Chapter 3 examines different narratives of female same-sex love with the aim of elucidating varied notions of erotic selfhood. The women whose stories are recounted here often construe themselves, implicitly or explicitly, as “masculine” or as “man” and are ungirded by economic notions of men as “providers.” Such claims to manhood are relational and hinge on the question of which partner is more experienced or more senior in status than the other. In contrast to Euro-American notions of gender expression, their masculinity is not threatened by their quest for male husbands and children. Rather it is their precarious economic reality that curtails their ideals of being able to provide for a female lover. The personal “styles” deployed to make up for this deficiency require a careful look at the situationality of gender in West Africa, as outlined by African feminists, and at the Akan figure of the ɔbaa barima, or “manly woman.”

Scholars have long recognized that Latin love elegy’s essential erotic plot is based on the conflict between the adulescens amator and meretrix in Roman comedy, and particularly its focus on the competition between lover and beloved for sexual access, behavioral control, and the economic interests of both parties. This chapter argues that Catullus was an exemplary figure for the elegists who first showed how Roman comedy could enter sustained personal poetry, and it is argued that Catullus was, with respect to the erotic and economic conflict, a proto-elegist. This chapter explores how Catullus examines the stock scene of the excluded lover in one understudied cycle of his poems, where he limned the essential elements of Roman elegy’s appropriation of Roman comedy’s “greedy girl” motif, serving as a bridge between the two genres and a window through whom Ovid and other elegists viewed Plautus and Terence.

Highlights how couples met – usually during work – and how they communicated. Discusses the range of relations, from sexual encounters to empathic relations and deep love with marriage plans. Analyzes the gender dynamics of the relationships between disarmed soldiers in captivity and in a foreign country and at least nominally free local women.

Interpreters assume not only that the moral concepts of Proverbs constitute virtues as defined by Aristotle but also that theological concepts in Proverbs resemble Aquinas’ theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. According to the Summa Theologica, these virtues correspond to the human actions of intellectual assent to God, trust in him, and love for him. The questions asked are twofold: how does Proverbs portray human apprehension, trust, and love in or for God, and how do these conceptions relate to the theological virtues of Aquinas’ moral philosophy? I argue that Proverbs contains concepts that meet Aquinas’ criteria for theological virtue. The biblical concepts appear explicitly, as in passages that mention “hope” and “love,” and implicitly, as in passages that portray humans exercising faith in God without mentioning “faith.” I explore texts in Proverbs that most clearly feature the theological virtues (Proverbs 1-3; 30:1-9) and material that supports and qualifies my initial conclusions (Proverbs 10-29).

This chapter argues that while Shakespeare has no single or overarching theory or view of love, specific patterns or tendencies are evident in both the plays and the poems. It focuses on three characteristics of such a disposition: the singularity of the beloved (‘you are you’) that admits of no substitute; the essentially projective rather than reactive vision of love (‘love sees not with the eyes but with the mind’); and the perhaps counterintuitive fact that love is not an emotion as such, but rather a disposition or form of behaviour that involves different, sometimes contradictory, emotions. This puts Shakespeare at odds with contemporary, Galenic theories of love as one of the most volatile of the passions. The Sonnets, for example, are virtually devoid of references to contemporary psychology, and the chapter focusses on these poems to explore the rich varieties of emotion they express in their complex and fraught negotiations of love and desire. Classifying and arranging the sonnets in accordance with the emotions expressed in them furthermore does not accord with the usual narrative attributed to them.

In the late 1710s and early 1720s, Swift produced three fairly neglected but potent short poems that break open the typical depiction of romance in verse. ‘Phillis, or, The Progress of Love’ tells the tale of an artful prude who elopes with an unpromising hero. ‘The Progress of Beauty’ presents Celia as a syphilitic nymph rotting to pieces before the narrator can finish her story. ‘The Progress of Marriage’ revels in the misfortunes of a foolish old cleric and his vain wife. If anyone could lay claim to the dubious honour of being Swift’s own muse it was Esther Johnson (“Stella”). Swift wrote her an annual poem for nearly a decade until she died. What sort of love poetry could Swift write? Pretty panegyrics for a younger woman he admired? Profound verse essays on life and love and ageing? Metapoems for a trainee poet? Some important friendships made for difficult poetry. The most noteworthy case in point is doubtless Esther Vanhomrigh, another former tutee, whom Swift immortalized in his longest ever poem. 'Cadenus and Vanessa', like the Stella series, is a remarkable non-love poem that conveys a deeper attachment to the subject than a straightforward parody would imply.

