"When I first began to look at medieval Latin texts for Carmina amoris, the epigrams, marginalia, and love letters I found by clerics and nuns from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries were a revelation. The beauty and freshness of the language spoke across the centuries. In matters of love (longing, desire, lamenting, sleepless wondering, making up, and quarreling), it appears not much has changed from the so-called 'dark ages' to our own well-illumined era." Steven Sametz