Luisa Passerini Research Articles

Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean. By Andreas Guidi

Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean aims to provide a post-Ottoman, colonial, and social history of Rhodes from the perspective of generations and youth. The book serves as both a microhistory of Rhodes and a global history of the Mediterranean in the twentieth century. Despite its apparently narrow focus on youth in a single locality, the book provides a compelling macro picture and delves deeper into the issues of post-Ottoman societies, Italian colonialism (and fascism), and the Mediterranean world. As one of the most significant achievements of the book, Generations of Empire offers “a change of framing toward thinking Italian colonialism as post-Ottoman history” (7). The persistence of Ottoman institutions, social structures, as well as forms of belonging during the island’s Italian colonial rule invites further contemplation of the chronological and geographical implications of “post-Ottoman” space and time. Furthermore, Guidi focuses on the Mediterranean as a divided whole, taking into account imperial continuities, colonial legacies, nationalist tensions, economic expropriation, and migration flows. On a more individual, familial, and rather communal level, the research informs the reader with extremely valuable detail on confessional communities, bonds of loyalty, and surveillance. The book treats communities as “intermediary institutions between government and families” (22) and gives voice to actors and institutions from all confessions in its narrative. The book’s engagement with “youth” and “generation” both as concepts and potential social actors is also quite novel. Guidi uses youth as a “situational” term, stressing that “a Young Turk newspaper, an Italian colonial governor, a group of Orthodox students, a rabbi, or a Muslim notable might all use the term youth with quite different aims.” (7). However, for the state(s), communities, and families alike, youth represented what Luisa Passerini has called “a metaphor of social change” and was a correlative term implying binomial references based on one’s standpoint.

Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival in Baghdad

Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival in Baghdad

Past, present, and future of the Italian memory of Fascism. Interviews with Luisa Passerini, Filippo Focardi, John Foot, Robert Gordon, and Philip Cooke

AbstractThis article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.

Zoufalství, jaderné rakety a magické hory. Uchronický příběh bývalého vojáka základní služby

The text follows the post-cultural turn oral history paradigm, as expressed in concepts of Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and others. It also makes use of the “dream stories” (Traumgeschichten) research by Reinhart Koselleck, to discover and interpret the cultural processes and forms related to the problematic historical subjectivity of an ex-Czechoslovak People’s Army conscript. The main historical source is the recorded oral-history narrative of a person, whose compulsory military service (1975–1977) led to a decidedly negative turn in his life. The narrator attempted to treat his shaken historical subjectivity through the creative construction of an elaborate uchronic story, merging his own military experience with motifs of imaginary service in units armed with nuclear weapons, with contemporary legends dealing with similar topics, and with older cultural strata, highlighting the phenomenon of “magical mountains” and apocalyptic military prophecies.

Sentimental biopower: rereading the Spanish nineteenth century

ABSTRACT Drawing on the theorization by Luisa Passerini and Kyla Schuller of Eurocentric notions that linked racial superiority to emotional refinement, the article will trace a substratum of biopolitical thinking across a range of Spanish texts from the 1830s to the 1880s. The use of medieval settings in Romantic historical fiction will be related to the contemporaneous belief that courtly love was the basis of European civilization. I will then explore how the concept of “impressibility” as the basis of moral improvement, derived from Lamarckian evolutionary theory, underpins a variety of literary and reform writings. I argue that these texts, which place the female capacity for sentiment at their center, are the other side of a biopolitical construction of class and race hierarchies.

Throwing the case open: The impossible subject of Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation

For John Forrester, the ‘case’, particularly in its psychoanalytic version, makes possible a science of the particular – knowledge open to the differences of individuals and situations. This article takes up that aspect of Forrester’s account that linked the psychoanalytic case with forms of autobiography – new narrations of that particular self. After Freud, many authors – literary and psychoanalytic – have taken up the challenge of narrating subjectivity in new forms, engaging a quasi-psychoanalytic framework (H. D., Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are examples). Focusing on Luisa Passerini’s text Autobiography of a Generation, which deals with the Italian experience of 1968, the article examines some of the features of such hybrid texts, and argues that psychoanalysis makes a contribution not just to the forms of self-investigation they pursue, but more significantly to the search for a radically new methodology of narration. Such models end up as ‘impossible’ cases, but in so doing they explore new interdisciplinary means for understanding the historical shaping of subjectivity.

