Volume I · A Slow History

A history of
romance,
from Sappho
to the airport.

Amoria is a journal in the old sense — an illuminated commonplace book tracing how humans have loved, wooed, waited, and written about it, from the first lyric fragment to the last unsent message.

Enter the archive → ✦ Est. mmxxvi

Renaissance-style painting of two lovers embracing in a candlelit garden at dusk — “Two hearts, one flame.” — anonymous, Florence, c. 1490

A brief ledger

c. 600 BCE Sappho writes fragment 31, the first anatomised love in the West.

1st c. BCE Ovid publishes the Ars Amatoria — the earliest surviving dating manual.

1174 Marie de Champagne convenes the first recorded ‘court of love’.

1595 Shakespeare drafts Romeo & Juliet; the balcony enters the language.

1846 The Brownings elope; 574 letters follow.

1942 Casablanca teaches the twentieth century how to say goodbye.

2003 The word “situationship” begins its slow crawl into the OED.

Four Chapters

The eras of longing.

All eras →

Add eras under Eras → Add New to populate this grid.

On the invention of the balcony.

Before Verona there was Provence, and before Provence there was a wall. The balcony was not designed for lovers; it was designed for weather, for air, for looking down at horses in a yard. Its long romantic career began, as most such things do, by accident — a woman appeared at one, a poet was passing beneath, and Europe took roughly eight hundred years to get over it.

What the balcony offered was not access but framing. It made a stage of a household window. It insisted that romance take place in the open, in earshot of the servants, in view of the moon — and thereby made every private feeling a small public performance. We have never quite given that up.

Continue reading →

Miscellany

Object

The Lock of Hair

A gram of keratin, wrapped in tissue, kept for forty years in a drawer. Portable relics for portable saints.

Word

Saudade

Portuguese, untranslatable — the ache for something loved that may never return. First recorded in a 13th-century songbook.

Ritual

The Handfast

A cord, a wrist, a promise held for a year and a day. Older than the church that eventually claimed it.