In the sixteenth century the kiss motif acquires such staggering popularity among poets across Europe that it inspires a sui generis lyrical sub-genre: the basium, or “kiss poem.” Kiss poetry with ...its candid evocation of the physical pleasures of romantic love, creates a sharp contrast with the chaste poetics of Petrarchism, a lyrical fashion still prevalent throughout the period. William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593) is deeply influenced by the basium. By employing and subverting the main motifs of kiss poetry, Shakespeare positions himself in between two poetic traditions: one that is plaintive, chaste, and normally associated with Petrarch and his legacy, and one that is more sensual and uninhibitedly corporeal, made popular in the sixteenth century by Neo-Latin and French poets. The kiss, an instance of the erotic that is fundamentally liminal, expresses with particular subtlety Shakespeare’s concern with mediation, as well as his interest in the ambiguities of the romantic phenomenon.
This essay considers readings of Plato’s Symposium in sixteenth-century trattati d’amore (love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi’s L’amorosa filosofia — that offer an alternative to Marsilio ...Ficino’s pervasive interpretation as presented in his De amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of the Symposium attempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima’s speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi’s reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes’s myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.
This article explores the substantive influence that Lucretius's poem De rerum natura had on Girolamo Fracastoro's (1478–1553) theory of contagion. Perhaps the first early modern intellectual to ...systematically adopt Lucretius's experiential epistemology, Fracastoro was also one of the very few who picked up on Lucretius's insistency on the crucial importance of tactility. Tactus is, for Lucretius, not only the bodily sense par excellence, but also—understood as atomic contact—the ontological mechanism that articulates generation and corruption. Fracastoro's theory of contagion, based on the concept of direct contact, is the product of a sophisticated and critical reading of Lucretian ideas on which the Veronese poet and physician had been ruminating since the dawn of his career.
The revaluation of the sense of touch is one of the most revealing intellectual phenomena of the early modern period. After over a millennium of neglect, accorded the last place in the hierarchy of ...the senses, touch acquires substantive epistemological, aesthetic, ontological, and moral prevalence in early modern discourse. It does so, I argue, to the extent that it becomes one of the foundations of a new cultural paradigm. Whereas the history of the "lower sensorium" has been the object of close attention lately, what has not yet received proper scrutiny are the negotiations between early modern authors and their classical sources that initiated such radical changes in the intellectual mindset of the period. It is only through a comprehensive study of the vindication of touch that we can understand the shift from authority to experience, the new conception of the human body and its place in the universe, and the aesthetic sensibilities that make this period exceptional in its provocative amalgam of literature, philosophy, science and religion.
