Renaissance Poetics

"This chapter reconstructs, for the fist time, the history of crucial intellectual controversies about the value and meaning of Greek tragedy in general and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in particular in 16th- and 17th- century Europe, from Joachim Camerarius and Philipp Melanchthon to André Dacier, in the context of the developments in early modern classical scholarship, literary criticism, and dramatic theory discussed in the previous chapters of the book.

(1.) 'Das ‘Problem’ und erste Lösungsversuche'
(2.) 'Ein frommer Wunsch oder: Camerarius versus Melanchthon, Winshemius, Rataller und Lalamantius'
(3.) 'Verhängnisvolle Gedankengänge  oder: Robortello  versus  Vettori'
(4.) 'Klassizistisches Ringen: Scudéry und La Mesnardière versus Corneille'
(5.) 'Die ‘Lösung’: André Dacier'""""

This chapter looks at the development of the doctrine of 'poetic justice' from Plato to the late 17th century and the role it played in the transformation of Aristotle's notion of tragic catharsis in the Renaissance theory of tragedy and in the Doctrine classique.

A trope is the transfer of a word from its usual meaning to a different one, justified by a relation of similitude, or of another kind, between the two meanings. Early modern students of grammar and rhetoric memorized the tropes and learned how to identify and use each of them through the use of widely reprinted ancient and contemporary manuals of rhetoric, as well as publications dealing exclusively with tropes, such as those by Despauterius, Mosellanus and Susenbrotus. In practical terms, tropes stood out as crucial ingredients of the ornament of style, and as such they were central to the way literate individuals would speak and, especially, write. Furthermore, from a theoretical standpoint, tropes were a catalyst for crucial developments in early modern linguistic and aesthetic thought. On the one hand, they provided a window to the mechanisms through which language works, opening as they did a distinction between literal and figurative meaning. On the other, tropes (and especially metaphor) attracted great attention as the locus of coalescence between cognition and pleasure and became, therefore, touchstones for the development of a theory of the beautiful.

The Renaissance tradition of the courtly love sonnet-sequence is noted for the idealization and sublimation of the lady, the love object, by the poet through writing. Yet, I would like to claim that Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti stands out in this tradition, not only because of its particular style entitled the “Spenserian Sonnet”, or the complex internal conflicts of the poet which McCabe terms “Spenser’s doubts”, or as Spenser writes - his “unquiet thoughts”, but also because of his subjective use of the writing, which makes it possible for the Spenserian subject to register a unique encounter between the courtier and his lady.

I analyze this unique text from a psychoanalytic position, which takes into consideration the complex links between rhetoric and the subject’s erotic life, and in this specific case, between desexualization and sublimation as defined by Freud. This thesis explores the intimate relation between Spenser’s “unquiet thought” and his erotic life. I follow, then, the manner in which Spenser’s poetics in the Amoretti transfers the encounter between the courtier and his lady into the realm of the possible as well as the courtier’s response to the lady’s consent, that is, to a real encounter, which returns from the pages of the text.

La polémica que surgió a partir de 1614 en torno a la oscuridad poética de los grandes poemas de Luis de Góngora ―la "Fábula de Polifemo" y las "Soledades"― no fue una disputa circunscrita sólo a ámbitos eruditos. Desde los métodos por los que se difundieron estos poemas, pasando por los intercambios polémicos entre apologistas y detractores, hasta llegar a la presencia pública que este debate llegó a presentar, la disputa en torno a la oscuridad responde a unas dinámicas modernas de difusión, presencia pública y fama literarias. En este artículo examino los principales procesos de circulación de la polémica y las características generales de estas prácticas culturales estructuradas en torno a la búsqueda de una celebridad poética.

El presente artículo se ocupa de examinar la interpretación y crítica que realiza Alonso López Pinciano (1547-¿?) en la Epístola tercera (“De la esencia y causas de la poética”) de su Filosofía Antigua Poética (1596), el más conocido tratado en forma de diálogo de preceptiva poética del siglo XVI español, sobre la doctrina de las “cuatro especies de furor divino y sobrenatural”, expuesta en el Fedro o De Pulchro, específicamente el pasaje 243e9-245c5 que da inicio a la Palinodia. Para ello, a) se presenta y contextualiza la discusión sobre el temperamento artístico y el fin de la poesía en el texto del Pinciano; luego (b) se expone brevemente la doctrina expuesta por Sócrates en el mencionado pasaje del Fedro; para luego (c) analizar las corrientes interpretativas que marcan la lectura del Pinciano de la doctrina platónica, en la mencionada epístola, presentando la pretendida refutación del Pinciano a los argumentos de Platón y finalmente (d) nuestras conclusiones.

