Related Papers
Imagined terrain: literary nomadism in Venice and the Veneto
Paul Venzo
Many poets and writers have used Venice and, to a lesser extent, the Veneto as a creative topos. There is both the writing that might be said to belong to the Italian/Venetian literary tradition, as well as the non-Italian tradition of writing Venice, a phenomenon that spans English literature, in particular, from William Shakespeare’s time, to the Romantic period and into the present day. This paper explores my relationship to this creative topos and the writers and writing that are associated with it. In particular, it focuses on the notion of literary nomadism: a method for interacting with the literature of Venice and the Veneto that allows me to find intersections between my own work and that which already exists in a broad historical and literary terrain. Moving between and across the literatures of this region, I argue that it is possible to find multiple points of reference that guide and inform my own poetic responses to it, and which reflect my own subjective nomadism and in-between-ness. By taking such an approach I am able to map my hybrid, transnational and transcultural identity into this space, in order to locate myself—and my writing—in the “imagined terrain” I have chosen as a creative topos.
reading.ac.uk
Transplanting the Laurel: Mapping France in Du Bellay's Landscapes
Louisa Mackenzie
Doctoral Dissertation
The Italian Verse of Milton
2018 •
Francisco Nahoe
The Italian verse of Milton consists of but six poems: five sonnets and the single stanza of a canzone. Though later in life the poet will celebrate conjugal love in Book IV of Paradise Lost (1667) and in Sonnet XXIII Methought I saw my late espousèd saint (1673), in 1645 Milton proffers his lyric of erotic desire in the Italian language alone. His choice is both unusual and entirely fitting. How did Milton, born in Cheapside, acquire Italian at such an elevated level of proficiency? When did he write these poems and where? Is the woman about whom he speaks an historical person or is she merely the poetic trope demanded by the genre? Though relatively few critics have addressed the style of Milton’s Italian verse, an astonishing range of views has nonetheless emerged from their assessments. The Italian style of Milton illustrates fundamental attributes of the poet’s approach to composition in both his prose and his verse. The Secretary for Foreign Tongues must of necessity function as poet and polemicist, routinely crossing linguistic frontiers whensoever the genre requires it. In this respect, the Italian verse of Milton — in which the poet responds in a strania favella [foreign speech] to the demands of love — is an early occurrence of the effort of the Commonwealth rhetor who likewise answers the challenges of European censure by exploiting the plurilingual resources of Renaissance humanism. Most of all, the Italian verse gives us a glimpse of the systematic reformation of Petrarchist poetics that Milton undertakes in his later verse in English. Perhaps it is because Petrarchan values came to England directly from Italian sources that Milton decides to reform petrarchismo first in Italian. Milton’s Italian verse attempts in miniature a moral reformation of the whole genre of love poetry itself.
Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Introduction
Unn Falkeid, Aileen A. Feng
A Companion to Anticlassicisms in the Cinquecento
2023 •
Marc Föcking
‘Anticlassicisms,’ as a plural, react to the many possible forms of ‘classicisms.’ In the sixteenth century, classicist tendencies range from humanist traditions focusing on Horace and the teachings of rhetoric, via Pietro Bembo’s canonization of a ‘second antiquity’ in the works of the fourteenth-century classics, Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the Aristotelianism of the second half of the century. Correspondingly, the various tendencies to destabilize or to subvert or contradict these manifold and historically dynamic ‘classicisms’ need to be distinguished as so many ‘anticlassicisms’. This volume, after discussing the history and possible implications of the label ‘anticlassicism’ in Renaissance studies, differentiates and analyzes these ‘anticlassicisms.’ It distinguishes the various forms of opposition to ‘classicisms’ as to their scope (on a scale between radical poetological dissension to merely sectorial opposition in a given literary genre) and to their alternative models, be they authors (like Dante) or texts. At the same time, the various chapters specify the degree of difference or erosion inherent in anticlassicist tendencies with respect to their ‘classicist’ counterparts, ranging from implicit ‘system disturbances’ to open, intended antagonism (as in Bernesque poetry), with a view to establishing an overall picture of this field of phenomena for the first time.
