changes, as we grapple with this slippery and bewildering emotion. Since love can easily overwhelm us, we try to make sense of it through narratives and fantasies. Love isn’t a static and immovable object waiting to be discovered. Rather it is constructed from the collective fragments of our experiences, which are more often than not contradictory and non-linear. While we often see love as an act of fate, it is only in the act of retrospection that we come to believe that love, which happens on a contingent event, was meant to be. 

As such, when we look at the narrative of Western history, we see that love has been defined and constructed from a wide range of experiences and philosophies. In her 2022 book, Love: A History in Five Fantasies, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein posits five primary fantasies that have endured throughout the Western history of love: like-mindedness, transcendence, obedient self-sacrifice, obsession, and insatiable desire. Plumbing the depths of Western art, history, poetry, and literature, Rosenwein illustrates how these intertwining fantasies have come to influence our current understanding of love.

Overview:

As a leading scholar in the history of emotions, Rosenwein has fixed her gaze on the historical development of love and how it has been expressed over the millennia. She argues that emotions are not independent of the communities in which we live, which shape how we understand our feelings and assign meaning to them. These “emotional communities” inform how we interpret our feelings, shape them into words and stories that attempt to make sense of them, and reify them, turning them into a coherent fantasy. 

As such, Rosenwien identifies five intertwined fantasies in the Western canon of art and literature that form a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting image of love. The first is the idea of love as a shared kinship of two soulmates uniting as one. The basis of this love can be found in the praise of same-sex friendship in Greek thought, as men who cultivated virtue were thought to be in accord. Through this harmonious agreement, rulers could govern justly and with like-minded virtue (though Plato expanded this idea into a more egalitarian idea extended to all citizens, regardless of gender).

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes posits that humans originally had two faces, four arms, and four legs. The gods, however, were angered, and split them in twain and separated them from one another. Now, each half searches for their original “other half” in order to become whole once again. This likemindedness found corollaries in the Greek couple of Odysseus and Penelope, as well as in medieval writings of Heloise and Abelard. Rosenwein argues that, in the early modern period, this like-mindedness found expression in the likes of Montaigne and Hume as a kinship or sympathy between two souls.

The second fantasy of love is the concept of a transcendent love that takes the lover into a higher realm of existence. While Rosenwein finds this in Greek sources -- such as the satiric vision of Socrates in contemplating the concept of beauty among the clouds -- she argues that this idea of love is primarily associated with ecstatic visions of loving God in the Christian tradition. This then transformed into a transcendence through child-rearing in later centuries. 

The third fantasy consists of love as a form of self-sacrificing devotion to a beloved. This idea of love finds its most salient expression, Rosenwein argues, in the history of marriage as a vow to the other person, particularly the vow of obedience. Throughout her retelling of this fantasy, Rosenwein dips her toes into the continual debates around freedom and love as she bucks against the modern idea that love is free from obligation, which she argues requires redefining. 

The fourth fantasy Rosenwein examines is the concept of love as an unshakable obsession. Rosenwein takes her cue from the romantic poetry of the Middle Ages, as poets wrote letters of unrequited love to their unattainable lovers. Here, Rosenwien’s account takes a self-reflexive approach, as many writers knowingly opened themselves up to criticism of their obsessions, yet chose to pursue it anyway. 

The fifth and final fantasy that Rosenwein analyzes is the idea of love as an insatiable desire that cannot be quenched. This, she admits, might be one of the most curious of the fantasies, as we typically label persistent sexual desire as lust, not love. Yet, this carnal desire feeds into a persistent fantasy of attaining a brief sense of wholeness through the sexual encounter. Rosenwein dives into the history of (mostly heteronormative) sexual deviants throughout the centuries. Insatiable love, Rosenwein writes, “is the heart of darkness, the threat of unchained desire” (175). Its purpose, however,  is to play around with norms and test the boundaries of acceptability. 

The five themes are interconnected, forming a rich, though incomplete tapestry of experiences. Through these five themes, we see Rosenwein investigate how love is expressed through the virtuous thoughts of the mind, the sincere and passionate yearnings of the heart, and the burning carnal desires of the loins. These fantasies of love do not exist in a linear progression throughout history but rather complement and compete with one another at various times. The scripts that are given to us as fantasies, “are very much part of reality; make believe is our way to make sense - and to make art - out of a congeries of disparate elements” (177). While it is easy to believe that our ideas of love are inherent within us and unchangeable, Rosenwein forcefully makes the point that this is the most misleading fantasy of all. Rather, they are constructed through our collective hopes, fears, and experiences, which give us the power to change the script by creating new stories and meanings from love.

Commendations: 

There are several notable strengths to Rosenwein’s account of love. First of all, her work serves as a brisk introductory exploration of the multifaceted ways the West has tried to express and imagine the powerful, if fickle, concept of love. Her writing is briskly paced and breezy, which makes for an accessible and relatively quick read, especially in light of the complex subject matter. Love is a complicated emotion to capture in words, and Rosenwein has given the reader a fascinating and useful glimpse into how it has been felt and expressed throughout Western art and literature. 

