<b>C. Stephen Jaeger</b>, Ennobling Love. In Search of a Lost Sensibility. 1999
Mark Chinca
“Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing particularity […]. It renders them accessible: setting in the frame of own banalities, it dissolves opacity.” These sentences Clifford Geertz sum up project an ethnography whose method is interpretation and goal understanding; they might have provided motto for Stephen Jaeger's latest book, which can fairly be described as exercise Geertzian interpretive anthropology, but applied to past rather than other cultures contemporaneous with ethnographer. Here opacity dissolved “a way loving that seemed me strange unicorns stigmata” (p. ix); love aristocratic men middle ages frequently professed men, fear disapproval, using language gestures strike modern sensibility extravagant.
Arbitrium