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Women, the vernacular, and classical languages

Helena Sanson

in Women, Language and Grammar in Italy, 1500-1900

This chapter examines women's linguistic education in Cinquecento Italy and the role played by the vernacular in making knowledge more accessible to the less educated, and particularly to women. ... More

This chapter examines women's linguistic education in Cinquecento Italy and the role played by the vernacular in making knowledge more accessible to the less educated, and particularly to women. Women's language, according to men of letters and theorists, was simple and devoid of refinement, but also pure and conservative. Women's role as linguistic educators of their offspring could only be a limited one, circumscribed to the first years of childhood: a girl's education usually remained confined within a domestic environment dominated by the vernacular, and removed from the universe of classical languages and more advanced studies that was a privilege of the lucky few. With the development and spread of the printing press, women came to be seen as a new, profitable sector of the publishing market. They became the target of a variety of works that brought the literary vernacular within their reach. A determining role in helping to spread the literary vernacular across different social classes was played by Petrarchism, and the prestige of the written vernacular allowed for the expression of the voices and talents of women writers. Discussions on language were not merely arid scholarly lucubrations. They had become a fashionable topic that pervaded courtly and upper-class society and concerned men and women alike, with women's presence also occasionally directly gracing the more traditional realms of male linguistic erudition.Less

Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno

Gatti Hilary

in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years

This chapter traces the more secular spirit of Giordano Bruno's Petrarchism. It suggests that Bruno's originality can be seen in the fact that he brings his Italian experience of the Petrarchan and ... More

This chapter traces the more secular spirit of Giordano Bruno's Petrarchism. It suggests that Bruno's originality can be seen in the fact that he brings his Italian experience of the Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan debate to Britain and that he confronted the principal English Petrarchan poet of his time, Sir Philip Sidney. It discusses Bruno's dedication of the Gli eroici furori to Sidney and his belief that the Petrarchan sonnet is a suitable vehicle for philosophical enquiry in the post-Copernican, infinite universe.Less

Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England

Michael Wyatt

in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years

This chapter examines the traces of Petrarchism in England during the early modern period. It discusses Roger Ascham's attack on Petrarch, Elizabeth Tudor's translation of the first ninety lines of ... More

This chapter examines the traces of Petrarchism in England during the early modern period. It discusses Roger Ascham's attack on Petrarch, Elizabeth Tudor's translation of the first ninety lines of Petrarch's Trionfo dell'Eternità, and Arundel Harrington's rewriting of the Vita Solitaria. It suggests that it was Petrarch's versatility and elusiveness that allowed so many different versions of him to circulate in the early modern period.Less

Sidney, Spenser, and Political Petrarchism

Syrithe Pugh

in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years

This chapter examines traces of Petrarchism in English poets Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sydney. It argues that the engagements of both poets with Petrarchism are more serious, and indeed more ... More

This chapter examines traces of Petrarchism in English poets Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sydney. It argues that the engagements of both poets with Petrarchism are more serious, and indeed more political, than traditional readings have implied. It explains that these two poets share Petrarch's condemnation of desire but do not display their contemptus mundi. It also discusses Spenser's recognition of the Petrarch's authority as a model for creating a sense of nationhood in thrall to a monarch and his use of this model to create a counter-national poetry whose authority is independent of political power.Less

Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet

Ronald D. S. Jack

in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years

This chapter examines the Scottish Petrarchans before and after 1603 or the Union of the Crowns. It explains that Petrarch was initially resisted as a model for the connection between poetry and ... More

This chapter examines the Scottish Petrarchans before and after 1603 or the Union of the Crowns. It explains that Petrarch was initially resisted as a model for the connection between poetry and nationhood and that the Scottish sonnet became more anglicised when James VI became King of England and Scotland and Petrarchism became the more dominant lyrical influence. It considers three Scottish poets who exemplify this development of the Petrarchan sonnet, culminating in William Drummond of Hawthornden.Less

Introduction

Mauro Calcagno

in From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self

From Madrigal to Opera investigates music's own contribution to Petrarchism as a window on the issue of early modern subjectivity.

From Petrarch to Petrarchism: A Rhetoric of Voice and Address

Mauro Calcagno

in From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self

A powerful discourse on a flexible self emerges in the opening sonnet of Petrarch's Canzoniere, discussed also in musical settings by Monteverdi and Wert. Petrarch's view of the self was ... More

A powerful discourse on a flexible self emerges in the opening sonnet of Petrarch's Canzoniere, discussed also in musical settings by Monteverdi and Wert. Petrarch's view of the self was appropriated, inflected, and socialized in late Renaissance literary Petrarchism, of which the madrigal was an epiphenomenon. Representative figures of the literary side of Petrarchism practiced and theorized about a “rhetoric of voice and address,” a way in which poets communicated to readers/listeners, which was then appropriated by musicians.Less