In the 1730s Swift produced his most controversial poems (‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’, ‘Strephon and Chloe’, and ‘Cassinus and Peter’). Often read as discomfiting scatological poems, these works have been grouped together as 'the unprintables', proof (some critics argue) of an increasingly depraved mind. My new interpretation treats the works in the context of Swift’s career-long fascination with the materiality of poetry. In the unprintables Swift messily mingles the conventions of ancient and Renaissance love poetry in an exposé of what he perceives to be the limitations of form itself. This chapter also places Swift’s most famous poem, 'Verses on the Death of Dr Swift', alongside his other self-portraits written between 1731 and 1733, including political satires and metapoems alike, from verse libels on Delany to 'On Poetry: A Rapsody' and ‘The Legion Club’. Odes, epistles, fables, ballads, verse libels, political satires, descriptive and narrative verses, imitations, auto-eulogies, elegies, rhapsodies, anti-erotica, peeping-tom poems, metapoems, and more: to the end, Swift kept reinventing himself and the poetry and poets around him.

Intimate relationships exist around the world, throughout the lifespan, and are influential in every domain of peoples’ lives. This chapter provides a brief review of the literature on intimate dating and marital relationships including processes such as attraction and relationship initiation, relationship maintenance, and relationship dissolution. A few theoretical perspectives (evolutionary, interdependence, attachment, self-expansion) are highlighted throughout the chapter. A main focus of this review is discussing intimate relationships in the context of gender and culture, including limitations in our current knowledge and suggestions for future research.

Lucretius’ choice of addressee has engaged a number of critical responses, both historicizing and literary-critical. This chapter assesses what is distinctive about Lucretius’ approach to C. Memmius (taken to be the praetor of 58 BC and unsuccessful consular candidate of 53 BC) through comparison with the theory and practice of Epicureanism in contemporary sources, chiefly Philodemus. In the context of Memmius’ disgrace and exile to Athens, Lucretius’ invectives against ambition and similar vices take on an especially mordant character – a frank criticism that contrasts with Philodemus’ more deferential treatment of C. Calpurnius Piso, especially in On the Good King According to Homer. This difference suggests that Lucretius chose Memmius as his addressee for the very reason that this corrupt and failed Roman politician was far from being a promising disciple and badly in need of Epicurean teaching.

Chapter 2 argues that relationships are integral to a person’s life and constituted in human’s well-being. As both human life and well-being have non-instrumental values, relationships cannot be instrumentalised. Thus in our relationships with others, we connect to the intrinsic value of them as persons. Insofar as we appreciate other people as such, that value and other people become part of our own life. In this way, human relationships can enlarge our horizons and enrich our lives. These interpersonal relationships are ethical because they involve a form of caring. An awareness of ethical relationships in one’s well-being can determine an openness and attentiveness to others. In this sense, others must be regarded as whole beings, not as assemblage of their identity labels or roles. This commitment to being-with and to ‘we’-ness is transformative and transcendent, and such ethical relationships can be nurtured through caring education and radical love. This includes learning to be directed at cultivating human qualities; curriculum to offer unmediated experiences of others through humanities subjects and activities within the humanities domains; and pedagogy to feature listening and dialogue. Most importantly, schools should be set up as caring communities where members can collaborate and develop a sense of ‘we’.

Euripides was lampooned in Aristophanes’ comedies for creating characters such as Phaedra and Stheneboea, married women driven by desire for a man who is not their husband. By contrast, the picture of Sophocles that we glean from the extant tragedies seems to characterise him as a playwright comparatively less interested in depicting female erotic expression and its consequences. This chapter shows that this picture is flawed: in at least three plays – Phaedra, Oenomaus and Women of Colchis – Sophocles did portray ‘women in love’ who experienced sexual desire for a male character and whose actions in pursuit of that desire resulted in the deaths of others. The chapter draws attention to this overlooked aspect of Sophoclean characterisation, and deftly exposes the main differences between the typical Sophoclean and Euripidean models of such women: in Sophocles, none is deliberately betraying a husband, and this may be one reason as to why the playwright appears to have escaped the accusations of immorality and misogyny that comedy heaped upon Euripides.

