Christo si è fermato a Napoli. Renaissance und Reformation im Neapel des 16. Jahrhunderts (Giovanni Domenico di Lega, Morte di Christo, Napoli 1549)

Despite being only a minor member of the Neapolitan Accademia degli Incogniti and being far less known than prominent members of the academy such as Laura Terracina, Giovan Domenico di Lega published the highly significant sacred tragedy Morte di Christo in 1549. The text mirrors the classicist poetics of an Aristotelian tragedy and emphasises the belief of partial adaptability of Aristotelian concepts to the neotestamentarian content of Christ’s passion and crucifixion. Thus transforming the traditional Sacra rappresentazione into a “tragedia sacra”, di Lega choses not only a typical approach of Renaissance poetics to biblical texts, he also stages mainly the gospel according to John. In doing so he not only shows to be a philologist rather than a teller of pious legends like the authors of Sacre rappresentazioni, but he also presents himself as a supporter of a free circulation of the New Testament in its vernacular version, which was suppressed in Naples being part of the Spanish territories. In clear opposition to Spanish politics of religion in Naples, but in accordance with other members of the Accademia degli Incogniti and the former group of ‘spirituali’ around Juan de Valdés, who died in Naples in 1541, di Lega combines the major texts of a not only ‘Lutheran’ reform – the gospel according to John and the letter of saint Paul to the Romans – with the spirituali’s manifesto Il beneficio di Cristo, prohibited and burned shortly afterwards. In an increasingly orthodox environment such as Naples during the 1540 s di Legas Tragedia sacra with its combination of Renaissance poetics and explosive elements of religious reform could not be of great success, therefore there exists no further edition after the one of 1549. Nonetheless it witnesses the aborted attempts of Catholic reform in mid sixteenth century Naples.

“My Soul’s Imaginary Sight”: renaissance poetics and the notion of imagination

Nos séculos XVI e XVII, o significado conceitual de “imaginação” atrelava-se sobretudo à teoria aristotélica da phantasia, traduzida como imaginatio, em latim, e amplamente discutida em tratados sobre poesia e retórica. Neste artigo, propõe-se explorar brevemente algumas ideias relativas à especificidade histórica da noção de “imaginação” na poética renascentista, com vistas a evitar as abordagens transistóricas da poesia e de sua interpretação. Para tanto, serão comentados trechos específicos dos tratados The Defense of Poetry (1595), de Philip Sidney, Advancement of Learning (1605), de Francis Bacon, bem como algumas passagens das obras de William Shakespeare.

Some Remarks on Renaissance Mythophilia. The Medical Poetics of Wonder: Girolamo Fracastoro and His Thought World (Appendix Galeotto Marzio, De doctrina promiscua [ante 1490, princeps 1548])

The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy.

The Tragic, the Comic and the Tragicomic in Cretan Renaissance Literature

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine (the biblical drama Abraham’s Sacrifice) and a pastoral idyll with a tragic outcome (The Shepherdess), while Kornaros’ verse romance Erotokritos plays with the possibility of a tragic ending before settling for the outcome proper to romance. This intermingling of the tragic and the comic – of tears and laughter – is common in Cretan Renaissance literature, and most fully realised in the new hybrid genre of tragicommedia pastorale, which seems to have been popular in Crete around 1600. Taking Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis as its main textual focus, this chapter explores the interaction of tears and laughter both at a textual level and in plot structure. While the theoretical bases of tragicomedy, as propounded by Guarini, clearly underpin works like Panoria, in the case of works belonging to other genres other factors are involved: Petrarchising tropes, which are common in Cretan literature, and the antithetical structures characteristic of the folk tradition. Panoria, set on Mount Ida, is thoroughly Cretan and at the same time thoroughly imbued with late-Renaissance poetics.

The Rebirth of Poetics

This chapter traces the genealogy of the immortality of poetry topos from antiquity to the sixteenth century. It argues that the Renaissance poetics of ruins’s yearning for timelessness is accomplished through the strategy of a temporal multiplicity, a process that transmutes the past and in turn open its own transformation, from author to author, reader to reader. In other words, Renaissance poetry, implicitly or explicitly, hopes to transcend its temporal and spatial horizons (aspiring to be a monument), yet finds its survival in the immanent world, by being recycled, cited, and transformed by successors (living as a ruin). This tension—to be within or without time—drives much of the discourse surrounding ruins. Architectural destruction always compels poets to create works that rise above the sublunary world, while at the same time it inevitably leads them back into the thickets of exchange and mediation. The chapter ends with close-reading of several sonnets of Shakespeare.

“C’est un amour ou Cupidon nouveau”: Spiritual Passion and the Profane Persona in Anne de Marquets’s Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (1568–1569)

While best known for her 480 Sonets spirituels, published seventeen years after her death in 1605, the Dominican nun Anne de Marquets also contributed a remarkable collection of personal spiritual poetry during her lifetime in Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, chez N. Chesneau, 1568; reedited in 1569). In the pages following her translation of Marcantonio Flaminio’s Carminum sacrorum libellus, her original cantiques ou chansons spirituelles and sonets de l’amour divin reveal a convergence of Renaissance poetics and traditional Christian themes. In particular, Anne de Marquets looks to the Petrarchan tradition as a model for the expression of her love for the divine. Drawing on images and themes from Petrarch and his earliest French imitators, the Dominican adopts the poetic process promoted by the Pléiade, notably in Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse and in Ronsard’s ode Hercule chrestien. Connue aujourd’hui essentiellement pour ses 480 Sonets spirituels, recueil publié dix-sept ans après sa mort en 1605, la dominicaine Anne de Marquets a pourtant écrit d’autres poésies chrétiennes qui se trouvent à la suite de sa traduction du Carminum sacrorum libellus du poète néo-latin Marcantonio Flaminio (Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius, [Paris : N. Chesneau, 1568, rééd. en 1569]). Dans ses cantiques ou chansons spirituelles et ses sonets de l’amour divin, Marquets exprime son amour pour le divin à travers divers modèles de la poésie renaissante. Elle pratique en particulier le pétrarquisme tel qu’il fut transmis par les poètes de la Renaissance française. S’inspirant des images et des thèmes trouvés chez Pétrarque et ses imitateurs, cette poésie s’inscrit dans le courant poétique mis en avant par la Pléiade, notamment dans la Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse de Du Bellay et dans l’ode ronsardienne Hercule chrestien.