Pamięci. Pomiędzy milczeniem a zapomnieniem

Artykuł jest poświęcony kwestii istotnej dla zrozumienia kształtowania pamięci zbiorowych w XX w., a mianowicie mechanizmom tworzącym obszary „zbiorowego zapomnienia” oraz działaniom przywracania tego, co z pamięci zostało usunięte, przemilczane, pominięte lub wyparte. Przywołane w erudycyjnym szkicu badania i teksty wychodzą daleko poza granice pamięci europejskich, dając tym samym ogląd zjawisk pamięci i milczenia w ich globalnym wymiarze. Tym samym Luisa Passerini zachęca do porzucenia aroganckiego przekonania o naszej unikatowości i kulturowej wyższości.
 Tłumaczenie na podstawie: L. Passerini, Memories Between Silence and Oblivion, [w:] Memory and Utopia. The Primacy and Intersubjectivity, London–New York 2007, s. 15–32. Zgoda na publikację przetłumaczonej wersji artykułu została udzielona przez Autorkę. Licencja CC BY-SA 4.0 (przyp. red.).

Community Voices and ‘Community Scripts’

Community Voices and ‘Community Scripts’1 Carmen Mangion As a primary source, oral history testimonies have a chequered twentiethcentury history. The resurgence of oral history as a methodology in the 1960s was received with consternation by some historians, who saw it, as Eric Hobsbawm did, as a ‘remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts’.2 In the 1960s and 1970s, despite those who discounted the empirical value of oral history, it became a wellspring of ‘facts’, especially for social historians investigating marginalised groups.3 Scholars of cultural studies from the 1980s embraced and valued oral history for its subjectivity. Luisa Passerini argued that oral history narratives were more than facts, they were cultural constructs (‘expression and representation of culture’) that revealed ‘dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires’.4 Another doyen of oral history, Alessandro Portelli, added: ‘Errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings’.5 This reframing of oral history encouraged the development of the burgeoning field of memory studies, which bolstered the theorisation of oral history. Part of this theorisation included debates on the connections between individual and collective memory, which is the subject matter of this article. These links are examined to ask whether individual recollections of women religious6 fit into an (often unconscious) cultural script determined by the social norms, values and practices of religious life. If they do, than this suggests individual memories are pre-determined and constructed into grand narratives that are subsumed into collective memory.7 Cultural historian Anna Green suggests otherwise: that there is room for the ‘consciously reflective individual, or for the role of experience in changing the ways in which individuals view the world’.8 What better way to evaluate the question of cultural scripts than using the oral testimony of religious sisters?9 This short piece explores the subjectivities of Catholic women religious (their sense of themselves which includes their experiences, human inter-relationships and emotional states), Carmen Mangion Studies • volume 107 • number 427 302 as they frame their life-stories during the course of an interview (or series of interviews).10 One would expect, in communities of women who were socialised together, typically from youth to old age, a common narrative shaping their personal accounts of religious life. These narratives would then reflect in part the collective memory and corporate identity of the religious institute to which they belong. This article begins with a brief discussion of individual and collective memory, corporate identity and cultural scripts, before investigating three potential cultural script narratives. It concludes by arguing that collective memory does shape individual recollections but, given the disruptions to religious life many women religious experienced, personal stories do not always depend on a shared history. Collective memory and corporate identity The concepts of collective memory and corporate identity are important for understanding how religious life operates, as they allow us to connect communities of women religious to their historical traditions, customs and myths. They are also useful for understanding how cultural scripts are created. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs employed the term ‘collective memory’ to identify how an individual used their social and cultural surroundings to link their individual memories with that of the larger community. He argued that ‘The individual calls recollection to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory’.11 For much of the twentieth century, the intricate layering of frameworks of religious life included a two-part formation period, first as a postulant, then as a novice, with each stage punctuated by very specific milestones in the form of ceremonies and vows. Throughout this educative process, women were absorbing the history of the religious institute, learning community customs and studying the Rule and constitutions which guided their governance, prayer, work and even physical movements. Once a sister was professed and entered her community, collective memories were transmitted from sister to sister in order to create a cohesive message and identity.12 There was a consistent and repetitive emphasis on the Rule and constitutions, which was linked to the identity of a religious institute, and was used to build community and influence the self-perception of the community. Life for all women religious was structured by the horarium, which timetabled waking, praying...

