Petrarch

Petrarch PDF Author: Christopher S. Celenza
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238770
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet. Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private. In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.

Petrarch

Petrarch PDF Author: Christopher S. Celenza
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238770
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet. Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private. In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.

Tropes of Engagement

Tropes of Engagement PDF Author: Leah Schwebel
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487552610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
While scholars have long explored connections between Chaucer and Boccaccio, relatively few have asked why Chaucer makes such a habit of obscuring the influence of his favourite vernacular author. Tropes of Engagement asks the question of what motivated Chaucer to camouflage his debt to his most prominent, yet never named, Italian source: Giovanni Boccaccio. Leah Schwebel boldly claims that when Chaucer erases Boccaccio, he is mimicking strategies of translation practiced by his classical and continental predecessors. Tracing popular narratives from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, including the Knight’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Troy Book, Schwebel argues that authorial erasure, invention, and manipulation are recognizable literary tropes of engagement that poets employ to suggest their connection to, and place within, a broader authorial tradition. Combining an attention to the cultural, historical, and material circumstances surrounding literary production with a mode of source study that looks beyond discernable influence, Tropes of Engagement recognizes authors self-consciously erasing and misreading each other as part of a process of mutual and self-promotion.

Moral Combat

Moral Combat PDF Author: Gerry Milligan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487503148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Moral Combat explores dozens of primary texts to ask why women's militarism became one of the central discourses of sixteenth-century Italy.

Passion and Order

Passion and Order PDF Author: Carol Lansing
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.

Petrarch and Boccaccio

Petrarch and Boccaccio PDF Author: Igor Candido
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110419580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Die Buchreihe Mimesis präsentiert unter ihrem neuen Untertitel Romanische Literaturen der Welt ein innovatives und integrales Verständnis der Romania wie der Romanistik aus literaturwissenschaftlicher und kulturtheoretischer Perspektive. Sie trägt der Tatsache Rechnung, dass die faszinierende Entwicklung der romanischen Literaturen und Kulturen in Europa wie außerhalb Europas neue weltweite Dynamiken in Gang gesetzt hat, welche die großen Traditionen der Romania fortschreiben und auf neue Horizonte hin öffnen. In Mimesis kommt ein transareales, die europäische und die außereuropäische Welt romanischer Literaturen und Kulturen zusammendenkendes Verständnis der Romanistik zur Geltung, das über nationale wie disziplinäre Grenzziehungen hinweg die oft übersehenen Wechselwirkungen zwischen unterschiedlichen Traditions- und Entwicklungslinien in Europa und den Amerikas, in Afrika und Asien entfaltet. Im Archipel der Romanistik zeigt Mimesis auf, wie die dargestellte Wirklichkeit in den romanischen Literaturen der Welt die Tür zu einem vielsprachigen Kosmos verschiedenartiger Logiken öffnet.

Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition

Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition PDF Author: Mark Joyal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351897349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book, which honours the career of a distinguished scholar, contains essays dealing with important problems in Plato, the Platonic tradition, and the texts and transmission of Plato and later Platonic writers. It ranges from the discussion of issues in individual Platonic dialogues to the examination of Platonism in the Middle Ages. The essays are written by leading scholars in the field and reflect the current state of knowledge on the various problems under discussion. The collection as a whole testifies to the importance of the Platonic writings for the history of ideas, and to the vitality that the study of these writings continues to possess.

The Body in Early Modern Italy

The Body in Early Modern Italy PDF Author: Julia L. Hairston
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080189414X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Human bodies have been represented and defined in various ways across different cultures and historical periods. As an object of interpretation and site of social interaction, the body has throughout history attracted more attention than perhaps any other element of human experience. The essays in this volume explore the manifestations of the body in Italian society from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Adopting a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, these fresh and thought-provoking essays offer original perspectives on corporeality as understood in the early modern literature, art, architecture, science, and politics of Italy. An impressively diverse group of contributors comment on a broad range and variety of conceptualizations of the body, creating a rich dialogue among scholars of early modern Italy. Contributors: Albert R. Ascoli, University of California, Berkeley; Douglas Biow, The University of Texas at Austin; Margaret Brose, University of California, Santa Cruz; Anthony Colantuono, University of Maryland, College Park; Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University; Sergius Kodera, New Design University, St. Pölten, Austria; Jeanette Kohl, University of California, Riverside; D. Medina Lasansky, Cornell University; Luca Marcozzi, Roma Tre University; Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University; Katharine Park, Harvard University; Sandra Schmidt, Free University of Berlin; Bette Talvacchia, University of Connecticut

The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy

The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy PDF Author: Anthony F. D’Elia
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674015524
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Weddings in 15th-century Italian courts were grand, sumptuous affairs, often requiring guests to listen to lengthy orations given in Latin. D'Elia shows how Italian humanists used these orations to support claims of legitimacy and assertions of superiority among families jockeying for power, as well as to advocate for marriage and sexual pleasure.

Petrarch's War

Petrarch's War PDF Author: William Caferro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108613063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This revisionist account of the economic, literary and social history of Florence in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death connects warfare with the plague narrative. Organised around Petrarch's 'war' against the Ubaldini clan of 1349–1350, which formed the prelude to his meeting and friendship with Boccaccio, William Caferro's work examines the institutional and economic effects of the war, alongside literary and historical patterns. Caferro pays close attention to the meaning of wages in context, including those of soldiers, thereby revising our understanding of wage data in the distant past and highlighting the consequences of a constricted workforce that resulted in the use of cooks and servants on important embassies. Drawing on rigorous archival research, this book will stimulate discussion among academics and offers a new contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Florence. It stresses the importance of short-termism and contradiction as subjects of historical inquiry.

The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass

The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass PDF Author: Julia Haig Gaisser
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This book traces the transmission and reception of one of the most influential novels in Western literature. The Golden Ass, the only ancient Roman novel to survive in its entirety, tells of a young man changed into an ass by magic and his bawdy adventures and narrow escapes before the goddess Isis changes him back again. Its centerpiece is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche. Julia Gaisser follows Apuleius' racy tale from antiquity through the sixteenth century, tracing its journey from roll to codex in fourth-century Rome, into the medieval library of Monte Cassino, into the hands of Italian humanists, into print, and, finally, over the Alps and into translation in Spanish, French, German, and English. She demonstrates that the novel's reception was linked with Apuleius' reputation as a philosopher and the persona he projected in his works. She relates Apuleius and the Golden Ass to a diverse cast of important literary and historical figures--including Augustine, Fulgentius, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bessarion, Boiardo, and Beroaldo. Paying equal attention to the novel's transmission (how it survived) and its reception (how it was interpreted), she places the work in its many different historical contexts, examining its representation in art, literary imitation, allegory, scholarly commentary, and translation. The volume contains several appendixes, including an annotated list of the manuscripts of the Golden Ass. This book is based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 2000.