Murstein, B. I. (1974). Love, sex, and marriage through the ages. Springer.

The author presents a comprehensive survey of marriage practices world-wide, from ancient to modern and across the world’s societies. It is a great reference book for scholars of love, sex, and marriage. The book includes many topics, historical periods, cultures around the world. Among those are the following:

The evolution and classification of marriage. Hebrew marriage in the Old Testament. Marriage among the Greeks. Roman marriage.

Early Christian views on marriage and sex. The Middle Ages: The church and marriage. Marriage among the medieval laity.

Courtly love and its evolvements. The Renaissance and the Reformation: 1500-1615. The age of reason and licentiousness: 1615-1789. Romantics and Victorians: 1789-1918.

Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud: Philosophers of Sex. American marriage: From the colonies to the Civil War. Nineteenth-century experiments in marriage in the United States. The dawn of women’s liberation and American marriage: 1865-1918. Marriage and love in contemporary America. The sex explosion in America. Marriage in the Soviet Union. Marriage in China: Past and present. Japan: Confucius and computers. Marriage in Black Africa.

The future of marriage: some literary and theoretical approaches. Current marital innovations. Love, sex, and marriage: An overview and some predictions.