This chapter looks at the first attempts to make sense of Aristotle's concept of tragic hamartia and the insurmountable difficulties Renaissance scholars and literary critics faced while trying to reconcile it with their own theoretical, and increasingly moralistic, concerns as well as their re-interpretation of Aristotle's tragic theory  as a whole.  The compelling, yet most inconvenient interpretation advanced by Francesco Robortello in his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics of 1548 played in this intellectual controversy a crucial role.

This book presents a study of one of the most important literary polemics of the seventeenth century in which Lope de Vega was involved, the polemic about the new poetic language used by Luis de Gongora. This question is studied here through the analysis of the letters and censorships that Lope de Vega and Diego de Colmenares exchanged. Lope’s literary ideas, as well as those held by his rival, are presented within the frame of the different literary theory traditions existing at that time.

Il ritrovamento presso la Biblioteca Civica Vincenzo Joppi di Udine dell’unico esemplare sopravissuto della prima edizione del De ratione dicendi di Francesco Robortello, stampata a Bologna nel 1560 dai fratelli Giovanni Battista e Alessandro Benacci associati a Giovanni Rossi, dimostra che l’opera, dedicata interamente all’ars dicendi, è ascrivibile al periodo e all’insegnamento bolognesi di Robortello e non, come si era finora ritenuto fondandosi sulla riemissione del 1567, a quelli padovani.

This chapter reflects on the ways in which imaginative literature probes, troubles, and illuminates the relation between knowledge and faith through aesthetic mediation in post-Reformation England. In the process, it at once puts pressure on the category of the ‘literary’ and tunes us into the wider cultural meanings of ‘faith’, showing how an alternative episteme is forged in the synergies between religious belief and literary art. It posits, and offers for critical thinking, a poetics of faith at the intersection of form, feeling, and doctrine, one that turns apparent challenges of religious cognition into imaginatively, ethically, and emotionally productive resources. The chapter places this approach methodologically in the context of The Crossroads of Knowledge project out of which this volume emerges. Finally, it indicates how the individual chapters in this book speak to each other and weave a hermeneutic discourse that brings to life the experiential dimension of knowledge in the devotional domain, and traces the imaginative texture of faith and its ways of knowing, unknowing, and half-knowing.

Deutsche Fassung von "Contempt for Commentators". Der Aufsatz skizziert Daniel Heinsius' Verachtung für die Philologie, wie sie in seinen "Orationes" zum Ausdruck kommt. Die These lautet, dass diese Verachtung in Heinsius' neuplatonischer Poetik mit ihrer Sakralisierung der Dichtung begründet ist. In seinem Kommentar zur aristotelischen "Poetik", der "Constitutio tragoediae", ordnet Heinsius das technische Wissen, wie es in der aristotelischen "Poetik" formuliert wird, der neuplatonischen Inspirationstheorie unter.  Dabei transformiert er den traditionellen, historisch-philologischen Kommentar in einen neuen Typ von technischem Handbuch.

Made of recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, and felled trees, Bibles in Renaissance England were filled with visible traces of ecological matter, remainders that remind one that words on a page are thought fused with—and inflected by—matter. This essay places Henry Vaughan’s poem “The Book” in a broader conversation about the poetics of paper: the rhetorical effects of the varied colors and qualities of paper used in the production of the vernacular Bibles that transformed reading practices in Renaissance England. Historical writers and readers, who were directly involved in a flax-to-rags-to-paper economy, recognized and commented on the natural resources from which cheap, widely distributed Bibles and other texts were made. Further, this essay models a reading strategy that attends to the natural history of books, to both the function and the form of the organic matter used to mediate human ideas.

Cet ouvrage présente d’une façon toute nouvelle l'humaniste italien, Francesco Robortello (1516-1567), réputé pour avoir, le premier, commenté intégralement la "Poétique" d'Aristote. Il insiste sur le pédagogue, éditeur, philologue et philosophe qu’il a été, et sur le rôle prépondérant qu’il a joué dans l'instauration de la critique textuelle, le renouvellement éthique et méthodique de la lecture des Anciens, la (re)définition des genres littéraires.
Les contributions ici réunies le montrent au sein de la cité, au contact de ses pairs et de ses étudiants et, tout en attestant la diversité des domaines de l'Antiquité qu'il a explorés avec scrupule et érudition, elles mettent en évidence sa démarche exégétique, fondée sur une éthique singulière, et son goût prononcé pour une méthode « ouverte ».
La réhabilitation de ce savant souvent décrié, dont l'œuvre a dépassé les frontières italiennes et nourri la réflexion des intellectuels européens, invite désormais à une réédition de ses nombreux ouvrages, à l’étude spécifique de chacun d’eux, à l’enrichissement du répertoire de ses échanges épistolaires.

