Historia Amoris

A history of love as literature has treated it, from the Vedas and Egypt through Greece, Rome, the troubadours and the salons to the nineteenth century. Edgar Saltus wrote in a deliberately jewelled prose that was famous and then unfashionable within his own lifetime. The book is an anthology of attitudes rather than a history, and it is at its best on Provence. Sixty plates after painters including Poussin and Claude Lorrain carry the myths of Jupiter and Juno and the judgment of Paris alongside Saltus's jewelled prose.