Borders, Conflict Zones, and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerini's important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerini's early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerini's insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.

On Luisa Passerini: subjectivity, Europe, affective historiography

Weaving together the key themes of subjectivity, Europe, and affects, this article argues that the work of Luisa Passerini constitutes a paradigmatic shift in understandings of contemporary European history, culture, and politics. During the 1990s, Passerini's focus shifted from the history of fascism and memory to the study of ideas and experiences of Europeanness. She reclaimed Europeanism as a research topic for cultural history in order to articulate a critique of Eurocentrism. The coherence of her overarching thematic scope was safeguarded by a constant emphasis on subjectivity. Understanding the correlation between the theoretical privileging of the notion of intersubjectivity and the nurturing of collaborative, transgenerational, and transnational academic practices is thus very important for contextualizing Passerini's historiographical contribution. During the last three decades, Passerini has developed a historiographical framework that crosses many disciplinary boundaries and incorporates practices of teaching, learning, and researching into an integrated mode of producing historical knowledge.

Response on Borders, Conflict Zones, and Memory

In response to five essays (including the historiographical introduction) written in her honour, Luisa Passerini offers precise commentary and wide-ranging reflections on the different authors’ applications of such key concepts as subjectivity, intersubjectivity, memory, narration, love, utopia, and ego-histoire. Mixing the intellectual, emotional, professional, and personal, she considers the varied implications of the transnational and multigenerational panel of scholars whose respective contributions address Mennonite refugee women's food memories; testimonies by far-left Chilean women tortured by the military dictatorship after the 1973 coup; memories of the war between East and West Pakistan, and India and Pakistan; and a self-reflexive re-visitation of her career-encompassing work.

‘Bodies Across Borders. Oral And Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’ (BABE): a conversation with Luisa Passerini, Donna Gabaccia, and Franca Iacovetta

In this final contribution to this theme issue on Luisa Passerini's important scholarship, the guest editors and Passerini discuss her current EU Research Council-funded collaborative project, BABE, which is meant to bring together oral and visual forms of memory that reformulate the concept of Europe (and Fortress Europe) in more inclusive ways. Its distinctive features are discussed, including the collection and analysis of drawings and other visual itineraries by artists and other subjects, including students, from the global diaspora in Europe. Other topics include the importance of conversation in oral history work, the ‘mobility turn,’ and the gendered nature of mentorship.

‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini

This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gendered aspects of the MIR women's experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized political violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced and also how, more recently, women's testimonials have helped to break that silence. Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’

‘The dumpling in my soup was lonely just like me’: food in the memories of Mennonite women refugees

This article analyzes food memories as expressed in the oral and written memory sources of Mennonite women refugees who migrated from the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1940s to Canada and (less so) South America. The specific case study is informed by theoretical models brought to the study of memory by historian Luisa Passerini. In particular, her work on the psychological and emotional meaning inherent in memory is evident here, as Mennonite women associate food with past experience both traumatic and life saving. As such, Passerini's notion of memory's double character fits the pattern of food memory that aligns with polar times of deprivation and abundance.

