Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century The Popularization of Romance [Hardcover]

Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century explores the impact of print on conflicting cultural notions about romantic love in the sixteenth century. This popularization of romantic love led to profound transformations in the rhetoric, ideology, and social function of love - transformations that continue to shape cultural notions about love today.Introduction: Love, The Book Market, and the Popularization of Romance 1. Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier : Love and Ideal Conduct 2. Mario Equicola's De Natura d'amore : Love and Knowledge 3. Antonio Tagliente's Opera amorosa : Love and Letterwriting 4. Jacques Ferrand's On Lovesickness : Love and Medicine Conclusion: Romeo + Juliet Bibliography

The argument the eminently readable Love in Print presents is relatively simple. Before the advent of print, love was not as perplexing as it was afterwards. As access to printed books increased, discourses on love, no longer restricted to the elite coteries, discovered new audiences among merchants and millers. Love became as much a subject of the piazza as the palazzo, and there was a corresponding cultural shift, a destabilization of how love was conceived of rhetorically, ideologically and socially. - Times Literary Supplement

Beautifully written, and devoid of jargon, Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance is much more than a study of four specific books that treat love as either a philosophical, ideological, rhetorical or physical question. It is an erudite analysis of love as a broad cultural phenomenon with concrete and tangible effects in the sixteenth century, with Moulton's erudition manifesting in his extensive research, the complex tissue of ideas he has interwoven, and the many thoughtful questions he raises. This book will interest a host of readers in many disciplines. - Margaret F. Rosenthal, Professor of Italian, University of Southern California, USA

Love may be a many splenlóc