Sixteenth Century Poetry

Ce livre étudie la lamentation dans la littérature polémique au temps des guerres de Religion en France. La polémique de la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle est bien plus qu'une sous-littérature violente et trompeuse. Elle se nourrit d'une longue tradition poétique et rhétorique du discours véridique. Le pathos de la polémique est beaucoup plus riche qu'un appel à la haine et à l'indignation. L'ouvrage adopte une approche pluridisciplinaire à la croisée des recherches sur la rhétorique, la poétique, l'histoire des émotions et l'analyse du discours afin de saisir la spécificité de la lamentation comme pratique polémique qui vise à neutraliser le conflit par la pitié.

Compte-rendu par ANNE-GAËLLE LETERRIER-GAGLIANO :
http://cornucopia16.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Leterrier-CR-Lamentation-et-pol%C3%A9mique.pdf

>>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<
(ENG)

This book studies lamentation in polemical literature at the time of the Wars of Religion in France. The book adopts a multidisciplinary approach in order to grasp the specificity of lamentation as a polemical practice aimed at neutralizing conflict by pity.

Review by ANDREA FRISCH:
https://h-france.net/vol19reviews/vol19no191frisch.pdf

Review by CORINNE NOIROT
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4467CC1E2780ECD04056B58401EF0EB5/S0034433820001992a.pdf/lamentation_et_polemique_au_temps_des_guerres_de_religion_natalia_wawrzyniak_bibliotheque_dhistoire_de_la_renaissance_12_paris_classiques_garnier_2017_280_pp_32.pdf

How to know a person is in love with someone body? It is usually through expressing one’s love towards the loved one. It will be considered a strong love towards a beloved but if not expressing it or exaggerating it. Shakespeare’s sonnet, in the beginning, is misleading its readers due to the beginning 12 lines but the end is opposite to its start. As it is a true love between the lovers but not announced everywhere and yet not exaggerated. This paper aims to analyze one of Shakespeare’s great sonnets “Sonnet 130”, which is a satire of Petrarchan sonnets. The paper also looks at the form, and content of the “Sonnet 130” and analyses it to gain a broader insight into the sonnet. Finally, the study focuses on the literary devices used within the sonnet to comprehend Shakespeare’s portrayal of the women image in the sonnet, using the analytical approach.

My paper intends to explore the role of Louise Labé (c. 1516-1566) as renovator and new interpreter of
Italian lyric tradition. I will focus in particular on the first sonnet of her Evvrez, centred on the myth of
Ulysses.
As most of male-authored lyric poetry, Labé’s work deals with the absence of the lover.
Nonetheless, her poetry is far from being a repetition of male tradition. By deciding to write the first
sonnet of her collection in Italian, she is choosing the language of a specific man: Petrarch. According
to Brugnolo, her choice of Italian is “strutturale”: it is intended to show that the sonnet is the first of a
canzoniere. But her touch on the shape is evident: the sonnet has an Italian rhyme scheme, but not one
featured in Petrarch, her syntax is ‘spigolosa’ (Brugnolo), her canzoniere is made of twenty-four
sonnets. The Petrarchan example is accepted and violated at the same time: Italian language is a way to
make the debt explicit, but this does not stop Labé from reinterpreting it. Labé is not Penelope waiting
for her man, but rather the cunning Ulysses, a parallel rare in the poetry of the time, and particularly
unexpected for a woman. My claim is that the Italian sonnet is not merely an empty homage to Petrarch
(as many French critics have said), but the key to a coherent reading of the entire cycle based on the
concept of μῆτις (as described by Detienne and Vernant).
Finally, I will discuss the style and thematic patterns of the first sonnet in relation to the Evvrez,
in order to examine the female ‘difference’ (Jones, Lesko Baker, Sieburth) of Labé’s poetry, as a
counterargument to Huchon’s thesis, according to which Labé is but a nom de plume for a circle of
male authors.

This article examines Philippe de Monte’s first book of spiritual madrigals, underlining the pioneering character of this collection in the history of the genre and its relationships with the Jesuits. Two new text attributions, to Vittoria Colonna and Laura Battiferri, are discussed within an overall description of the book, its themes, and its structure. Three madrigals dealing with spiritual themes in terms of musical metaphors and imagery are analyzed in the context of sixteenth-century ideas on music and Christian spirituality, and as an open reflection by Monte on the real value of music beyond the ephemeral appreciation of human judgement.

This paper presents the first full edition and translation of an unpublished (1566) poem written by Johanna Otho and sent to Camille de Morel. Both young women, linked by their mutual acquaintance Karel Utenhove, were internationally recognized for their learning. Otho's poem is a significant contribution to the corpus of women's Latin poetry. This paper also offers a brief introduction to the poem's historical context and suggests contemporary political resonances for Otho's poem. Her poem contains allusions to the conflict between courtly life and religion, which reference the ongoing conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Europe and specifically France.

