This article demonstrates a systematic connection between the novelty of Petrarch’s authorship and his self-definition as an exile. Petrarch employs the unusual term exilium/esilio to substantiate ...his unprecedented claim that literature is a legally valid officium (civic role). Following Dante, Petrarch grounds his exilic authorship in the Christian discourse of peregrinatio: life as pilgrimage through exile. But Petrarch’s new officium allows him a measure of control over literary creation that no prior Italian writer had enjoyed. This is especially true of the “Canzoniere,” Petrarch’s compilation of his vernacular lyrics, whose singularity functions as a proxy for its author’s selfhood.
Francesco Petrarch is, among all other things, a poet of failure: the unofficial patron saint of unrequited love. This has, of course, not gone unnoticed. It is almost impossible to read Petrarchan ...criticism without coming across the word. There are failures of knowledge, of imitation, resolution, progress, power, communication, fictive experience, and more. But if critics have gestured toward these various ideas in passing, they have never to my knowledge given failure the weight it deserves. It is an idea so widely and passingly noted that it stands in danger of not being seen. Failure has been viewed as an occasional symptom of poetic perspective, a facet of inscribed character, a passing phenomenon. Perhaps the time has come to consider it a strategy. In pursuing these explorations I will be embedding this study in some of the many frameworks of new formalist criticism that have reflourished in the last fifteen years.
Petrarch's Civilized Barbarians
The journal of medieval and early modern studies/Journal of medieval and early modern studies,
05/2021
Journal Article
Early modern Spanish lyric's connections with music are manifold, and imagery of instruments and singing voices is virtually everywhere in the texts, often playing a part in the articulation of ...affect and providing a vocabulary for poets to reflect about their own verbal powers. And yet, as I argue in this article, the story of Golden Age lyric begins with tension and conflict at the center of the music-poetry relation. There is, I contend, a discrepancy between the Orphean tropes that equate writing verse with playing music, and the relative autonomy that poetry and music were developing in Renaissance Spain. In this context, I draw attention to a nostalgia that cuts across the texts: the sense that poets have only inherited one half of Orpheus's torrential and effective mixture of media, poetry, and song. To make these points, I draw from a collection of printed and manuscript sources from 1500 to 1700, by poets canonical and obscure.
In early modern Italy, lyric poets of spiritual verse experimented with engaging and depicting the divine Word in novel ways. They aestheticized bodies, including that of Christ, and they imagined ...eroticized encounters between themselves and the Word made flesh. This article examines the sensual spiritual poetry of three early modern Italian women who, between 1530 and 1630, dedicated themselves to crafting and reinvigorating the poetic word and to expressing and (re)presenting the divine Word. Exploring the introspective and subjective spiritual lyrics of Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Laura Battiferri (1523–1589), and Francesca Turini Bufalini (1553–1641) in the context of the Italian literary Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, it aims to highlight and to elucidate the conflation of the sacred and the erotic in their verse. In so doing, this article reveals how these early modern female poets deployed the sensual strategically in their verse to elevate the erotic and how they raised the Italian religious lyric to new literary heights by spiritualizing the dominant poetic idiom.
The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton rewrites the history of the Renaissance Vergilian epic by incorporating the neo-Latin side of the story alongside the vernacular one, revealing how epics ...spoke to each other "across the language gap" and together comprised a single, "Augustinian tradition" of epic poetry. Beginning with Petrarch's Africa, Warner offers major new interpretations of Renaissance epics both famous and forgotten—from Milton's Paradise Lost to a Latin Christiad by his near-contemporary, Alexander Ross—thereby shedding new light on the development of the epic genre. For advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the fields of Italian, English, and Comparative literatures as well as the Classics and the history of religion and literature.
Published in his second poetry volume, Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595), George Chapman’s “A Coronet for His Mistresse Philosophie” is often read as a sequel to the volume’s title piece. By attending to ...Chapman’s controversial dialogue with the Petrarchan lyric tradition in the England of his time, to his commitment to a didactic aestheticism that defends poetry’s enlightening powers, and to his preoccupation with proportional form, the present essay claims for this miniature sequence an autonomous status as a practical poetics. Chapman’s crown of sonnets—the first English instance of this form—is a programmatic defense of the amatory lyric as an instrument that warrants poetry’s dedication to the search for knowledge.
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