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The series of publications of Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin stands for internationally oriented literary studies which go beyond an exclusive focus on the Western tradition and turn towards the European, American, Arabic and Asian literatures of modernity, medieval times and antiquity. The publication forum offers monographs and anthologies which present an exemplary effort within their subject and at the same time cross its boundaries into the philologies and literatures of the world. The purpose is the integration of single disciplinary and comparative research involving neighbouring discursive practices. Friedrich Schlegel's approach obliges to do research of literary cultures from a universal-poetic perspective.

International Board

• Ute Berns (Universität Hamburg)
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University)
• Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (University of Tokyo)
• Renate Lachmann (Universität Konstanz)
• Ken’ichi Mishima (Osaka University)
• Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa)
• Jean-Marie Schaeffer (EHESS Paris)
• Janet A. Walker (Rutgers University)
• David Wellbery (University of Chicago)
• Christopher Young (University of Cambridge)

This book explores one of the central questions that has haunted husbands and wives and lovers over the millennia of history: What kind of afterlife might they expect for their love once one or both of them have died? Focusing on the evolution of ideas about posthumous love within medieval and early modern Europe, the book includes many religions and cultures in order to understand how expectations about the afterlife differed across traditions.