Jehan de Maletty was one of a group of humanist gentleman-composers meeting in Lyon around 1580. He is one of the few who published collections of settings of Ronsard's "Amours"; but also featured the newer 'star' of Desportes. Later he turned to religious music and a few of his Psalms survive complete. 40 other songs survive only in a fragmentary condition, and more have disappeared altogether. At least one of his tunes survived in a few Swiss MSS where it is re-used as the chorale theme in a Passion setting! This is (so far as I know) the only edition of the remaining material, collected together from the remaining partbooks in France, the UK and Germany.

Publié dans: revue RELIEF 9 (2), 2015 – ISSN: 1873-5045, p. 7-21.

Cette contribution se propose d’examiner la controverse opposant Marot et Sagon dans les années 1530. L’établissement d’une typologie des invectives échangées nous permettra de révéler l’enjeu principal de l’affrontement, qui consiste à se (re)placer dans le champ littéraire. Il s’agira par ailleurs d’aborder la composante clanique de la controverse, le conflit Marot-Sagon incarnant manifestement une dimension communautaire : les auteurs se constituent des ligues de partisans (réels ou fictifs) regroupés dans plusieurs recueils collectifs contemporains. Il conviendra ainsi d’élucider les différentes tentatives d’annexion – ou d’exclusion – à un clan, et les stratégies rhétoriques que cela suppose.

This paper presents the first full edition and translation of an unpublished (1566) poem written by Johanna Otho and sent to Camille de Morel. Both young women, linked by their mutual acquaintance Karel Utenhove, were internationally recognized for their learning. Otho’s poem is a significant contribution to the corpus of women’s Latin poetry. This paper also offers a brief introduction to the poem’s historical context and suggests contem- porary political resonances for Otho’s poem. Her poem contains allusions to the conflict between courtly life and religion, which reference the ongoing conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Europe and specifically France.

In the early Elizabethan period, nine of the ten tragedies attributed to the ancient Roman statesman, philosopher, and playwright Seneca (c. 1 BCE–65 CE) were translated for the first time into English, and these translations shaped Seneca’s dramatic legacy as it would be known to later authors and playwrights. This edition enables readers to appreciate the distinct style and aims of three milestone translations: Jasper Heywood’s Troas (1559) and Thyestes (1560), and John Studley’s Agamemnon (1566). The plays are presented in modern spelling and accompanied by critical notes clarifying the translators’ approaches to rendering Seneca in English. The introduction provides important context, including a survey of the transmission and reception of Seneca from the first through the sixteenth century and an analysis and comparison of the style of the three translations.

James Ker is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Jessica Winston is Professor of English at Idaho State University.

Available in hardback and paperback (amazon.com/amazon.co.uk) as well as e-book or PDF download (play.google.com)

Het zestiende- en zeventiende-eeuwse embleemboek was een zeer populair genre in de Nederlanden dat zich via een complexe keten van vertalingen en hertalingen heeft gevestigd en vervolgens een belangrijke meertalige component kreeg. De behandeling van deze meertalige embleemboeken in de bestaande onderzoekstraditie doet tekort aan de complexiteit van het polyglotte geheel. In dit artikel wordt betoogd dat dit teksttype beter begrepen kan worden als het beschouwd wordt in relatie tot de zogenaamde taalkwestie. Parallel aan de groeiende populariteit van het embleemboek in de zestiende eeuw namen de discussies over taal in de Nederlanden in hevigheid toe. Men zocht naar een geschikte taalvorm voor communicatie tussen de inwoners van de Nederlanden. Hoewel sommigen een bepaalde (dialectale) vorm van de Nederlandse vernaculaire taal naar voren schoven als perfecte kandidaat, nam de aandacht voor andere talen niet af. Via het meertalige embleemboek kon men gezamenlijk of alleen reflecteren op de centrale problematiek van de taalkwestie en zo visies op taal en taalverschillen vormen en uitwisselen.

Communication lors du 16e colloque Jeunes Chercheurs CIERL-CIREM « De la parole à l’écrit : formes, fonctions et représentations de l’oralité sous l’Ancien Régime », Rimouski (Québec), 16-17 juin 2016

À paraître en 2018.


Quand « amours » rime avec « discours » : des fonctions et pouvoirs de la parole dans l'histoire sentimentale en vers.