Le volume a été dirigé par Monique Bouquet, MCF émérite de Latin, et Claire Lesage, MCF d’Italien, membres du Groupe Romaniste (CELLAM – Université Rennes 2), Sergio Cappello, Professeur de Langue française (Università degli Studi di Udine) et Michel Magnien, Professeur de Littérature française de la Renaissance et de Littérature néo-latine (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, EA 174 – ED 120).

Este trabajo resume parte de lo que fue mi tesis doctoral, dedicada a las teorías de la risa en el humanismo quinientista. Se trata de un estudio sobre el primer opúsculo dedicado a este tema, el tratado "De Ridiculis" (1550) de Vincenzo Maggi, escrito como complemento de su comentario a la "Poética" de Aristóteles, a raíz de la desaparición de los capítulos dedicados a la comedia.

In der Renaissance wurde das Altgriechische als Literatursprache
für das westliche Europa wieder neu entdeckt und durch
Humanisten wie Angelo Poliziano und Markos Musuros in
eigenen griechischen Dichtungen propagiert. In ihrer Nachfolge
begannen auch deutsche Humanisten griechische Briefe zu
schreiben und Verse zu dichten. Als bedeutendster unter den
griechischen Dichtern der Renaissance in Deutschland gilt der
Dichterphilologe Lorenz Rhodoman (1545–1606), der gleich
mehrere größere Hexameterdichtungen veröffentlichte. Eine
außergewöhnliche Stellung unter diesen Gedichten nimmt der
bisher wenig beachtete "Arion" ein. Rhodoman bietet in diesem
Gedicht eine ausgefeilte Bearbeitung der bei Herodot überlieferten
Legende über den lesbischen Sänger Arion. Durch zahlreiche
Anleihen aus der antiken Literatur gewinnt Rhodoman der
Erzählung neue Seiten ab und nutzt sie, um über Aufgabe und
Stellung des Dichters in seiner Zeit zu reflektieren. Ein Höhepunkt
seiner Darstellung ist eine ausführliche Schilderung von
Ledas Verführung durch Zeus in Schwanengestalt. Diese Edition
legt nun erstmals das im dorischen Dialekt verfasste Epyllion
mit deutscher Übersetzung und ausführlicher Einleitung vor.

Indice.
I. La construcción de una teoría de los efectos del sonido verbal. 1. La fluidez oratoria. 2. G. Trapzuntius y la latinización del De Compositione Verborum. 3. El Actius de Pontano o de la sonoridad virgiliana. 4, Tradición pontaniana y crítica de las sonoridades en el siglo XVI: de Vida a Maranta. 5. De los efectos del sonido verbal y descripción de los elementos.
II. El neoaristotelismo renacentista y la teoría de los efectos del sonido verbal. 1. Comentarios de la Poética de Aristóteles. 2. De la armonía imitativa.
III. De la cualidad sonora. 1. La cualidad sonora en las artes poéticas y retóricas. 2. Aproximación gramatical a la letra: la potestad. 3. Cualidad, adecuación y representación en la teoría musical humanista.
IV. La vulgarización de la teoría de los efectos del sonido verbal. 1. La cuestión de la lengua. 2. La escritura de la poética vulgar. 3. Tradición pontaniana y poéticas vulgares. Minturno y Herrera.
V. La aspereza épica. 1. La construcción de la idea de aspereza épica. 2. Asprezza épica y dolcezza toscana. VI. Poner ante los ojos. descripción sonora y evidencia por fantasía. 1. Los instrumentos de la evidencia. 2. La poesía externada.
Conclusiones. / Bibliografía.

This essay considers how the garden as theme and metaphor worked with the garden as planned topography. The symbolic character of Renaissance gardens, where human fulfilment is figured in the perfection of place, appears alongside conceptual tendencies which use design instrumentally. The essay explores the garden topos as a phenomenological, not just a rhetorical situation; it also charts the growing generalisation of the relationship of person to place through tools such as perspectival design. It runs from classical discussions of rus in urbe to the spiritual renewal via urbanism in Sixtus V's Rome and considers key motifs such the nymph in their poetic, political and religious contexts; it also charts the shift from the antiquarian ruin as place of wandering to the prescribed movement of the actor-spectator in the great Renaissance gardens and in pilgrimage sites such as "sacri monti" which took on features of ideal cities.

