Marilyn Yalom is the author of the new book The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love. Her other books include A History of the Wife and How the French Invented Love. She is a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and she lives in Palo Alto, California.
Q: You write that an experience at the British Museum
inspired your new book. What initially caught your attention, and how did that
eventually result in this book?
A: In 2011, I was attending an exhibition of medieval
artifacts at the British Museum. In one
case I saw a collection of gold coins and pieces of jewelry that were part of
the Fishpool treasure hoard discovered in Nottinghamshire in 1966.
Suddenly a heart-shaped brooch caught my eye. I noticed the heart’s two lobes at the top
and the V-shaped point at the bottom as if I were seeing them for the first
time. Then for a brief moment I was
invaded by images of hearts—the ones I had known all my life from valentines,
candy boxes, balloons pendants and bracelets.
It dawned upon me that the perfectly symmetrical heart is a
far cry from the lumpish organ we carry inside us, and I asked myself how the
human heart had been transformed into such a whimsical icon. From that point
on, that mystery pursued me.
Q: Has the heart always been associated with love?
A: The heart has been associated with love as far back as I
can find in the written records of Western civilization. As far back as
Greco-Roman antiquity, the poets have been identifying the heart with love in
verbal conceits that would not find their visual equivalents for another two
thousand years.
Q: At what point did the image of the perfectly formed heart
first emerge, and have those images changed over the centuries?
A: The image of the heart as the symbol of love first
appeared in the 13th century, but it was not yet a bi-lobed symmetrical heart. In
a French manuscript called “The Romance of the Pear,” circa 1250, a kneeling
man is pictured offering a heart to woman in the shape of a pine-cone, eggplant
or pear.
That same shape appeared in both secular and religious
“heart offerings” to either a loved one or to God —the secular amorous heart in
France and the Catholic loving heart in Italy—in the period around 1300.
Finally, a French and Flemish manuscript called “The Romance
of Alexander” from around 1340 contained an
image of the bi-bilobed symmetrical heart held in the hand of a woman
who had received it from a man sitting next to her. He points to his chest as
the place from which it had come.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything
that especially surprised you?
A: I researched this book mainly in the wonderful new art
history library at Stanford University, but also in places where medieval
manuscripts and artifacts are held, such as the Morgan Library in New York, the
Cluny Museum in Paris, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Museum and
Victoria Museum in London.
A small museum in Regensburg, Germany sent me images of
their Medallion tapestry containing scenes of love’s joys and torments, some of
which show the German goddess of Love (Minnekönnigen) shooting an arrow into a
lover’s heart. All the early heart
imagery that I know of is either French, Flemish, Italian, or German.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now I am giving talks about this book in the Bay
area around Valentine’s Day, in Washington, D. C. in late March, in Boston in
late May. (See the calendar on my website.) After nine books, I’m
taking a break from writing.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: As I look back over my writing career, I realize that I
often take familiar subjects and defamiliarize them. I force myself (and others) to see them as if
for the first time. This is true of my
books about the female breast, the wife, the chess queen, and the heart icon.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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