Le début du XVII e siècle voit une explosion des fictions narratives, majoritairement à thématique amoureuse. Les personnages sont des parleurs intarissables, le discours direct, dans la tradition rhétorique de la prosopopée, étant considéré comme l'accès le plus direct à l'intériorité du personnage. Les histoires sentimentales en vers de Bertaut 1 et La Roque 2 ainsi que « Les Infortunees Amours de Meandre & d'Alize » 3 , dans la lignée des récits médiévaux, sont innervées par le discours oral. Les effets d'oralité (apostrophe des personnages, adresse au lecteur) abondent, le champ sémantique de la parole est omniprésent. Suite à cette insistance formelle et lexicale, il s'agira d'engager une réflexion sur la valeur du mot prononcé, « discours » rimant avec « amours », « bouche » avec « touche », mais « pensée » avec « offensée ». Dès lors, ce questionnement nous permettra d'interroger également la position de l'auteur, dans la mesure où l'histoire peut être considérée comme prise de parole de ce dernier. Alors que l'histoire sentimentale en prose multiplie l'insertion de formes oralement marquées (lettres, vers, dialogues), mises en évidence par la mise en page, le récit versifié occulte ces prises de parole. Le brouillage énonciatif entre l'auteur et les personnages devient possible. De plus, la distribution de la parole reflète le système manichéen des personnages. Si seuls les bons ont droit au discours direct et les paroles de l'auteur et du personnage se confondent dans la forme versifiée, quel est donc l'ethos de l'auteur qui se construit ?

In the 16th and 17th centuries, health was conceived as the balance (eucrasia) between the four humors –blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile–, whereas sickness was the result of the excess or the lack (discrasia) of any of those substances. One of the diseases –of the ‘imbalances’– that drew much attention and reflection over the long period between Antiquity and the 17th century is melancholy, the malady that results from the excess of black bile. This text studies some of the physical symptoms related to melancholy –especially so called “love-melancholy”– and compares them to symptoms of amor hereos (‘lovesickness’) that appear in love poetry. The comparison between poetical and medical texts –two separate genres between which, nonetheless, influences can be traced– reveals a series of ambivalences, tensions, contrasts and paradoxes that operate at the center of the ideas of sickness and of love.

Con i Treny di Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) il Rinascimento polacco e tutta la poesia slava premoderna conseguono il loro capolavoro. In un breve ciclo di 19 componimenti elegiaci di vario metro e misura è racchiuso un universo di pensiero, tutta la crisi dell’uomo rinascimentale che – posto di fronte al male e al dolore assoluti per la morte di una bambina men che treenne, tenta una ricostruzione della perduta armonia del mondo, e della propria stessa identità, dignità e integrità umana e paterna. E nel "sogno", cioè nella poesia, ci riesce" (Dall'Introduzione di L. Marinelli). In questa edizione, oltre al testo originale in polacco, si può leggere la traduzione finora dei Treny rimasta fin qui inedita, a opera di Umberto Norsa, della quale viene pubblicata in appendice anche la scansione del manoscritto, e viene riproposta insieme la versione di Enrico Damiani, già pubblicata nel 1926 e, "in una nuova versione ampliata e riveduta", da I.p.E.O. nel 1930. Completa il volume un ricco apparato di note utile, assieme alla doppia introduzione di Luigi Marinelli, per la migliore collocazione del capolavoro kochanowskiano nel contesto del Rinascimento europeo e della traduzione di poesia polacca in Italia.

Publié dans : L’éditeur à l’œuvre : reconsidérer l’auctorialité ?, éd. Dominique Brancher, Gaëlle Burg et Giovanni Berjola, 11-13 octobre 2018, Bâle.
Open access : https://emono.unibas.ch/catalog/book/61

A partir de la notion de "labeur", cette contribution interroge le geste éditorial de Gilles Corrozet, à la fois auteur, éditeur et libraire.

This article is concerned with an artistic Latin translation of Euripides’ Cyclops, which was published in 1556 by the Calabrian humanist Coriolano Martirano (1503-1557). It illustrates the way in which Euripides’ text is reworked in the broader context of the reception of the satirical drama in sixteenth-century Italy. An analysis of the work shows that Martirano intervenes on the text, modifying and integrating it, not only under the influence of other ancient sources dedicated to the figure of the cyclops, ranging from Homer to Ovid and from Theocritus to Virgil, but also in a dialogue with the Neo-Latin and vernacular production that other exponents of Calabrian humanism, such as Antonio Telesio and Coriolano’s brother Bernardino, dedicated to the cyclops in the 1520s and 1530s.

Writers the world over have often accompanied their texts with a variety of annotations, marginal glosses, rubrications, and explicatory or narrative prose in an effort to direct and control the reception of their own works. Such self-exegetical devices do not merely serve as an external apparatus but effectively interact with the primary text by introducing a distinctive meta-literary dimension which, in turn, reveals complex dynamics affecting the very notions of authorship and readership. In the Renaissance, self-commentaries enjoyed unprecedented diffusion and found expression in a multiplicity of forms, which appear to be closely linked to momentous processes such as the legitimation of vernacular languages across Europe, the construction of a literary canon, the making of the modern author as we know it, and the self-representation of modern individual identities.

