Love and Marriage in Historical Perspective

Catalog description

Love and Marriage in Historical Perspective is a reading-and-discussion-based thematic history course. This course is designed to expose students to the history of love and marriage from classical antiquity to the present in global perspective. Marriage is one of the oldest social institutions in human culture: and, as an institution, it has not always been associated with the concept of love. This course considers the transformation of marriage as both a public, private, political, economic, social, and emotional institution that has been fundamental to the development of human societies. This includes a discussion of the Greco-Roman world, the Middle Ages, the Romantic era and marriage in the global village at the present. Why is traditional marriage on the decline in Western societies? What is traditional marriage? When, why, and how did the idea of love get tangled up with marriage and how successful has the love-marriage connection been over time? Why is marriage in crisis? What does love have to do with it? What are the revolutionary implications of the rise and fall of marriage as a love-match? These are some of the questions we will contemplate in this course as associated with issues related to sex, gender, sexuality, race and class by examining love and marriage in literature, poetry, music, and in philosophical treatises on the subject utilizing the historical method as the primary approach.