Additionally, as a medievalist, I also appreciated Rosenwein’s emphasis on the Middle Ages as a prime space of multivariate and robust thinking. The bulk of Rosenwein’s examples from art and literature are from this period, which serves as a necessary rejoinder against the common trope of this period as the “Dark Ages.” As a scholar of psychoanalytic theory, I doubly appreciated Rosenwein’s emphasis on fantasy as a driving force of history. In this sense, fantasy is not the opposite of reality, but is constitutive of reality itself. History reveals to us the tip of the proverbial iceberg of repressed emotions and drives that are often hidden from plain view, but nevertheless motivate our actions. As such, Rosenwein’s intervention serves as a useful framework for organizing the wild swirl of emotion that has been expressed in myriad ways throughout Western history, as it allows for the dialectic productivity of contradiction. 

Finally, I also appreciated the humility within Rosenwein’s approach. At the outset, she readily recognizes that writing a book about the history of love is a gargantuan undertaking, as there are endless avenues to explore. She admits that her account is incomplete, “for the story of love, like love itself, is always in the process of change, re-elaboration, and new fantasy making” (8). This epistemic humility was refreshing to read, especially in an academic text, which can often be prone to sweep shortcomings under the rug. Likewise, Rosenwein’s attempt to recenter the role of women in these narratives was also commendable, as men tend to make up the bulk of traditional Western histories. 

Critique: 

On the other hand, Rosenwein’s account has a few key weaknesses. Most notably, due to the broad subject of the book and short length, there is much that is left out of Rosenwein’s account or flattened for the sake of simplicity. While the breezy writing makes for an accessible read, the nuances of her chosen subjects and the historical developments she describes are more often lost for the sake of brevity. Due to the breakneck pace of each chapter, Rosenwein can at times be overly reductionist in order to draw hardline comparisons between the key figures of her analysis, which often might disappoint those looking for a more rigorous comparative analysis.

Due to its non-linear nature, this work can often feel rather fragmented and disjointed. Rosenwein jumps back and forth between various centuries as she recounts how various philosophers and writers have conceptualized love. Some of these are repeated in nearly every chapter, which makes sense in light of Rosenwein’s argument that these five fantasies overlapped significantly over time. Yet, it can often be difficult to find solid footing as they read the text, as Rosenwein occasionally goes into tangents and gets lost in the weeds. This is made worse by the fact that some writers are only obliquely referenced, while others receive several pages of vivid description without much justification. This might ultimately be an issue of editing, but this back-and-forth unevenness made the pacing of the book awkward at times. 

Additionally, Rosenwein’s historical account draws strictly from the Western canon of art and literature. Though she does give a brief acknowledgment that other important ideas and interpretations of love exist in non-Western histories, they do not feature in any way in these texts. Again, while Rosenwein admits as much from the outset, it is curious that there isn’t any greater reference to these ideas, especially since contact with non-Western cultures greatly influenced these five fantasies, especially in the Middle Ages and early modern period. As such, Rosenwein’s account tends to treat “the West” as an undivided and undisturbed whole, despite the varied and multidimensional aspects that comprise it. Even if we were to geographically isolate the West from outside influence in this historical narrative, it still wouldn’t account for the fractures that invariably arose within the European continent, such as factional religious and political conflicts. As such, the book’s format can feel rather dated in its structure, despite its refreshing epistemological humility and contemporary feminist themes.

Finally, the book almost exclusively focuses on heterosexual relationships when it comes to its narrative of love. There is no discussion of the role of queer and non monogamous relationship, save for a brief aside regarding the invention of the category of homosexuality in the nineteenth century. This further limits the scope and impact of this work and reinforces heteronormative love as the dominant structure of the historical imagination. To be sure, queer relationships have been marginalized in history, especially since the nineteenth century, yet Rosenwein’s omission of this dimension of love only serves to reinforce the male-dominated, heteronormative view of history that she is otherwise eager to disrupt through her recovery of women’s voices.

Conclusion:

Overall, Love: A History in Five Fantasies, is an accessible and enthralling tour through the Western history of love. While its exceedingly brisk pace and narrow scope might be disappointing for those looking for greater depth, Rosenwein’s work serves as an excellent introduction to the ways in which we narrativize and construct meaning from our disparate experiences of love. Though it barely scratches the surface in regards to reconstructing a rigorous history of love, the wide breadth of Western sources within this book will undoubtedly spark lively and interesting discussions amongst its readers. As such, this book would serve as a productive tool in undergraduate courses on Western history, especially as an example of the burgeoning field of the history of emotion. In showing us how fantasies are made within particular communities, Rosenwein gives us the opportunity to remake and reimagine our collective concepts of various emotions, including the most powerful one of all.