(Re)constructing Utopia

The union of art and politics has endured down the centuries, looking to the past, through memory, and to the future, through desire. The memory of what was or could have been provides a utopia to be celebrated or mourned, and since 1948 Palestinian and Israeli art has reflected on loss and gain, sacrifice and security, and presence and absence in the land. Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli art has converged, seeking peace, critical reflection and an acknowledgement of the impact of the years of unrest that has been borne by both sides, while technology has afforded a means to trace heterotopias in the spaces between possession and dispossession. Drawing on Luisa Passerini, Michel Foucault and Maurice Halbwachs, this article maps the land, utopia and heterotopias in Israeli and Palestinian artistic practices, and explores the performativity of silence, loss and remembrance through the works of Sliman Mansour, Reuven Rubin, Tamam al-Akhal and Yael Bartana.

Touches, Traces and Times

tAlthough this is officially an 'unthemed' issue of New Formations - collecting simply the best unsolicited submissions received by the journal over the past two years - the resonances and convergence between its various contributions are remarkable. Every article here is concerned in one way or another with issues around the theorisation of experience, affect, and temporality: with the technologically, temporally and socially distributed nature of experience. Several essays concern themselves in novel ways with the unstable relationship between the interior self and the surfaces on which it is reflected or expressed, and whose interrelationships are its condition of im/possibility. The irreducibly social and technological character of existence is a key theme which runs across several contributions. The historical specificity and/or the conceptual insufficiency of orthodox psychoanalytic doctrines is a recurring theme, explored here in an array of polemical and analytic contexts. The importance of the early twentieth century as a key point of historical and intellectual reference comes up in several different ways, even while other key moments - from the moment of Kant's formulation of the modern subject to the events of 1968 to the present day - are crucial as well.Lisa Baraitser's essay considers the return of the 'peace camp' form of protest which has characterised recent pro-democracy uprisings, and re-reads Luisa Passerini's classic 1988 study, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, as a way of understanding the intergenerational dynamics of protest. Baraitser argues that through an engagement with the psychoanalytic tropes of rememoration and delayed action, we can see how this text both engages and reverses the classic feminist slogan, 'the personal is political', showing that it is through a capacity to attach to one's own generation and to establish retroactively the lateral relations of 'my time', that the work of psychoanalysis can take place. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger's notion of the matrixial, the paper further proposes that this capacity for attachment to 'my time', is linked to what it is not possible to separate from, lose, or abject, which Ettinger traces as an alternative substrata to psychic life, marked in the feminine as a form of positive difference. Baraitser reads the matrixial in political rather than personal terms, linking it to a return to the aesthetics of communal living proposed by the 'peace camp'. The paper concludes by tying together the double meaning of generation: generation as the collective time-frame of the political with generation as the matrixial substratum of psychic life.Victoria Coulson makes a comparably radical engagement with psychoanalytic theory, contending that contemporary practices of literary criticism continue to reproduce and reiterate idealist propositions about the nature of subjectivity and the mind/body split. To explore this claim, her essay examines the reception by late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Anglophone scholarship of Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault's work on shoplifting in fin-de-siecle Parisian department stores. The essay demonstrates that recent scholarship on de Clerambault reproduces the idealist assumptions that informed critical accounts of his work in the early 1990s, and locates these philosophical postulates within two interrelated poststructuralist interventions that enjoyed significant intellectual prestige in the 1980s and 1990s: the critique of the 'culture of consumption,' and the feminist deployment of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The article proposes that a new interpretation of de Clerambault's work may challenge the sexual politics of the philosophical idealism that structured some of the most influential feminist scholarship of the poststructuralist era, and that continues to shape critical thinking today.Rex Ferguson's essay covers adjacent ground, examining the emergence of new conceptions of selfhood, memoration, depth and surface around the turn of the twentieth century. …

