Search Results

In the 1550s, Joachim Du Bellay, a member of the Pléiade and an aristocrat who sought a career in the king’s diplomatic service, made use of Homeric elements in his poetry that reveal a deep ambivalence toward the notion of royal prudence. In the same period, Etienne de la Boétie questioned monarchical authority by contesting Homer’s authority on politics, precisely because Homer and Homeric figures had become such an integral part of the political imaginary of sixteenth-century France, finding objectionable that Dorat’s teachings and the Pléiade’s verse were placed in the service of that authority. While his use of Homer amounts to a strenuous critique of civic humanism, at least as it was being practiced, it also forms an important link to the work of Montaigne, who responds to La Boétie on the question of sovereignty.

Part II showed that tenses were fundamental to early modern rituals of dying, burying, and mourning. One strand within such rituals was the representation of the actions and words that the deceased had performed and produced during his or her life. In Part III the role of tenses in this strand is examined more closely, but with the focus no longer on the ritual dimension. This first section of Part III focuses on how dead people’s non-verbal actions were represented as providing them with posthumous presence, through three interconnected routes: (i) the system of exemplarity; (ii) history-writing; (iii) one of the deceased person’s faculties—his or her will—being extended and continued through the actions of the living.

This essay examines the role of the place of the ‘encyclopaedia’, or circle of learning, in writing on poetics by humanist authors from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Italy and France and in neo-Latin and the vernacular. It explores two questions: what is the relationship between Renaissance appropriations of the encyclopaedia as an ideal and contemporary views on how poetic competence is achieved? And how does the place of the encyclopaedia interact with other poetic commonplaces in circulation in pan-European Renaissance culture? Comparative analysis of occurrences, overt and implicit, of the commonplace in writing by Joachim Du Bellay, Cristoforo Landino, Marco Girolamo Vida, and Jacques Peletier Du Mans reveals that the circle of learning is an important touchstone for positions taken in longstanding debates that see Neoplatonic and Horatian approaches to poetics variously opposed, appropriated, and reconciled.