Contract, Carnival, Tryst, and Trance – Love in the Middle Ages – A History of Love

Interintellect founder Anna Gát continues her exploration of the history of love with a discussion on the Middle Ages and Renaissance. We will explore the dark centuries of perpetual war, plague, and Crusades,  as well as the buzzing peacetime cities of commerce and arts, and the role of religion in the family home.  We will start at the Fall of Rome and arrive at the moments of all-encompassing change that the “discovery” of America and the advent of Protestantism in Europe brought about.

        “… she spake: “Turn thee, and list.

       These eyes are not thy only Paradise.”

– Dante

What we call the “Middle Ages” may be a shorter period than the vast realm of the prehistoric past or even the era of Antiquity which we explored in the first two salons in this series, yet the turbulent centuries that followed the dissolution of the Roman Empire and preceded the colonisation of the Americas were disproportionately instrumental in forming the notions of family, state, and Church which much of the world still lives by today.

In this playful salon we will talk about war, faith, and poetry, and discover that even amidst the horrors of war, destructions of plague, and ecstasies of religion, people were just what we are, people, who loved to dance, gossip, and love, and searched for the meaning behind it all.

Join us to discuss these interesting themes!

*The Dark Ages*

• Sex in the Middle Ages
• The (not so) stinky Middle Ages: why medieval people were cleaner than we think
• Mysticism and Sexuality
• The salacious Middle Ages
• The man who wrote the book of Love — Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura

*Shakespeare and going from Renaissance to Baroque*

• Sex and Music: The Renaissance and Early Baroque
• Gender, sexuality, courtship and marriage
• Did Shakespeare Invent Love
• We know little of Shakespeare’s sexuality—but his work is full of queer themes
• How did the Bubonic Plague make the Italian Renaissance possible

*The Protestants*

• Wittenberg celebrates Luther’s wedding
• Love and Marriage Among the Puritans

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