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The closely related problems of creativity and freedom have long been seen as emblematic of the Renaissance. Ullrich Langer, however, argues that French and Italian Renaissance literature can be profitably reconceived in terms of the way these problems are treated in late medieval scholasticism in general and nominalist theology in particular. Looking at a subject that is relatively unexplored by literary critics, Langer introduces the reader to some basic features of nominalist theology and uses these to focus on what we find to be "modern" in French and Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Langer demonstrates that this literature, often in its most interesting moments, represents freedom from constraint in the figures of the poet and the reader and in the fictional world itself. In Langer's view, nominalist theology provides a set of concepts that helps us understand the intellectual context of that freedom: God, the secular sovereign, and the poet are similarly absolved of external necessity in their relationships to their worlds. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Offering a fresh interpretation of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, Robert E. Stillman's intellectually ambitious study challenges traditional scholarship by identifying the impact of his education by the followers of Philip Melanchthon-the so-called Philippists-on his poetics, piety, and politics. Sidney created the first Renaissance text to argue for poetry's pre-eminence as an autonomous form of knowledge in the public domain, and its consequent power to promote cultural reform.
More than any other early modern text, Montaigne's Essais have come to be associated with the emergence of a distinctively modern subjectivity, defined in opposition to the artifices of language and social performance. Felicity Green challenges this interpretation with a compelling revisionist reading of Montaigne's text, centred on one of his deepest but hitherto most neglected preoccupations: the need to secure for himself a sphere of liberty and independence that he can properly call his own, or himself. Montaigne and the Life of Freedom restores the Essais to its historical context by examining the sources, character and significance of Montaigne's project of self-study. That project, as Green shows, reactivates and reshapes ancient practices of self-awareness and self-regulation, in order to establish the self as a space of inner refuge, tranquillity and dominion, free from the inward compulsion of the passions and from subjection to external objects, forces and persons.
Through the examination of the concept of freedom in the writings of St Francis de Sales the author concludes that, in contradistinction to a contemporary understanding of freedom perceived as self-determination, a Salesian understanding privileges freedom's relationship to 'the good'. This situates St Francis de Sales in the classical Thomistic tradition of freedom's necessary relationship to the good, but involves a methodological shift as he employs the Renaissance starting point of 'the turn to the subject'. This study demonstrates how St Francis arrives inductively at what St Thomas demonstrated deductively, namely, the essential relationship of freedom to the good. Along with this Thomistic influence, the author analyses the Salesian indebtedness to Augustinian anthropology which explains the primacy St Francis gives to the will, and consequently, to love. Love, understood as the heart's movement towards the good, allows the Salesian approach to move beyond the confines of a traditional faculty psychology to embrace a more biblical understanding of the human person. This examination of love's relationship to freedom reveals their teleological and archaeological natures, coming back to our origins wherein we discover the source of our freedom bestowed on us as a gift from God.
Introduction. Canonicity, hybridity, freedom ; Sailing with Dante to the new world ; The Dante wax museum on the frontier, 1828 -- Colored Dante. Dante the Protestant. Abolitionists and nationalists, Americans and Italians ; H. Cordelia Ray, William Wells Brown -- Negro Dante. Educating the people: from Cicero to Du Bois ; African American filmmaker at the gates of Hell ; Spencer Williams ; Dante meets Amos 'n' Andy ; Ralph Waldo Ellison's prophetic vernacular muse -- Black Dante. LeRoi Jones, The system of Dante's hell ; A new narrative model ; Amiri Baraka: From Dante's system to the system -- African American Dante. Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills ; Multicolored, Multicultural Terza Rima ; Toni Morrison, The Bluest eye ; Dante Rap -- Poets in exile.
Influential accounts of European cultural history variously suggest that the rise of nominalism and its ultimate victory over realist orientations were highly implemental factors in the formation of Modern Europe since the later Middle Ages, but particularly the Reformation. Quite probably, this is a simplification of a state of affairs that is in fact more complex, indeed ambiguous. However, if there is any truth in such propositions - which have, after all, been made by many prominent commentators, such as Panofsky, Heer, Blumenberg, Foucault, Eco, Kristeva - we may no doubt assume that literary texts will have responded and in turn contributed, in a variety of ways, to these processes of cultural transformation. It seems of considerable interest, therefore, to take a close look at the complex, precarious position which literature, as basically a symbolic mode of signification, held in the perennial struggles and discursive negotiations between the semiotic 'twin paradigms' of nominalism and realism. This collection of essays (many of them by leading scholars in the field) is a first comprehensive attempt to tackle such issues - by analyzing representative literary texts in terms of their underlying semiotic orientations, specifically of nominalism, but also by studying pertinent historical, theoretical and discursive co(n)texts of such developments in their relation to literary discourse. At the same time, since 'literary nominalism' and 'realism' are conceived as fundamentally aesthetic phenomena instantiating a genuinely 'literary debate over universals', consistent emphasis is placed on the discursive dimension of the texts scrutinized, in an endeavour to re-orient and consolidate an emergent research paradigm which promises to open up entirely new perspectives for the study of literary semiotics, as well as of aesthetics in general. Historical focus is provided by concentrating on the English situation in the era of transition from late medieval to early modern (c. 1350-1650), but readers will also find contributions on Chrétien de Troyes and Rabelais, as well as on the 'aftermath' of the earlier debates - as exemplified in studies of Locke and (post)modern critical altercations, respectively, which serve to point up the continuing relevance of the issues involved. A substantial introductory essay seeks to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the study of nominalism and literary discourse, in addition to offering an in-depth exploration of the 'nominalism/realism-complex' in its relation to literature. An extensive bibliography and index are further features of interest to both specialists and general readers.
Before the rise of universities, cathedral schools educated students in a course of studies aimed at perfecting their physical presence, their manners, and their eloquence. The formula of cathedral schools was "letters and manners" (litterae et mores), which asserts a pedagogic program as broad as the modern "letters and science." The main instrument of what C. Stephen Jaeger calls "charismatic pedagogy" was the master's personality, his physical presence radiating a transforming force to his students. In The Envy of Angels, Jaeger explores this intriguing chapter in the history of ideas and higher learning and opens a new view of intellectual and social life in eleventh- and early twelfth-century Europe.
Boldly investigates the relationship between the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem
Love's Wounds takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, this book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped his model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. Cynthia N. Nazarian argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new "countersovereignty" from within the heart of vulnerability—a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered.Love’s Wounds tracks the development of the countersovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, Nazarian reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.
During the decade or so surrounding 1540, there is a change in French thinkers' assumptions about themselves, their country, and their place in the world. This evolutionary change is examined from multidisciplinary points of view, providing readers with tools for interpreting, defining, and understanding it in a broader sense. The character of the change being explored here is neither rupture nor revolution. It is a displacement of center that contributes to, or in some cases actually creates, a changed relation between past and mid-sixteenth-century present as well as between that present and attitudes toward the future. During the period around 1540, French thinkers and French perceptions opened to the notion that what-had-never-been now could be, what for lack of a better term, called the new, often accompanied by a nationalism proclaiming it for France. This brings a fresh understanding of what it means to be French - in language, in music, even in food. It brings an expansion of categories to be treated as part of the French economy, like Canadian fish, or more surprisingly, leisure, or music. Marian Rothstein is Professor of French at Carthage College.