The article reviews the findings of recent studies on how the idea of romantic love appears in literary fiction in many cultures across the world.

What the Early Scholars of Love Believed

Researchers of literary history once believed romantic love was a European creation rooted in Medieval poems and songs of “courtly love” and Early Modern romantic literature. The historians thought that these European romantic ideas, stories, and descriptions spread further to other cultures across the world. It turned out they were wrong in their Western culture-centered views.

“Romantic Love” Emerged in Literary Fiction Across the World

Researchers, however, learned that the Southern French culture of the 12–13th centuries, a presumable “inventor” of romantic love, was substantially influenced by the Arabic and Iberian cultural conceptions of love of that and previous times. Recent studies have demonstrated that in the Indian, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Japanese cultures, romantic love evolved culturally independently of each other. They developed their own yet largely comparable literary traditions.

Investigations of the cultural history of numerous societies have shown that romantic love has been enduring in many places and eras (see for review, Baumard, Huillery, Hyafil, et al., 2022; Jankowiak and Fischer, 1992; Karandashev, 2017).

This Is How Romantic Love Ideas and Plots Came in Literary Fiction

But how did romantic love ideas and plots first enter literary fiction, and how did they spread culturally?

Romantic elements in European and Asian literary fiction have grown significantly over the current millennium across many societies and cultures. The themes and narratives of love appeared first in Classical India, Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. However, the substantial increase in love topics happened much later in cultural history. When, where, and how did this occur?

A recent large-scale study completed by French and Spanish researchers confirmed the cross-cultural universality of romantic love ideas. Nicolas Baumard, Elise Huillery, Alexandre Hyafil, and their colleagues compiled a comprehensive database of ancient literary fiction spanning the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. They compiled literary data for 77 periods spanning 3,800 years of human history and 19 geographical regions around the world. The researchers discovered that socioeconomic, ecological, and cultural factors contributed to the literary proliferation of romantic love (Baumard et al., 2022).

Economic Factors that Affected Literary Interest in Romantic Love

At first, one may think that the ideas of love are on another plane than the economic life of human existence. Romantic love is idealistic, while the economy is materialistic. So, they seem not to be closely related.

However, the researchers found that higher incidences and a larger prevalence of love themes in narrative fiction strongly correlate with regional variations in economic development across societies in the past. The higher levels of economic development in these societies lead to an increased abundance of romantic love literature in their cultures.

I noted elsewhere how economic development significantly contributed to the boost in interest and proliferation of romantic love in literary fiction in the past centuries of cultural history.

Growth in economic development played a significant role in the literary evolution of romantic love. It was conducive to the rise and flourishing of love fiction in Western Europe during the Central Medieval period of 1000–1300 years (Baumard et al., 2022).

However, literary themes, plots, and narratives of “romantic love” emerged and evolved in many world cultures independently of one another. That upsurge occurred at roughly the same historic periods when their societies saw growth in their population, urbanization, and economic growth (Baumard et al., 2022).

What about the Cultural Diffusion of Romantic Love?

“Cultural diffusion” is one of the main mechanisms explaining the spread and blending of cultural ideas, beliefs, artifacts, and practices across various cultures. Many people who study literature think that the spread of ideas from other cultures caused the growth of romantic literature.

So, what about the cultural diffusion of romantic love themes, plots, and narratives? For example, historians of literature considered medieval European “courtly love” as the outcome of social contacts with Arabic courtly culture and possibly the cultural rediscovery of Roman and Greek literature. In particular, some scholars believe that the love story of Tristan and Iseult might have its origins in unknown archaic Celtic fiction, a Welsh fable, an Irish tale, or the Persian love story of Vis o Rāmin.

Was Cultural Diffusion Frequent and Significant in Literary Love Fiction?

Researchers in literary history (Baumard et al., 2022) compiled an enormous collection of romantic love fiction across many cultures. They ran statistical modeling on their data set to explore the role of several factors in the evolution of love in history. When they compared the explanatory power of economic development and cultural diffusion, they discovered that despite the evidence that European and Asian societies had contact with each other, “their cultural diffusion played a minor role in explaining the concomitant rise of love.” (Baumard et al., 2022, p. 507).

Many old oral folklore tales of the 12th century were enriched with romantic themes, plots, and narratives to meet the growing interest in romantic stories in affluent societies in Western Europe.

As researchers demonstrated (Baumard et al., 2022), literary cultures varied across historical periods between romantic and non-romantic values in accordance with the economic standing of their societies.

The Examples of Romantic Love in Greek and Russian Literary History

Here is the Greek example,

“Greek, the lengthiest literary culture of our sample, started as non-romantic during the Archaic period, became more romantic during the Classical and Roman periods, then switched back to lower levels of love during the early medieval period and finally developed a new romantic culture during the Central Middle Age and the Early Modern period.”

(Baumard et al., 2022, p. 511).

Here is another example of romantic love, this time from Russian literary culture,

“The Russian culture quickly developed a highly romantic literary tradition during its economic take-off in the eighteenth century, despite a long tradition of non-romantic works. This suggests that the transmission of earlier works (that is, tales, epics) is less important in explaining the eighteenth-century level of love than the ecology of eighteenth-century Russia (that is, higher economic development).”

(Baumard et al., 2022, p. 511).