Academic literature on the topic 'Italian Christian poetry'

Si iracunda, aut avaritia, aut carnis illecebra naviculam concusserit mentis, respice ad Mariam.— Bernard, In laudibus Virginis MatrisFactat animam Vulcanus, vestes aptat Pallas, fucat Venus, & cesto cingit, ornant cteterte Den, docet pessimos mores Mercurius. Et quia omni genere rerum a Diis donata esset, Pandoram appellat.— Jean Olivier, PandoraCelle qui est la Vertu, et la Grace …Monstre, qu'en soy elle a plus, que de femme.— Délie, D354 and 284This study proposes a new reading of Delie and tries to shed a new light on the poet himself. Sceve appears here not only as the humanist we all know, but as a Christian poet, a poet as much interested in biblical and other religious sources as in Classical and Italian ones. In his canzoniere, Scève follows very closely, and even sometimes imitates, a corpus of fixed-form poems — rondeaux parfaits, ballades, and chants royaux — written by poets of the two previous generations for poetic contests known as Puys. And he constantly expresses his love and describes his idol in terms, images, and symbols directly borrowed from Marian poetry. To the Christian cult of the Virgin Mary corresponds for the Lover the pagan cult of Délie.

According to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the leading theorists of German Romanticism, the “highest” art is always symbolic, and it would be more precise to name the discipline that deals with it “symbolics”, rather than “aesthetics”. According to Schlegel, the highest arts comprise painting, sculpture, music, and poetry as the “arts of the beautiful and the ideally significant”. Using the examples of painting and literary arts, he demonstrates the symbolic character of art in general. Schlegel thinks that masterpieces of old Italian and German painters exemplify symbolic art. Schlegel is against separating painting into genres. He thinks that portrait, landscape, or still nature are merely sketches in preparation for a large, multi-figure, historical painting — as a rule, with Christian content — which leads the spectator to divine spheres. At the same time, painting must perform its symbolic function by means purely pictorial. The best examples of poetry (this is how Schlegel styles all belles lettres) also have been symbolic, especially during its “Romantic period”, from the Middle Ages and up to the 1600s. Schlegel refers to its symbolic meaning by the term “allegory”. The Bible — as an artistic, symbolic book — became the foundation of the “Romantic” literature of the Middle Ages, which took two routes: “Christian-allegorical”, which transfers Christian symbolism on to the entire world and life, and properly speaking Romantic, which presents every phenomenon of life as leading up to symbolic beauty. Using the example of drama, Schlegel divides works of art into three categories: superficial, spiritual-profound, and eschatological. According to the German philosopher, contemporary art has lost its symbolic content and mostly remains at the superficial level.

If the Neapolitan humanist Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) receives any recognition in scholarly circles these days, it is usually for his Arcadia, an elaborate pastoral in twelve books, each combining prose and verse, that forms one of the most important links between the work of Petrarch, its inspiration, and that of Sir Philip Sidney. The Arcadia, published first authoritatively in 1504, is written in Italian, as are the hundred or so surviving Rime (songs and sonnets), largely products of the last decade of the fifteenth century. But Sannazaro was also a prolific writer in Latin. It is a question worth asking why, after the success of his vernacular magnum opus, he opted to use primarily a classical language for the major poetry that occupied his attention for the opening decades of the subsequent century. Perhaps a confirmation of his allegiance to Christian humanism is one reason. Perhaps also it was his devotion to Virgil whose three great works provided him with the most telling impetus for his own achievements in the Augustan poet's tongue.