In Search of Voice: Musical Petrarchism in the Sixteenth-Century Madrigal

Mauro Calcagno

in From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self

Chapter 5 investigates the musical side of Petrarchism in the madrigal before Monteverdi, from the microlevel of verbal resonances and emphasis on specific words to the macrotextual level of modeling ... More

Chapter 5 investigates the musical side of Petrarchism in the madrigal before Monteverdi, from the microlevel of verbal resonances and emphasis on specific words to the macrotextual level of modeling print collections of poems and madrigals on the Canzoniere. This range of possibilities is explored from the point of view of creators, performers, and listeners, in works by Verdelot, Arcadelt, Willaert, Rore, Wert, and Marenzio, focusing on these composers' appropriation of the voice of poets, as well as on the listeners' perception of it. Through madrigal books, musicians created stories that effectively met the expectations of listeners, who stored in their memories narrative patterns absorbed by reading poetry collections. These composers calibrated the relationships between narrator and characters in a variety of ways, assembling texts from disparate literary sources and modifying them to suit their own purposes.Less

Passionate, eloquent and determined: Heroines’ tales and feminine poetics: Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture read 12 April 2016

Helen Cooper

in British Academy Lectures, 2015-16

This article studies a group of romances, appearing first in French in the mid-12th century in the Roman d’Eneas, and later in Anglo-Norman and Middle English (including Ipomadon and William of ... More

This article studies a group of romances, appearing first in French in the mid-12th century in the Roman d’Eneas, and later in Anglo-Norman and Middle English (including Ipomadon and William of Palerne), in which the heroine is given priority over the male protagonist in falling in love and acting to bring that love to fruition. These relationships are aimed at marriage and, very often, procreation, in a way that opens the potential for the founding of a dynasty; they thus go against received ideas of both courtly love and antifeminism. The texts are characterised by long soliloquies given to the heroines that anticipate the Petrarchan discourse of desire, though here it is distinctively feminine and carries the hope of fulfilment; and fulfilment and mutuality are in turn given their own distinctive, mimetic form of poetry.Less

Making Petrarch Matter: The Parts and Labor of Textual Revision

William J. Kennedy

in Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare

This chapter explores the acts of redaction and revision in Petrarch’s works. In general, Petrarch’s manuscripts during the 1350s and 1360s abound in tropes associated with time, change, and shifting ... More

This chapter explores the acts of redaction and revision in Petrarch’s works. In general, Petrarch’s manuscripts during the 1350s and 1360s abound in tropes associated with time, change, and shifting identity, and his revisions in these manuscripts often concern the relationship of change to physical matter. The chapter argues that the revisionary nature of his poems shapes Petrarch’s vernacular poetics, and its influence dominates sixteenth-century Petrarchism. Petrarch himself seems to have thought of his writing as a species of intellectual property that entitled him to a professional status, hence his poems reveal not the presentation of a completed and unchanging self, but the palimpsest of a past self under revision as he evolves a new and still changing self.Less

The Smirched Muse: Commercializing Sonnets pour Hélène

William J. Kennedy

in Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare

This chapter examines the fifth and newly revised edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres (1578), which includes a new sonnet sequence written for one of the queen mother’s maids of honor, Hélène de Surgères. ... More

This chapter examines the fifth and newly revised edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres (1578), which includes a new sonnet sequence written for one of the queen mother’s maids of honor, Hélène de Surgères. It consists of two parts with no overt distinguishing features between them, offering sixty poems in Le premiere livre des sonnets pour Hélène and fifty-five poems in Le second livre des sonnets pour Hélène. To this two-part collection the poet attached fifty-one Amours diverses, thirty-nine of which he integrated into his Sonnets pour Hélène in the sixth edition of his Oeuvres (1584). These years mark Ronsard’s return to Petrarchism, building upon observations about himself and others, spun from experience and fused with a smart, sophisticated use of Petrarchan topoi.Less

The Tragic, the Comic and the Tragicomic in Cretan Renaissance Literature

David Holton

in Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine ... More

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine (the biblical drama Abraham’s Sacrifice) and a pastoral idyll with a tragic outcome (The Shepherdess), while Kornaros’ verse romance Erotokritos plays with the possibility of a tragic ending before settling for the outcome proper to romance. This intermingling of the tragic and the comic – of tears and laughter – is common in Cretan Renaissance literature, and most fully realised in the new hybrid genre of tragicommedia pastorale, which seems to have been popular in Crete around 1600. Taking Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis as its main textual focus, this chapter explores the interaction of tears and laughter both at a textual level and in plot structure. While the theoretical bases of tragicomedy, as propounded by Guarini, clearly underpin works like Panoria, in the case of works belonging to other genres other factors are involved: Petrarchising tropes, which are common in Cretan literature, and the antithetical structures characteristic of the folk tradition. Panoria, set on Mount Ida, is thoroughly Cretan and at the same time thoroughly imbued with late-Renaissance poetics.Less

Petrarchan Tyranny and Lyric Resistance in Spenser’s Amoretti and The Faerie Queene

