It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s snowing. No problem. I’ve curled up with a box of chocolates and a couple of good books. Today, they’re all about courtly love. Back in the 12th century, in the age of ...

The Tudors in Love. By Sarah Gristwood. St Martin’s Press; 400 pages; $29.99. Oneworld Publications; £20 As “The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess” shows, chess once carried a more thrilling charge than ...

In the historian Sarah Gristwood’s “The Tudors in Love,” for both monarchs and courtiers the stakes are higher than romance. Card one, clockwise from top: Henry VIII; Mary I; Queen Elizabeth I. Card ...

For all the tabloid fuss and docudramas, the messy love lives of today’s British royals seem like pallid reflections of monarchical scandals past. The personalities are smaller, the stakes so much ...

John of Gaunt (1340-99), like many premodern historical figures, poses a problem for the contemporary biographer. Norman Cantor’s subject, the founder of the Lancastrian line, the richest man in ...

When most people think about medieval marriages they are either practical, cold, and loveless, or the idealised “courtly love” of chivalric knights and damsels in distress. But what was married life ...

On April 27, Boston Baroque presented a thrilling production of one of the gems of baroque opera, George Frideric Handel’s opera “Ariodante,” which is a tale of love’s triumph over evil set in ...

Love and loss, beauty and time solemnize every act, every appreciation–a kind of talmudic connoisseurship attentive to the scent, the overtone, the implication of every gesture. Feeling is meaning–and ...

An affair between young Angelica and Don Fabrizio, the last Sicilian prince of the House of Salina? That seems to be what Giuseppe di Lampedusa contemplated, according to a new edition of his ...