The study was supported by a grant of the Russian Science Foundation No. 22-28-01671, https://rscf.ru/project/22-28-01671 /; Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities. The work is devoted to the study of Joseph Brodsky's poem «I was only what» (1981), part of the poetry collection «New stanzas to Augusta», compiled directly by the author himself in 1983. The article puts forward a hypothesis about the functioning of J. Brodsky's special unconventional supertext unity with a lyrical meta-plot of initiation and cognition through love, the creative work of a lyrical hero in love. In the course of the analysis the authors consider the main content and poetic features of Brodsky's chosen text as a potential semantic center of the selected supertextual unity, actualize the connections of the poetic markers highlighted at different levels of the text, establish correlations with other lyrical works of the poet that are part of a potential supertextual unity. It has been shown that in addressing his leading theme of human realization and the formation of the individual's creative potentials, Brodsky steadily synthesizes the three leading «private» texts of his own extensive metatext: Christmas, topos (in this case Italian), and love texts. The poem «I was only what» is considered as the semantic center of the designated supertext unity, embodying in a concentrated form all the main signs of the unity and integrity of the cycle. lyrical plot and the system of characters, imagery, motif and thematic structure, chronotopic originality, intertextual levels and allusive layers. The analysis demonstrates that the perspective of singling out and modeling the supertextual unity is extremely fruitful, allowing us to reconstruct the logic of the writer's artistic mindset and recreate the image of his mythopoetic world picture. Thus, in Brodsky’s poem «I was only what» the interference of the pretextual layers, «large» and «small», saturates the connotative components of the subtext and focuses the central motive line of the plot – the creation, that gives the lyrical hero the ability to gain sight, hearing, voice, that is, to speak, and potentially to create, in particular, to be a poet.

Paulinus of Nola might not be very widely read today, even among professional classicists, but he remains the most popular Latin poet in his adopted hometown. At the Christian basilica complex in Cimitile, near Nola, where Paulinus founded a community for ascetic devotees of the cult of St. Felix in the late fourth century, his poetry is still recited publicly on a number of festive days each year. On a recent visit to Cimitile, I found myself in the audience at one of these narrazioni, which had been organized as a prelude to the Festa dei Gigli, held annually in Paulinus’ honor on June 22. For a group of local residents, gathered around the tomb of Felix in the basilica uetus, an actor read passages from an Italian translation of Paulinus’ carmina, which were then subjected to theological exposition by the Vicar General of the Diocese of Nola. Even now, therefore, Paulinus’ poems, with their straightforward diction and everyday subject matter, are seen as an appropriate vehicle for inspiring religious devotion in the lay community. It is not difficult to imagine a similar scene at Cimitile when Paulinus himself was leading the festivities, 1600 years ago. Still, this modern recitation raises questions about how the Natalicia—that is, the series of poems he composed for Felix's feast day each January 14—were performed in their original context. Presumably, Paulinus would have delivered the Natalicia on his own, without the assistance of actors—but would he have recited all 858 verses of Natalicium 13 (for example), or would he only have presented excerpts? Would the readings have been supplemented by any commentary—theological, or even literary?

The article examines the topic of spleen (mal du siècle) as one of the main types of organization in the expressive structures of Liszt’s compositions. A series of relevant literary works are considered, which were read by Liszt and inspired a revolution in his musical language as early as 1834. The writings of Chateaubriand, Senancour, Byron (and a forerunner, Schiller), classified by Albert Thibaudet as the literature of emigration of the first romantic generation, drastically changed the classical concept of the Sublime, while the writings of Lamennais and Lamartine, labelled as the religious literature of the second generation, offered a remedy against the deep malaise by involving the faith in God. Views of another literary historian are also employed: Paul Bénichou distinguishes the spiritual counter-revolution in royalist and Catholic poetry (Chateaubriand), the rather exceptional case of Senancour who rejected religion remaining faithful to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and the humanist Romantic movement hallmarked by Lamartine’s optimism and Lamennais’s vision of Christian democracy. The musical analyses reveals that the themes and doctrines of the intellectual party of the counter-revolution, of emigration, and of Senancour led to Liszt’s use of instrumental recitativo, of French and Italian indications to the performer expressing the mal du siècle and the “negative sublime,” and of a harmonic system extended to the twelve tones Ernő Lendvai called in the 1950s the axis system, in reference to Bartók’s music. The influence of the romantic “humanitarian” literary current is presented in the area of Liszt’s formal conception and use of isotopies. From the synthesis of the narrative strategies, including some of Liszt’s major compositions, it becomes obvious that there is a simple model, invariably going through four stages or thematic complexes (Vallée d’Obermann), which is extended with two or three further isotopies in the case of longer pieces.

