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Lyric Humanity from Virgil to Flaubert
Ullrich Langer investigates why lyric representation holds a particular power to address our humanity from Virgil to Flaubert.
Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance
The closely related problems of creativity and freedom have long been seen as emblematic of the Renaissance. Ullrich Langer, however, argues that French and Italian Renaissance literature can be profitably reconceived in terms of the way these problems are treated in late medieval scholasticism in general and nominalist theology in particular. Looking at a subject that is relatively unexplored by literary critics, Langer introduces the reader to some basic features of nominalist theology and uses these to focus on what we find to be "modern" in French and Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Langer demonstrates that this literature, often in its most interesting momen...
Lyric in the Renaissance
Moving from a definition of the lyric to the innovations introduced by Petrarch's poetic language, this study goes on to propose a new reading of several French poets (Charles d'Orléans, Ronsard, and Du Bellay), and a re-evaluation of Montaigne's understanding of the most striking poetry and its relation to his own prose. Instead of relying on conventional notions of Renaissance subjectivity, it locates recurring features of this poetic language that express a turn to the singular and that herald lyric poetry's modern emphasis on the utterly particular. By combining close textual analysis with more modern ethical concerns this study establishes clear distinctions between what poets do and what rhetoric and poetics say they do. It shows how the tradition of rhetorical commentary is insufficient in accounting for this startling effectiveness of lyric poetry, manifest in Petrarch's Rime Sparse and the collections of the best poets writing after him.
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Renaissance
This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.
Perfect Friendship
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The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the great Renaissance skeptic and pioneer of the essay form, is known for his innovative method of philosophical inquiry which mixes the anecdotal and the personal with serious critiques of human knowledge, politics and the law. He is the first European writer to be intensely interested in the representations of his own intimate life, including not just his reflections and emotions but also the state of his body. His rejection of fanaticism and cruelty and his admiration for the civilizations of the New World mark him out as a predecessor of modern notions of tolerance and acceptance of otherness. In this volume an international team of contributors explores the range of his philosophy and also examines the social and intellectual contexts in which his thought was expressed.
Disguised Vices
The notions of virtue and vice are vital components of the Western ethical tradition. But in early modern France they were called into question, as writers such as La Rochefoucauld argued that what appears as virtue is in fact disguised vice. Disguised Vices analyses the underlying logic of such claims, and explores what is at stake in them.
The Gargantuan Polity
Critics and scholars have long argued that the Renaissance was the period that gave rise to the modern individual. The Gargantuan Polity examines political, legal, theological, and literary texts in the late Middle Ages, to show how individuals were defined by contracts of mutual obligation, which allowed rulers to hold power due to approval of their subjects. Noting how the relationship between rulers and individuals changed with the rise of absolute monarchy, Michael Randall provides significant insight into Renaissance culture and politics by showing how individuals went from being understood in terms of their objective relations with the community to subjective beings. By studying this evolution, he challenges the argument that subjectivity enabled modern political autonomy to come into existence, and instead argues that subjectivity might have disempowered the outwardly directed and highly political individuals of the late Middle Ages. A profound and detailed study of one of the most drastic periods of change, The Gargantuan Polity will be of interest to scholars of French literature, the Renaissance, and intellectual history.
The Visionary Queen
The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.
Secrets
In Secrets: Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre, Jacob Vance argues that Erasmus and French Evangelical humanists made secrecy central to their literary thought. They revived Scriptural, medieval, and early Renaissance notions of secrecy in their spiritual and profane literature to advance the reforms in church and society that they advocated. Erasmus, Briçonnet, and Marguerite expanded on Origenian, Augustinian, and pseudo-Dionysian concepts of divine mystery, as being secret, throughout their works. By developing the idea that the divine remains both transcendent and immanent in the world of creation, these humanists explored, through literature, how the human spirit can either accede, or fail to accede, to the secrets of Christian wisdom.
