Love and Marriage:  From a Medieval and Early Modern Perspective

Both love and marriage play major roles in everyone’s life, and many of our modern discussions center on these two concepts. But we are often much too stuck in our own emotions to understand fully love and marriage.  This presentation offers a cultural-historical perspective on the concepts, examining their associated approaches, values, norms, and ideas.  The audience will learn what constitutes true love and marriage according to a variety of medieval poets, artists, theologians, and philosophers. Ultimately, audience members will be invited to critically analyze their own understandings of love and marriage.

Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona, focusing his research and teaching on the Middle Ages, the early modern age, and on modern issues, such as the environment, gender, immigration, the border, and transcultural experiences.  More specifically, his topics of interest concern love and marriage throughout time, the relationship between Jews and Christians in past and present, the history of early Sonora/Arizona through the lens of the German-speaking Jesuit missionaries of the eighteenth century, and borderlands in Germany in comparison to borderlands of the United States.  For Classen, all research in the humanities must be related to the concerns and interests of those living today.