The purpose of the paper is to study the images of the platonic and courtly in the protagonist’s personal relations with God in J. Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” in the context of the connection with the Petrarchan tradition. In order to accomplish this, a complex approach including elements of biographical, genealogical, typological, hermeneutic, comparative, and structural-semiotic methods of literary analysis has been used. The views of literary critics on the sources of the “Holy Sonnets” (Christian meditative practices, Bible books, traditions of English religious lyrics) have been reviewed, their connection with the Petrarchan poetic tradition has been pointed out and, in this context, one of the possible interpretations of J. Donne’s sonnet sequence has been proposed. It has been shown that three poems of the sequence – XIV, XVII and XIX – are especially important and conceptual for understanding the evolution of the protagonist’s relations with God in the “Holy Sonnets”. In the first of them, feeling his own weakness and impossibility to overcome the devil, J. Donne’s persona begs the Lord to win back his heart from the enemy, using a broad palette of military metaphors typical to the Petrarchan lyrics. However, the Lord, who in sonnets I – XIII is depicted in a Petrarchan manner as distant and completely deaf to the protagonist’s pleas, remains indifferent. In sonnet XVII, which looks similar to the lyrical texts of the “Canzoniere” dedicated to Laura’s death, a notable change in the relationship between the characters takes place. As in the Italian humanist’s poems, the life path of J. Donne’s persona finally turns to heaven after the death of his beloved, and he begins to feel that the loss of earthly love is compensated by the gaining of the Divine one. However, his further relations with God, once again, seem to be built according to the Petrarchan model, most fully described in the last text of the sequence. The sonnet XIX demonstrates all the complexity of the relationship between a human being and the Lord. J. Donne’s persona is constantly dominated by conflicting feelings and emotions, which generally correlates with Petrarchan understanding of the ambivalence of love, best shown by F. Petrarch in the sonnets CXXXII and CXXXIV. Moreover, the poetic vocabulary used by J. Donne in this poem indicates the specific character of his persona’s relations with God, which are supposed to have signs of courtly love, courtly bowing-service. It has been summed up that the protagonist’s relations with the Lord in the “Holy Sonnets” might be interpreted as generally built on the same principles that are immanent in the concept of love in the poetry of Petrarchism. The persona of the English poet, as well as the traditional hero of Petrarchan texts, also suffers from unrequited feelings, longs for reciprocity with all his heart, and, in addition, speaks in the specific metaphorical language. Even if the linguistic practice utilized by the author cannot be considered exclusively Petrarchan, since a similar rhetorical code, in which the experience of spiritual communication with the Lord was described with the help of erotic images, was widely used by the Christian mystics, the sonnet poetic structure is canonical for Petrarchan lyrical discourse and require following the established rules not only in terms of form, but also in terms of content.