The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University (https://www.dur.ac.uk/imems/) invites proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of self-commentary and self-exegesis in Early Modern European literature, broadly defined as ca. 1400 – ca. 1700. The conference will be aimed specifically at bringing together both established scholars and early career researchers working on diverse Renaissance literary traditions (including Neo-Latin and Slavonic languages), and promoting cross-cultural dialogue.

A number of fundamental questions will be addressed, including:
- How do authorial commentaries mimic standard commentaries?
- If commentaries ordinarily aim to facilitate textual comprehension and bridge the gap between a text and its readership, in what ways can this be true of self-commentaries as well? What further motivations and strategies are at work?
- How do writers of the Renaissance position themselves in respect of the classical tradition?
- How do they progressively depart from the medieval scholastic practice of glossing texts?
- How do self-commentaries interact with the primary text and contribute to its reception?

For consideration, please send a title and abstract of ~300 words as well as a one-page CV to francesco.venturi@durham.ac.uk no later than 15 October 2015.

Thanks to the sponsorship of the Society for Renaissance Studies (SRS), a limited number of bursaries (contribution towards travel/accommodation) will be available for postgraduate and early career researchers.

Confirmed speakers: Carlo Caruso (Durham), Hannah Crawforth (King’s College – London), Martin McLaughlin (Oxford), John O’Brien (Durham), and Federica Pich (Leeds).

Acuity of Wit aims at illuminating the role that the notion of “wonder” played in early modern poetic theory, starting with the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the mid-sixteenth century. By delving into debates and controversies taking place between the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas, it demonstrates that scholars from Lodovico Castelvetro to Francesco Patrizi to Alonso López Pinciano developed a theoretical framework able to account for the transition from a feeling of wonder aroused by the unexpectedness of plot twists, paradoxical statements and far-fetched metaphors to a feeling of marvel towards the “subtlety” or “acuity” of the wit responsible for any of these. In doing so, I propose a series of often-neglected continuities between sixteenth-century Aristotelianism and the interest in ingenuity generally associated with seventeenth-century Jesuit theorists of “acutezza” or “agudeza”, such as Matteo Peregrini and Baltasar Gracián. For the latter, the ability to market wonders became the main criterion by which to judge the value of a poet and the path to conceive aesthetic values in a poem or a speech. I further show that the taste for wonder and acuity of wit eventually colonized spaces as apparently alien to it as history. Historians influenced by the renewed popularity of Tacitus saw themselves as making use of “acuity of wit” to decipher intentions that the agents had cunningly dissimulated. By doing so, they entered a space halfway between reciprocity and challenge, in which writing was experienced as a contest to outwit princes and courtiers in a game of unveiling inner thoughts and secrets. Finally, I explore how early modern writers and theorists conceived of acuity of wit as a virtue that can be noticed only through the active cooperation of the reader in the process of decoding and unfolding arguments. In a series of highly controversial debates touching on contemporary literary fashions such as the so-called “laconic style” or Luis de Góngora’s “new poetry”, scholars such as Virgilio Malvezzi or Francisco Fernández de Córdoba reversed principles inherited from ancient rhetoric to relocate aesthetic pleasure in the interdependence and competition between author and reader.

Les rares documents qui survécurent à la destruction du monastère royal Saint-Louis de Poissy revêtent aux yeux des historiens une valeur d'autant plus grande que la plupart de ses archives disparurent avec les édifices de cette institution médiévale, détruite au lendemain de la Révolution française. Le manuscrit Fr. 5009 en constitue un exemple remarquable. Intitulé les Memoires concernant le Prieuré de Poissy, Recueillis sur les archives de la maison par Madame Susanne de Henequin Religieuse de ce monastere qui me les envoya, et qui releguée par rapport aux brailleries qui etoient dans cette maison ombre madame de Mailey Prieure Perpetuelle, mourue de la petite verole à Châlon sur Saone, en 1719. dans un monastere de son ordre, cet assemblage de textes renferme plusieurs informations sur le couvent, depuis sa fondation en 1304 jusqu'à l'aube du dix-septième siècle. Mises à part les listes des jeunes femmes et filles qui y entrèrent et prirent le voile, sa compilatrice, Susanne de Hennequin, y insert les résumés de quelques cérémonies qui eurent lieu au couvent pendant la seconde moitié du seizième siècle. Le document contient notamment, à la feuille 2r, une brève description des rites funèbres célébrés en l'honneur de la prieure Marguerite du Puy, décédée en 1583. La relation de ces rites est accompagnée d'une épitaphe anonyme plus loin dans les Memoires, pièce qui en constitue le seul texte poétique du recueil. L'auteure n'est pas identifiée, mais certains aspects du poème évoquent les vers d'un célèbre membre du couvent, Anne de Marquets (1533?–1588).