Love in literature

Love is perhaps the oldest and most often renewed theme in literature. This section traces its history through the great texts that taught the West how to speak of it: from the fragments of Sappho to Catullus's poems for Lesbia, from Latin elegy to the irony of Ovid, from the Song of Songs and its mystical readings to Plato's Symposium. It then passes through the medieval courts, with the fin'amor of the troubadours, the treatise of Andreas Capellanus and the legend of Tristan and Isolde, on to Dante and Beatrice, Paolo and Francesca, Petrarch and Laura and the tales of Boccaccio. The journey closes with Shakespeare, Goethe's Werther and Romanticism. Each article presents authors, works, dates and contexts, distinguishing documented facts from legends and scholarly hypotheses, to show how every age has reinvented the language of feeling.