Does Solace Mean Comfort

Culture, Consolation, and Continuing Bonds in Bereavement

Culture, Consolation, and Continuing Bonds in Bereavement presents Dennis Klass’s most important contributions to the scholarship of grief and bereavement. Journal articles, book chapters, and previously unpublished works cover more than 40 years of study and practice on the forefront of our understanding of individual, family, and community grief. The writings range widely, including explorations of continuing bonds and consolation, aspects of grief that were missing when Klass began his work, studies of grief across different cultures, and critical analyses of theories that were popular in grief scholarship but inadequately described bereaved parents’ experiences. The book ends with a previously unpublished case study of Charles Darwin, whose experience as a bereaved parent informed the worldview at the heart of his theory of natural selection. This collection of essays offers an integral understanding of how individuals move through grief and is a valuable addition to the library of anyone working with topics relevant to grieving adults, children, and adolescents.

Love Cures

What is love? Popular culture bombards us with notions of the intoxicating capacities of love or of beguiling women who can bewitch or heal—to the point that it is easy to believe that such images are timeless and universal. Not so, argues Laine Doggett in Love Cures. Aspects of love that are expressed in popular music—such as “love is a drug,” “sexual healing,” and “love potion number nine”—trace deep roots to Old French romance of the high Middle Ages. A young woman heals a poisoned knight. A mother prepares a love potion for a daughter who will marry a stranger in a faraway land. How can readers interpret such events? In contrast to scholars who have dismissed these women as fantasy figures or labeled them “witches,” Doggett looks at them in the light of medical and magical practices of the high Middle Ages. Love Cures argues that these practitioners, as represented in romance, have shaped modern notions of love. Love Cures seeks to engage scholars of love, marriage, and magic in disciplines as diverse as literature, history, anthropology, and philosophy.

Ancient Jewish and Greek Encouragement and Consolation in Sorrow and Calamity