Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern

This is a book that reads like a dark poem about desire itself. Saltus traces eros from the barbarian origins of sex through the mythologies of Babylon and Eden, through the philosophic dialogues of Greece and the courtly romances of medieval Europe, all the way to the sundering of modesty from romance in 18th-century Europe. His prose is seductive and sinister, weaving together scholarship with a decadent sensibility that makes every paragraph feel like a forbidden confession. Saltus has the wit of Wilde, the gloom of Poe, and a voice entirely his own: languid, learned, and utterly unrepentant. This is history as reverie, philosophy as poetry, a portrait of humanity endlessly circling the same eternal question: what are we willing to do for love, and what does it cost us? For readers who want their nonfiction to feel like fiction at its most intoxicating.