THE POETRY AND MUSIC OF SCIENCE: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Tom McLeish. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 414 pages. Paperback; $16.95. ISBN: 9780192845375. *In this tour-de-force book, British physicist Tom McLeish finally comprehensively argues, in one dense volume, what so many scientists have been claiming piecemeal for centuries: that doing science often looks and feels like doing art. That is a broad, amorphous statement, of course, and scientists have not done a very good job of fully understanding this idea or selling it to the rest of the world. This carefully crafted volume must be the most exhaustive work in this area, treating the notion that the creative work of scientists and artists is extraordinarily similar, in that they both fundamentally involve an intimate passion for describing and representing the world around us. *This is not a book about beauty or wonder in science, but rather it examines how scientific ideas and theories come to a scientist's mind and find fruition as publishable science. The entire book juxtaposes literature and art with science and mathematics to help understand the creative process. One important impetus for writing the book, according to McLeish, was recent evidence that smart, capable high schoolers in England were choosing not to go into science because they believed it would not be nearly as fulfilling, creatively, when compared to work in the arts or humanities. McLeish, a Christian, succeeds in this book in showing that not only is creative thinking and experimenting necessary and "part of the chase" in science, but that it is also a natural fulfillment of our creative mandate as human beings made in the image of God. McLeish is also careful to give examples of "more-regular" science, rather than relying solely on the popular accounts of the creativity of exceptional geniuses; he trys to show that all scientists participate in this artistic-like creativity no matter what they are studying. *The first two chapters introduce the concepts of creativity and inspiration in science. McLeish begins an interaction with several important works that he draws on throughout the book: William Beveridge's The Art of Scientific Investigation from 1950, Henry James's The Art of the Novel, and Howard Gardner's 1993 work Creating Minds (one of many surveys of particularly creative individuals). Chapter 3, "Seeing the Unseen," is about visual imagination and its role in theory creation, artistic design, and general problem solving. Visual imagination is seeing things in the mind's eye, but it is obviously linked to actual sight and seeing the world, too. Surveying the history of thought in this area, McLeish ranges from Plato to Gregory of Nyssa, to the thirteenth-century polymath Robert Grosseteste, to the Italian painter Giotto, to Einstein, who said his theory creation and problem solving started with visual images in his mind, which often led to his famous gedanken experiments. Grosseteste is one of the main interlocutors for McLeish throughout the book, being an exemplar of someone having a broad view of thought and creative exploration, not just compartmentalizing a premodern understanding of the physical world from his theological and philosophical commitments. *Chapters 4 through 6 sequentially juxtapose each of the three main areas of scientific work (experiment, theory, and mathematics) with their natural counterpart in literature and music. Experimental science is akin to writing a novel (!?) in that both set up artificial worlds that are tested against the real world and help illuminate the real world. Theoretical science is akin to writing poetry, in that both re-imagine the universe within fixed constraints: poetry within a certain shaping but constraining form, and theoretical visions of what goes on "under" the natural world constrained by a necessary conformity to that world. Chapter 6 compares mathematical creativity with composing and listening to music--the two "wordless" human endeavors in the world of the abstract. *The book is ultimately a treatise on creativity, and as such applies not just to science and art, but to all human endeavors that require creativity. In the final two chapters (7 and 8), McLeish develops what he describes as an "Ur-narrative of creative experience." Starting with a four-step creative process taken from Graham Wallas's 1926 work The Art of Thought, he adds in three more important stages that emerge from his analyses. The seven steps are: vision, desire, industry, constraint, incubation, illumination, and verification. (McLeish has added in desire, industry, and constraint, along with switching Wallas's ideation to vision.) Chapter 7 deals with emotion and drive in scientific creation, and chapter 8 ponders the purpose of human creativity, the telos that ultimately drives scientists and artists to such great lengths in pursuing their creative work. McLeish brings the imago Dei front and center, drawing on the two great hymns in the Book of Job, "Voice from the Whirlwind" (Job 38-42) and "Hymn to Wisdom" (Job 28), as guides to understanding the creative impulse to understand creation. In this he draws on his previous volume with Oxford, Faith and Wisdom in Science. *I believe that listing all the scientific works that McLeish describes in detail with regard to the creative elements behind the works is a good way to convey the magisterial scope of this intellectually rich book. Topics that get 