Collecting Time: Some Reflections on the Psychopolitics of Belonging

Starting with the return to the aesthetic of the 'peace camp' that we have seen in the 2011 pro-democracy uprisings stretching from North Africa and the Middle East to the central squares of Madrid and Athens, this paper re-reads Luisa Passerini's classic 1988 text, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, as a way of understanding the intergenerational dynamics of protest. Passerini's text reads the events of 1968 through collecting political testimony in the mid 1980s from those involved primarily in the occupation of the Palazzo Campana at the University of Turin, which she then juxtaposes with an account of her own psychoanalysis that she undertakes during the research period. Her psychoanalytic journey takes her to the core traumatic event of her childhood - the death of her mother at the age of six - which can only be worked through in relation to a working through of the events of 1968. I argue that through an engagement with the psychoanalytic tropes of rememoration and delayed action, we can see how the text both engages and reverses the classic feminist slogan, the personal is political, showing that it is through a capacity to attach to one's own generation and to establish retroactively the lateral relations of 'my time', that the work of psychoanalysis can take place. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger's notion of the matrixial, the essay further proposes that this capacity for attachment to 'my time', is linked to what is not possible to separate from, lose, or abject, which Ettinger traces as an alternative substrata to psychic life, marked in the feminine as a form of positive difference. I read the matrixial in political rather than personal terms, linking the matrixial with a return to the aesthetics of communal living proposed by the 'peace camp'. The essay concludes by tying together the double meaning of generation: generation (the collective time-frame of the political) with generation (the matrixial substrata of psychic life).

Introduction

Introduction Eugenia Paulicelli (bio) and Elizabeth Wissinger (bio) December. After years, I once again pay attention to how I dress, coordinating colors, accessories, sometimes I even wear make-up. Everyone remarks on it: "You look so elegant." For me, it's a way of demonstrating a femininity, a way of being like my mother. —Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968 Bordercrossing "You look so elegant." Such a comment can be a double-edged sword—is it a compliment? Or is it a criticism? As Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, "Elegance is also a bondage," and elegance in the academy, particularly for women, can be fraught. Can a woman who loves clothing and cares about the way she looks still be politically and intellectually engaged and, most important, taken seriously? Are fashion and feminism a contradiction in terms? In this issue, we have collected pieces that attempt to see through clothes to the politics of power they materialize, in order to consider how the study of fashion examines not only costume or dress but also questions of gender and racial identity, representation, the geopolitical concerns of globalization, and technologies of self that push the boundaries of what we mean by gender and embodiment toward the realm of virtuality. These questions animate both fashion and women's studies, and to grasp their relationship, we first must ask: How has fashion, so often associated with frivolity and negative views of femininity, come to be a topic of serious study? [End Page 14] Fashion studies' growth as a field was born of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s-1980s that deeply affected the academy. Its establishment in academia as a field of study emerged from the same kinds of intellectual work and the profound upheaval of the status quo that gave us women's studies. Women's studies emerged from the global feminist movements and political protests of the 1960s to answer a demand to transform the lively debates on the history of difference and translate them into disciplinary practice. Women with access to education and the opportunity to enroll in women's studies courses saw their lives, their ways of thinking, and their individual practices changed. Responding to demands to rewrite past, present, and future history from a gendered and feminist perspective inevitably brought to light new areas of inquiry, such as the lived experience of dress and appearance, formerly considered to be outside of academia's purview. Scholarly inquiry into these aspects of everyday life created a new urgency for linking theory with practice, discourse with embodiment and the body, and the personal with the political. These unavoidable nexuses significantly inform not only feminist thought and the study of women, gender, and sexuality but also the study of fashion. Work in each area has further demonstrated the ways in which the reorganization and expansion of existing disciplines is a phenomenon that is transformative and fundamentally political in nature. In fashion studies, this reorganization and boundary crossing has been relatively recent. It was only in the 1990s that U.S. institutions began to take the academic treatment of fashion seriously. By that time, with London leading the way, graduate programs had become well established in the United Kingdom and, much later, in other European countries such as Italy, Sweden, and Denmark. Building on growing interest in the field, the seminal journal Fashion Theory, founded by Valerie Steele in the early 1990s, was met with a ready and eager audience and played a crucial role, along with Steele's scholarly work, in the establishment of fashion as an academic field of study. As interest and participation in the field grew in the early 2000s, the City University of New York (CUNY) became an early adopter of fashion studies in the United States, along with several other New York-based institutions. Organizing one of the first international academic conferences in fashion studies on American soil in 2002 brought CUNY to the forefront of fashion studies in both the United States and abroad.1 In the wake of this conference, a CUNY Fashion Studies Forum was established, [End Page 15] strongly supported by the Women's Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center, which...

Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968

The meeting-point between memory studies and auto/biographical studies provides new perspectives on the study of the radical generation of 1968 through life-writing techniques, including oral history. A comparison between Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, published in 1986, and Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, published in 1988, suggests that belonging to this generation involves tensions between the social master narrative of 1968 and auto/biographical memories. Steedman and Passerini’s personal narratives relate in complex ways to this master narrative, and exploring these ambiguities helps us to generate further innovation in ‘generational thinking’ as well as a comparative understanding of the ‘memory studies’ of two of the most important thinkers in British and Italian contemporary history.

Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere

Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere Rochona Majumdar (bio) Shannon McSheffrey . Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 304 p.; ISBN 978-0-8122-3938-6. Christina Simmons . Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 306 p.; ISBN 978-0-19-506411-7. Ginger S. Frost . Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. 272 p.; ISBN 978-0-7190-7736-4. Maria Raquel Casas . Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007. xiv + 261 p.; ISBN 978-0-87417-697-1. Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas, eds. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 280 p.; ISBN 978-0-226-11352-4. Kristin Celello . Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 248 p.; ill.; ISBN 978-0-8078-3252-3. The association of the modern "West" with ideas of romantic love, companionate marriage, and the nuclear family has a long and varied genealogy. Whether we look at the radically different philosophical expositions of John Locke, G.W.F. Hegel, or Friedrich Engels, or to twentieth-century historians like Philippe Ariès, George Duby, and Lawrence Stone, there remains little doubt that the emergence of the modern West has been seen as coterminous with consensual marriage and conjugal equality. In historian Luisa Passerini's eloquent formulation, the "myth" of Europe was associated with the idea of romantic love.1 The books under consideration in this review are all engaged in revealing the gaps between ideals of romance and conjugal equality and the actual lived experiences of men and women. They interrogate received ideas about love and marriage, primarily in the Anglophone west, from the late medieval period to the present. Of [End Page 182] course, romantic love was never the only reason people married. Love and money, familial security, and citizenship concerns were inextricably linked in making western marriages. Taken together, these books remind us of the labors involved in making a marriage work. While the labor of the couple is unquantifiable, the institution of modern marriage has boosted new professions and economic activity that constitute key features of contemporary Anglo-American capitalism. The majority of these works are engaged in the critical labor of historicizing the particular forms of romantic love, conjugal equality, and companionate marriage in England and America, demonstrating that love, marriage, divorce, and romantic partnerships were highly contested phenomena. The books collectively make it clear that any attempt to think of love, marriage, divorce, or companionship as homogenous or uniform is fundamentally flawed. Each study helps the reader navigate a particular archive and its vivid portrayal of how intimacy was lived by men and women, and how intimate practices shaped the public sphere in England and the United States. Love in Africa, the only book that focuses on the "non-West," offers a foil for comparison, giving insight into how these purportedly western ideas of romance and marriage get differently inflected in non-western settings. Since the publication of Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès's multivolume A History of Private Life, the ideology of separate spheres has persistently influenced historical imagination.2 Feminist scholarship has issued numerous challenges to these ideas by showing the porous nature of the public and private spheres, which in turn has bearing on our understanding of marriage. If marriage is not a singularly "private" practice, then under what rubric can we productively think about the place of marriage and sexual relations? Shannon McSheffrey's book, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, marks an important addition to these debates. By demonstrating how marriage and sexual practices were formative of medieval English civic culture, McSheffrey shows how anachronistic it is to use categories such as private and public, personal and political for the medieval period. As she argues, ". . . some of those arenas of life that seem obviously 'private' to us were not so...