This article investigates the connection between the all-important concept of invention within the literary terminology of sixteenth-century England and the perception of translation during this period. Invention is discussed as a concept in transition during the sixteenth century, as it was then still associated with the rhetorical notion of “finding” within a topical system, while new shades of meaning closer to imagination, fantasy, fancy and wit started to become dominant even in rhetorical contexts. Invention was deemed in the sixteenth century a necessary ingredient for outstanding poetry, and yet it was assumed to be absent from the work of the translator, whose role was solely to copy the invention of the source text. This article claims that the lack of invention in translations (or rather, the mere following of the invention of the translated text) was the main reason why translations were invariably regarded as minor achievements as compared to their source texts.

This thesis explores the place of medieval French literature in the formation of national identity in sixteenth-century France. It focuses on an unpublished and little-studied manuscript miscellany, the Veilles ou Observations de plusieurs choses dinnes de mémoire en la lecture d’aucuns autheurs françois. The Veilles are a collection of essays inspired primarily by readings in medieval French literature, written in 1555 by Claude Fauchet (1530-1602). I read this text in relation to the socio-cultural currents of its moment, arguing that the Veilles represent a seminal moment in the nascent conceptualisation of the French nation and its medieval heritage. Given that early modern discourses of nationhood have traditionally been characterised by their prominent valorisation of Classical Antiquity, the overtly positive evaluation of the medieval found in the Veilles is unexpected and requires interrogation. In Chapter 1, I introduce the contents, immediate context, and material history of the Veilles, arguing that this text reveals a relation to the native past characterised by the desire to recover lost texts and traditions. Chapter 2 therefore takes a step back, asking how this desire for recovery arose. Using a book-historical approach, this chapter argues that during the 1530s and ’40s a French literary culture characterised by continuity with its medieval inheritance underwent a process of rupture, resulting in turn in a felt need for recovery: a need epitomised in the Veilles. The nature and purpose of recovery as practised in the Veilles is examined in chapter III, which focuses on the importance of native exemplarity – the exemple domestique – to Fauchet’s notion of Frenchness. Chapter IV places Fauchet’s emphasis on the exemple domestique in conversation with Pléiade poetics, exploring Fauchet’s conception of the place of native history in the construction of Frenchness through literature. I conclude that traditional literary-historical periodisation which isolates ‘the Middle Ages’ from ‘the Renaissance’ does not reflect the reality of early modern French culture. Rather, the Veilles testify to the way these period concepts were themselves forged through the recovery of a native past in the early modern period.

Résumé

Notre paradigme actuel du discours vernaculaire en France pendant le seizième siècle est foncièrement coloré, d’un côté, par la poétique classique de la « translatio » dont la Pléiade s’est fait la championne, et de l’autre par des efforts plus académiques visant l’établissement d’une généalogie nobiliaire pour la langue française – entreprise liée surtout à l’imprimeur et helléniste Henri Estienne. Cependant, cette image reçue ne représente qu’une seule perspective sur la langue vernaculaire à cette époque. Le Recueil de Claude Fauchet, par exemple, témoigne d’un groupe de juristes et d’humanistes à Paris qui s’intéressaient avec animation et admiration à la poésie française médiévale. Cette haute estime pour la culture textuelle et matérielle du Moyen Âge français s’opposait directement au ton dominant du discours vernaculaire contemporain, lequel cherchait à se distancer du passé médiéval. Fauchet s’avère particulièrement notable à cet égard grâce à sa contribution fondatrice à l’histoire littéraire française, sa reconnaissance du rôle joué par les langues vernaculaires dans l’histoire, et sa sensibilité vers l’aspect matériel du passé natif de la France.

Abstract

Our current paradigm of sixteenth-century French vernacular discourse can be epitomised on the one hand by the classically inspired poetics of translatio propounded by the Pléiade, and on the other, by the scholarly efforts to establish a noble genealogy for the French language by writers such as the printer and Hellenist Henri Estienne. This picture however merely constitutes one of several contemporary narratives regarding the French vernacular. The Recueil of Claude Fauchet provides evidence of a lively and appreciative interest in medieval French poetry among a group of Parisian jurist-humanists, whose valorisation of medieval French textual and material culture was developed in direct opposition to the dominant tenor of contemporary vernacular discourse, which sought to break away from France’s medieval past. Fauchet in particular is notable for his seminal contribution to French literary history, his keen awareness of the role of vernaculars in history, and his sensitivity towards the material aspects of France’s native past.