The Making of Romantic Love is a contribution to the history of emotions—here, specifically, the emotion William Reddy identifies as “longing for association”—and to the comparative study of cultures. Its approach is ethnographic, and its method, the author tells us repeatedly, consists of “just reading the documents.” The result is a comparative study based mostly on secondary sources and a reading of literary texts as historical documents. Reddy's concern is primarily medieval Europe (or more specifically, medieval France). Chapters on India (“The Bhakti Troubadour: Vaishnavism in Twelfth-Century Bengal and Orissa”) and Japan (“Elegance and Compassion in Heian Japan”) in the same period offer a comparative context that highlights the uniqueness of the medieval West. Reddy's argument is that the origin of Western romantic love is to be found in the medieval notion of courtly love, developed in opposition to moral theological definitions of sexual love as an appetite of the body to be suppressed by spiritual discipline. Whereas in Japan and India, sexual love, pleasure, and devotion to another person were bound together in spiritual and religious practices, in the medieval West, such notions were split apart. In The Making of Romantic Love, this conflict is defined as an agonistic struggle between, on the one side, the clerics and theologians who censure desire, and on the other, the poets who celebrate sexual love and emotional attachment.

Reddy believes in grand narratives. Courtly love, defined by twelfth-century French poets, is a response to the anti-sex Gregorian reforms of the same period, he tells us, a new response to “longing for association.” It defines sex as part of a loving bond with another person, in opposition to the notion of sex-as-appetite. In Reddy's broad-brush approach, everything happens in France (despite a few references to Germany), and all moral and theological writing is subsumed in the “Gregorian Reform.” The many intersections between theological and literary texts are neglected and everything good happens in literature, though in this analysis, literature is read only for content and not for its literary qualities. This is because, Reddy tells us, literary critics of the last three decades have been so preoccupied with Lacanian psychoanalysis that they have not understood the texts. Reddy has arrived to set us straight.

Reddy offers us “an ethnographic reading of the evidence” (p. 42). This means a straightforward reading of medieval poetry as the speech of a historically situated individual poet, and poetry is compared to other examples of aristocratic speech. This comparison is productive: Reddy shows the extent to which poets draw on the practices of aristocratic speech, that is, the discursive practices used by elite members of medieval culture to negotiate status, position, and relationships. Because disputes were resolved by rule-governed violence, strategies of deceptive speech and silence were deployed to avoid conflict, particularly around potential accusations of adultery or incest, he argues, and the valuable insight that similar linguistic practices were used in poetry to promote loving sexual relationships is grounded in comparative evidence from other records of aristocratic exchange.

In Reddy's reading, poetry is about history: history explains poetry and poetry influences history. There is nothing wrong with that view, but one does not need Lacan to see how slippery language and meaning are in poetry. This is particularly true for the elusive and multivalenced poetry of the twelfth-century troubadours and trobaritz, whom Reddy cites in published translations. He advances a highly normative and traditional reading of courtly love. It is resolutely heterosexual, he argues against a growing body of research (by literary scholars) that shows the ambiguity and ambivalence that characterize descriptions of the beloved's gender in many poems and romances. Reddy also fails to acknowledge the many ways in which courtly texts engage with theological texts and traditions. Above all, his ethnographic reading neglects the play of language and the alternative meanings and ambiguities that lurk in poetry—he cites texts for what they say, but does not analyze the ways that meaning is constructed (and deconstructed) through word play, allusion, and even poetic conventions.

Reddy is not a literary scholar, but an ethnographer, as he repeatedly asserts. So is the comparative ethnographic method productive? The Indian and Japanese examples allow Reddy to make a claim for the uniqueness of what happens in Europe and to ask an interesting question about the West, but one whose answer—that medieval courtly poetry invents Western romantic love—is hardly new. Reddy uses comparative study to argue for origins, but to my mind, the most valuable contribution of The Making of Romantic Love to medieval studies is in its comparative study of the cultural forms and understandings of love, and the careful teasing out of similarities and differences among those forms. In this respect, Reddy has produced a model study.