《爱情与西方世界》是瑞士文化理论家鲁热蒙的一部经典的著作。作者描述了爱情在西方的兴衰史，探索了从特里斯坦和伊索尔德时代到好莱坞电影的爱情心理学。作者长期致力于研究西方世界婚姻和情感的不可避免的冲突，把爱情问题与社会和宗教的责任以及中世纪普罗旺斯混乱的、无法遏制的爱结合起来加以考察，探索了宗教和文化，爱神，上帝，虚无主义和美好生活问题等有时隐藏的关系。按照作者的研究，早期诗人谈论的是以爱欲神学为中心的话语，正是通过这些异端的声音，混乱的、无法遏制的爱以及西方文学，才迈向了一个新的方向。 作者认为，现代西方的激情浪漫之爱的文化根源在于中世纪普罗旺斯的宫廷诗。在西方世界的爱情中，这种诗歌传统默许与卡特里派教派、诺斯替教派二元论的蔑视婚姻和身体的宗教愿景相沟通。 作者结合历史的、哲学的、宗教的、文化的维度，追踪了西方浪漫之爱作为一种秘密从文学开端到电影的商业化时代的演进。希望还原最初完整的爱的神话，并从哲学角度对现代婚姻进行阐述。

A history of the Holocaust must include the history of emotions and imagination of Germans during the Third Reich, for the fundamental reason that the persecution and extermination was built on fantasy. In persecuting and exterminating the Jews, Germans waged a war against an imaginary enemy that had no belligerent intentions toward Germany and possessed no army, state, or government.
The essential motivations for this war were not practical, for Germans and Jews did not have a conflict over territory, land, resources, borders, or political power that often characterizes cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the modern world. In the mind of the Nazis, this was a war about identity. Nothing about Nazi anti-Semitism was driven by a desire to provide a truthful account of reality. Yet it was nonetheless believed by many Germans and therefore was for them real and truthful.
A key to understanding this world of anti-Semitic fantasies is no longer to account for what happened—the administrative process of extermination, the racial ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the brutalizing war—because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities. Rather, a key is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening, for how they imagined their world. What was this fantasy created by Nazis and other Germans during the Third Reich, and the story that went along with it, that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews justifiable, conceivable, and imaginable?

在“经典”形式的文化史（以布克哈特和赫伊津哈为代表）遭受质疑以来，文化史领域新见迭出，在研究对象、主题、视角、方法乃至研究者本身等方面都日益多样化。
著名文化史家彼得•伯克在《文化史的风景》中撷取了若干独具特色的研究主题——如社会记忆的历史、梦的历史、心态史，甚至玩笑和姿态的历史——进行细致描绘之余，对文化史的传统、问题、潜力与趋势也做出了总体的反思。他认为，尽管出现了许多重要的研究方法，但“经典”形式之后尚未出现新的“正统”，文化史研究门派繁多，呈现出一幅“众声喧哗”的景象。