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Sur le point de paraître, le très attendu livre de William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love. Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE, The University of Chicago Press, 2012.Présentation de l'éditeur:In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire.  Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance.In The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent—or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900-1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.Sommaire:cknowledgmentsIntroductionPART ONE The Emergence of Courtly Love in Europe1 Aristocratic Speech, the Gregorian Reform, and the First Troubadour2 Trobairitz and Troubadours and the Shadow Religion3 Narratives of True Love and Twelfth-Century Common SensePART TWO Points of Comparison4 The Bhakti Troubadour: Vaishnavism in Twelfth-Century Bengal and Orissa5 Elegance and Compassion in Heian JapanConclusionAppendix: Transliterated South Asian WordsBibliographyIndex