Scholars have typically turned to Aquinas’s Summa theologiae for the moral theology of Dante’s Purgatory. However Dante is, in fact, following an older, more conservative tradition of Christian ethics represented by Peraldus’s De vitiis et virtutibus. In the thirteenth century, theologians moved from trying to displace the structuring principle of the seven capital vices with other alternatives to reforming it from within, and Peraldus and Aquinas adopted markedly different approaches to this reform.

Peraldus’s rationale impels him to treat the vices separately, according to disordered love by excess or deficiency (gluttony, lust, avarice, and sloth) or to love of an evil (pride, envy, and anger). Aquinas, by contrast, introduces an Aristotelian anthropology and a new positive teleological frame, enabling him to treat vices and virtues together in terms of shared good objects desired or avoided. A comparative critique highlights the characteristics, including the weaknesses, of Dante’s poetic treatment (which clearly follows Peraldus’s treatise).

The parallel in ethical content between Peraldus and Dante is matched, furthermore, by a parallel in form: Peraldus’s De vitiis invites us to imagine Dante assuming in the Purgatorio the role of a venacular preacher against vice, with the reader envisaged as a Christian sinner.

Critics have typically failed to appreciate the importance of the sin of sloth in Dante’s biography, as well as its pervasive presence in his Christian moral vision. This chapter demonstrates that Peraldus’s treatise ‘De acedia’ profoundly influenced Dante’s poetic representation of sloth. It opens up the depth and breadth of contemporary understandings of acedia enabling us to understand sloth as, indeed, a scholar and a poet’s sin.

Two key narrative dramas occur in the terrace of sloth: the acute fervour of the penitent slothful and, framing this, Dante-character’s intellectual zeal for knowledge. Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures (XVII, 73– XVIII, 87) – on the moral structure of Purgatory, on the nature of love, and on free will and moral responsibility – are not, then, parenthetical to the terrace’s drama. Rather, they are represented symbolically by the dream of the Siren (XVIII, 130–45 and XIX, 1–69).

Dante’s first sin in Inferno I may be identified as tepidity and, more precisely, as the sub-vice of ignavia. Likewise, Dante’s confession in the Earthly Paradise is principally a sin of omission, with the Siren’s call providing a psychological dichotomy with the desire for Beatrice. Sloth is also the post-conversion sin of Statius, Dante’s poetic cypher.

This chapter reappraises Dante’s relationship with his reader in Purgatorio through the interpretative paradigm of medieval preaching against vice. The terrace of pride is particularly interesting, in this context, as the medieval Church provides its implicit backdrop. The terrace’s centrepiece is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls (Purg. XI, 37–142), and this encounter is framed by the three examples of humility (Purg. X, 34–93) and the twelve examples of pride (Purg. XII, 25–63). This chapter interprets these three groups together as a triptych.

Dante openly acknowledges that he sinned gravely in pride, and he models a spiritual exercise of conversion from pride to humility. As sinner and preacher, he invites his reader to reflect upon the three prideful souls identified (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani) and upon the three groups of prideful examples (delineated by the acrostic ‘VOM’) in counterposition with the three exempla of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan).

Dante’s choice of exempla (which has puzzled critics) becomes understandable when, and only when, we interpret them in relation to each other in terms of his moral purpose for the terrace as a whole.

When Augustine tells us in Books 7 and 9 of the “Confessions” that he saw “that which is,” he is not claiming to have seen God as a whole or one of the divine persons, each of whom is equally God, but that he understood an eternal standard that God is also eternally understanding, thereby achieving a union with God in the knowing of one divine idea. This is a union that provides momentary intellectual possession or “embrace” of an intelligible beauty, because the Forms are intelligible beauties in Platonism.

The first chapter concentrates on the period around 1800, laying the groundwork by examining the concepts of sentimentality, the code of Romantic love, Bildung, interpretation, and the appeal of Greek antiquity as an analogue to the history and formation of the self. Beginning from Winckelmann’s erotic classicism it draws on the writings of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Georg Herder, together with insights from recent literary, historical, and sociological work on the discursive codification of emotions and of closeness in that period.