Cynthia N. Nazarian

in Love's Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe

This chapter discusses the use of Petrarchan themes to explore modes of legitimate political resistance by considering the constant collaborative dialogue between Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence ... More

This chapter discusses the use of Petrarchan themes to explore modes of legitimate political resistance by considering the constant collaborative dialogue between Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti and his epic-romance poem The Faerie Queene. It argues that Amoretti's Petrarchism is political, whereas The Faerie Queene's politics are Petrarchan: the two works collaboratively stage contests between lyric and epic that test each genre's strategies of resistance to tyranny. It shows that the sonnets articulate contestation and critique through lyric countersovereignty, while the epic-romance overthrows various Petrarchan Beloveds through its narrative teleology. By delegitimizing their Beloveds' sovereignty, both texts open up the possibility of lyric resistance to tyranny. They also share highly specific imagery in their portrayals of subjection and vulnerability.Less

The Paradoxes of Pain: Shakespeare beyond Petrarchism

Cynthia N. Nazarian

in Love's Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe

This book has examined the metaphors of wounding, torture, vulnerability, and war that were abound in sixteenth-century love poetry, identifying them as a pan-European phenomenon through which early ... More

This book has examined the metaphors of wounding, torture, vulnerability, and war that were abound in sixteenth-century love poetry, identifying them as a pan-European phenomenon through which early modern poets recoded Petrarchan conventions of inequality and oppression into a new idiom for political critique. It has argued that sixteenth-century European lyric imagination actively explored the foundations of a countersovereign voice that had begun with Petrarchan parrhēsia. This conclusion considers William Shakespeare's anti-Petrarchan turn by focusing on the parodic questioning of Petrarchan postures of abjection in Venus and Adonis and the nightmarish vision of Petrarchan vengeance that is The Rape of Lucrece. Both texts raise problems that the study of Petrarchism cannot resolve: paradoxes of pain, authenticity, and eloquence that color the poet's claims of truth and suffering. Whereas Venus and Adonis gradually deconstructed the elements of Petrarchan countersovereignty to lampoon the genre's contradictions, The Rape of Lucrece redeploys it, using countersovereignty to reveal the same agency and political potential that Petrarchism locates at the heart of vulnerability.Less

Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence

Andrew Hui

in The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

Any study of Renaissance ruins must begin with Petrarch, for he was one of the first thinkers to recognize that the signs of antiquity were scattered, dispersed, mutilated, which necessitated their ... More

Any study of Renaissance ruins must begin with Petrarch, for he was one of the first thinkers to recognize that the signs of antiquity were scattered, dispersed, mutilated, which necessitated their reconstruction and renovation. This chapter argues that Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past can be conceived of as an investigation, a search for vestigia. The poetics of ruins for Petrarch is one in which his reflection on the ruins of Rome broadens into a meditation of lost time; this discourse then prompts him to compose fragmentary works that attempt to recollect his scattered self. I give a brief semantic history of vestigium; it explores Petrarch’s search for Laura’s footprints in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as guided by a dissembling imitation of Dante’s work; in his epic, the Africa, Rome as a city is textualized and made whole through a careful reworking of its predecessors, Aeneid and Pharsalia; there is a kinship between contemplating ruins and writing letters in Petrarch’s epistles, which are modeled after Cicero’s. The chapter finally offers some thoughts on the relationship between gathering the fragments of Petrarch’s self in the Secretum and collecting the fragments of ancient manuscripts in his epistolary collection.Less

Telling Time on the Body

Wendy Beth Hyman

in Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry

“Telling Time on the Body” examines carpe diem in conversation with Renaissance visual arts of death. Lyrics that once seemed merely imitative of classical tropes take on paradoxical new life when we ... More

“Telling Time on the Body” examines carpe diem in conversation with Renaissance visual arts of death. Lyrics that once seemed merely imitative of classical tropes take on paradoxical new life when we recognize that their depictions of time, aging, and death incorporate distinctly visual strategies for representing desiccation and emptiness. These artists ekphrastically reveal the effect of Time upon matter, turning the abstraction of temporality into something rendered hauntingly in green and ochre. Early modern poets, likewise, present pictorialized “Time” as the figure that divulges hidden truths about decaying bodies. They thereby claim their own consanguinity to Time, as fellow actants upon bodily material, while also presenting decay as an event that happens predominantly to women. Yet it is not misogyny alone that motivates these sometimes-grisly figurations of the aging or postmortem female body. Rather, in decomposing the idealized beloved—rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, and all—the poet also “unmakes” the Petrarchan poetry that first invented her, demonstrating his temporal triumph over tired poetic conventions. By vividly rendering the postmortem decay of the woman’s body, that is, the poet brings “death” not just to his supposed beloved, but also to Petrarchist clichés about the red and gold and white. Carpe diem’s unforgivingly visual program of poetic representation confronts outmoded mystifications with brute empiricism, and demands that erotic verse leave behind courtly conventions and claim a new place in literary history.Less