By the Grace of the Pen
By the Grace of the Pen
2012 •
Ms. Brooke Cohen, MLIS
Benedetto Varchi was one of the most esteemed Renaissance polymaths in Northern Italy. But his reputation has faded from historical records along with Varchi’s cultural significance. History has erased him from the narrative or, at best, reduced him to an endnote. The reasons behind Varchi’s eradication from art historical criticism are as numerous as they are complex. Instead of focusing on his absence from historiography, I want to discuss why Benedetto Varchi was such a revered intellectual in the art world of the sixteenth century. Varchi the man seemed drawn to extremes. Most famously in the field of art theory, he ignited an aesthetic debate at the church of Santa Maria Novella in March of 1547, where the merits of the fine arts were contested and a hierarchy of disciplines was established. Varchi delivered the lecture on the topic that we now refer to as the paragone, or comparison between the arts, in which debaters used philosophical reasoning in an attempt to establish which art was superior. In this thesis, I have searched for how the paragone could serve to clarify the relationship between poetry, painting, and sculpture in the Cinquecento. It is within the frame of the paragone debate that I will raise questions regarding seemingly obscure Cinquecento wit and systems of poetic iconography. In seeking to decode these symbols embedded in poetics and art we must look to a shared cultural fabric. Varchi can be seen as a unifying thread since the ideas in his lectures spread and inspired critics to contemplate the limitations and possibilities of each artistic medium. For this investigation, I examined mannerist portrait art and analyzed the poetic circles in and around Florence after the fall of the Republic. In an effort to retain control over Florence, Duke Cosimo I de Medici repressed the talents of Florence’s most prolific humanists, attempting to mold these geniuses into mere court iconographers. He harnessed the poetic and artistic creativity of Florence by institutionalizing the Accademia Fiorentina in 1541. Offering immunity to those exiled intellectuals who had remained loyal to the republic, Cosimo began to secure a cultural revival. Arguably Cosimo’s most impressive achievement was convincing Benedetto Varchi, to return from exile to work in his service in Florence. Varchi brought prestige, authenticity, and intellectual curiosity back to Florence while reinforcing the duality of the literati’s existence in Renaissance culture.
Colloquia Maruliana 27 (2018): 5-41
Italian Poetry in Early Modern Dalmatia: The Strange Case of Hanibal Lucić (1485-1553)
Ivan Lupić
The article announces the discovery of Sonetti di messer Anibal Lucio Lesignano, scritti a diversi, a collection of poems written in Italian by Hanibal Lucić (1485-1553), one of the leading poets of the Croatian Renaissance. Until now, scholars have known only one book by Lucić, his Croatian collection entitled Skladanja izvarsnih pisan razlicih, published posthumously by Hanibal’s son Antun. Like Skladanja, Lucić’s Sonetti were published in Venice in 1556, in a beautiful quarto edition produced by Francesco Marcolini, the printer of Skladanja. The article describes this hitherto unknown publication and explains how it was discovered. An edition of the book’s contents is provided at the end of the article in the hope that Lucić’s Italian verse will be studied by scholars on both sides of the Adriatic, and beyond. Lucić’s Sonetti constitute an important document in the essentially multilingual history of the European Renaissance in this part of the world, and they remind us how our focus on national literatures has in some cases rendered the multilingual aspects of the Renaissance tradition practically invisible.
Shirat Devorah: Festschrift in Honor of Devora Bregman, pp. 9-29 [English section], Edited by Haviva Ishay (Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press)
The Poet in the Printing Shop: Leon Modena and the Paratextual Production of Authority in Early Modern Venice
2018 •
Michela Andreatta
The Italianist A Simple Virgin Speaks: Authorial Identity and Persuasion in Isabella Cervoni's Oration to Pope Clement VIII
Anna Wainwright
This article analyzes Isabella Cervoni’s Orazione […] al santissimo, e beatissimo padre, e signor nostro, Papa Clemente ottavo, sopra l’impresa di Ferrara, con una canzone […] a’ prencipi cristiani (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Bellagamba, 1598), a bold call to war through which the young female poet strategically inserts her voice into the complex political debate of the 1590s. Cervoni redeploys the words of well-known historians and poets, including Scipione Ammirato and Ludovico Ariosto, to bolster her historically, politically and religiously charged work. She portrays herself as, in turn, a divinely-inspired innocent, an erudite historian, and finally, a prophetic woman poet worthy of both patronage and consideration. This essay also considers Cervoni’s unique work within the larger context of other writers who published similar polemics addressed to Pope Clement VIII and other rulers of Europe on the Ottoman threat in the final tumultuous years of the sixteenth century.
Cambridge Scholars
"That nightingale that sweetly mourns": Comments on the thematics and poetics of the Cypriot Canzoniere
2014 •
Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa
