A Perverse History of the Human Heart

By Milad Doueihi

The seat of the soul, the centre of legends, the middle of cults and cultural taboos: the heart has a history as long and complex, and often as sordid, as that of the secret life it once signified. And this is the history that Milad Doueihi tells in a book that follows the adventures of the human heart through custom, legend, religion, and literature from antiquity to early modern times. Most prominent, and macabre, in this history is the account of the eaten heart, beginning with the myth of Dionysos, who was kidnapped and devoured by the Titans. Doueihi shows the reader, from the Middle Ages through to the 17th century, strange tales combining a cuisine of the macabre with the devotion of the lover, in which a jealous husband serves his unwitting wife the heart of her murdered lover. Beyond the tensions of courtly love, manifest in the Laid Ignaure, the Roman du Chatelain du Coucy, and works by Dante and Boccaccio, Doueihi evokes the image of the devoured heart invoked in Francis Bacon's Essay on Friendship.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674663276
• ISBN13: 9780674663275
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"