Spiritualizing Petrarchism, “Poeticizing” the Bible: Two Counter-Reformation Self-Commentaries (original) (raw)
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Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400-1700
Leiden-Boston: Brill (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, vol. 32), 2019
This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. https://brill.com/view/title/54662?lang=en Introduction By: Francesco Venturi Pages: 1–27 1) Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos By: Martin McLaughlin Pages: 28–49 2) Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia By: Jeroen De Keyser Pages: 50–70 3) Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas By: Ian Johnson Pages: 71–98 4) On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry By: Federica Pich Pages: 99–134 5) Self-Commentary on Language in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prefatory Letters By: Brian Richardson Pages: 135–164 6) ‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses By: John O’Brien Pages: 165–188 7) Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies By: Harriet Archer Pages: 189–230 8) The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross By: Colin P. Thompson Pages: 231–262 9) Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and Self-Exegesis in La Ceppède By: Russell Ganim Pages: 263–283 10) Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship By: Gilles Bertheau Pages: 284–315 11) Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators By: Joseph Harris Pages: 316–337 12) Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and Self-Affirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature By: Els Stronks Pages: 338–368 13) Reading the Margins: The Uses of Authorial Side Glosses in Anna Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685) By: Magdalena Ożarska Pages: 369–394 14) Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco in Toscana By: Carlo Caruso Pages: 395–419 Afterword By: Richard Maber Pages: 420–424
The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) at Durham University will host an international conference on the topic of self-commentary and self-exegesis in early modern European literature, 26-27 February 2016 at Palace Green Library. Registration is free. To reserve a place, please email: selfcommentary@gmail.com Plenary lectures will include Martin McLaughlin (Oxford) on Leon Battista Alberti, John O’Brien (Durham) on Montaigne, and Federica Pich (Leeds) on Italian Renaissance poetry. Eight scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds will explore various literary traditions, from Neo-Latin Humanism to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, and Polish literature: Harriet Archer (Newcastle), Gilles Bertheau (François Rabelais – Tours), Carlo Caruso (Durham), Jeroen De Keyser (Leuven), Russel Ganim (Iowa), Joseph Harris (Royal Holloway – London), Ian Johnson (St Andrews), and Magdalena Ożarska (Jan Kochanowski – Kielce). For further information, please contact the event organiser: francesco.venturi@durham.ac.uk or visit: https://www.dur.ac.uk/imems/events/conferences/?eventno=25738
De Gruyter eBooks, 2023
The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, the state of the art of sacred poetry around 1550 is examined on the basis of the Libro primo/Libro secondo delle rime spirituali parte nuovamente raccolta da più auttori, parte non più date in luce (Venice 1550) and its canonising strategies of an editorially produced invented tradition of the rime spirituali, which can provide the background for the study of Michelangelo's sacred poetry in the other contributions to this volume. On the other hand, it deals with the hermeneutical problems that spiritual sonnets of the 1550s, characterised by allusiveness, semantic openness and a restricted petrarchist lexis, pose for a reading aiming at the detection of confessional affiliations. In contrast to modern attempts to force a "heterodoxy" viewed with sympathy out of the texts by updating inquisitor's methods, this article argues for a reading that does not try to minimize their (pre-)confessional indecision, but accepts it as a textual strategy or as a semantic necessity of a sonnet, which will not and cannot compete with a theological treatise.
The Vineyard of Verse: The State of Scholarship on Latin Poetry of the Old Society of Jesus
This review of scholarship on Jesuit humanistic literature and theater is Latin-oriented because the Society's sixteenth-century code of studies, the Ratio Studiorum, in force for nearly two centuries, enjoined the study and imitation in Latin of the best classical authors. Notwithstanding this well-known fact, co-ordinated modern scholarship on the Latin poetry, poetics, and drama of the Old Society is patchy. We begin with questions of sources, reception, and style. Then recent work on epic, didactic, and dramatic poetry is considered, and finally, on a handful of "minor" genres. Some genres and regions are well studied (drama in the German-speaking lands), others less so. There is a general scarcity of bilingual editions and commentaries of many "classic" Jesuit authors which would, in the first instance, bring them to the attention of mainstream modern philologists and literary historians, and, in the longer term, provide a firmer basis for more synoptic and synthetic studies of Jesuit intertextuality and style(s). Along with the interest and value of this poetry as world literature, I suspect that the extent to which the Jesuits' Latin labors in the vineyard of the classroom formed the hearts and minds of their pupils, including those who went on to become Jesuits, is underestimated.
Poetic Theology : A Crisis of Medieval Authority ?
A comprehensive history of medieval concepts of “the author” and textual authority must resist the urge to segregate “secular” and “sacred” literary theory. For their relationship was enduring and reciprocal. Crucial theoretical issues were developed within Biblical exegesis before passing into secular poetics. Conversely, discourses characteristic of secular poetics (frequently classified under ethics) often had a considerable impact on Biblical exegesis. Within a system of textual classification formalized in the thirteenth century, the poetic, affective and imaginative nature of certain forms of Biblical writing were recognized and justified. But this raised a troubling question: was theology moving too close to poetics, the “queen of the sciences” being reduced to the level of an unreliable servant? Furthermore, despite affirmation of the solidity of the “literal sense” of Scripture, from which logical argument could safely be drawn, theology could hardly derive support from the...
Medieval Criticism: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Hermeneutics
This paper offers an overview of the main figures and subjects in medieval criticism in the Western tradition, covering both secular poetics and those topics in theological reflection and Biblical commentary which have some relevance for literary theory. The first section deals with medieval poetics, discussing literature theory with reference to the trivium and the quadrivium, with a special focus on the poetics of Geoffrey de Vinsauf. This is followed by a short section on aesthetics and a more detailed treatment of medieval hermeneutics. The main figures and topics in this section include Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Dante, and Boccaccio, with a discussion of the theological dimension of literature, of symbolism, allegory, and of the modes of hermeneutical interpretation.