2-10 pages each of description include Feynman's theory of beta decay, McLeish's own considerable contribution to viscous flow in branched polymer melts and his idea of entropically based allostery in biology, Belgian scientist Jan Vermant's work in mesoscale properties of "living matter" (which involves cellular-based material science), "collective phenomenon" and its original invocation by Pierre Weiss in 1907 to explain ferromagnetism, the centuries-long premodern controversy over the nature of sight (intromissive vs. extramissive, etc.), the recent evidence of a star being destroyed by a black hole, Boyle's contributions to the founding of modern experimental science, Alexander von Humboldt's important contributions to the value of a wholistic, multilevel vision of nature and science, Emmy Noether's astonishing discovery of the theoretical origin of conservation laws in physics, the discovery of the all-important fluctuation-dissipation theorem over 30 years (inaugurated by Einstein in 1905, applied to electrical noise by Nyquist in 1928, and fully generalized by Callen and Welton in 1951), the recent development at Caltech of a jet fuel polymer additive that greatly inhibits explosions of jet fuel (motivated in part by the horror of the fuel explosions on 9/11), and finally the full discovery of what causes rainbows by Theodoric in ca. 1310. The descriptions of these historic achievements are each fascinating in their own right and very readable--they alone, for me, would justify an investment in this book. When they are paired with a similar creative work from art, poetry, or fiction, the juxtaposition is extremely fruitful, though the philosophical/psychological analyses get much denser. *Many other discoveries are given much shorter treatment (less than one page), including Andrew Wile's solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, Dirac's mathematical discovery of spin and anti-matter, Poincaré's discovery of a new class of Fuchsian functions, Royer's recent proof of the Gaussian Correlation Inequality in statistics, and Heisenberg on discovering quantum matrix mechanics. The explorations into artistic and literary creativity are typically much shorter, but are nearly as numerous; they include a painting conceptually representing a string-quartet performance by English artist Graeme Willson, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Robert Schumann's orchestral work Konzertstück, and Picasso's masterpiece Guernica. *At nearly four hundred pages, this is not light reading and takes some patience and time to get through. It is written at a very high level of sophistication, and therefore one is often "bogged down" trying to make complete sense of what one is reading. (However, if one is not writing a review of the book, one need not spend quite so much time disentangling every dense sentence to get the main gist of the passages.) Also difficult are the many references to previous parts of the book. While these references are entirely appropriate, they are quite demanding of the reader given the sheer number of names and amount of material covered. I had to do quite a bit of flipping back and forth, checking the index to remember exactly what so-and-so said that is now being referenced 100 pages later. In other words, this is a thoroughly academic text. *This is a revised edition of the book, which was first published in 2019. The overwhelming positive response, according to the new preface, prompted the author to immediately answer some of the initial reviews and friendly critiques, which I believe made the book quite a bit better (initially there was not nearly as much about poetry; the comparison of poetry with theoretical science now became a separate chapter, enabling McLeish to more logically and thoroughly cover the territory he had staked out). McLeish sadly died very recently (February 2023) at age 60, while holding the newly created chair in Natural Philosophy at University of York. He was a lay preacher in the Anglican Church and a Fellow of the Royal Society. *Reviewed by Peter Walhout, Chemistry Department, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. 60187.

To a far greater degree than many of us have yet realized, late-nineteenth-century women's poetry may be a poetry of alien homelands: of cultural spaces, that is, in which the domestic proves alien, even as technically alien territory comes to represent some form of home. And partly for this reasosn, to explore poetry in English may require moving not only beyond Britain, but also beyond English itself. Think, for example, of Christina Rossetti, who composed poems in Italian; of Mathilde Blind, with her German accent and translation of the French edition of theJournal of Marie Bashkirtseff; of Agnes Mary Frances Robinson Darmesteter Duclaux, whose poetry preceded a long, successful career of writing in great part in and for the French; of Louisa S. Bevington Guggenberger, with her German home and husband; or, for that matter, of nineteenth-century India's first influential English-speaking woman poet, Toru Dutt. As generations of Indian critics have stressed, as early anthologizer E. C. Stedman made clear, and as certain editors of recent nineteenth-century poetry collections have also acknowledged, Dutt's writing played a suggestive role within late-century understandings of “British literature.” Indeed, even now, growing attention to her work is helping extend our conception of the geographical origins of “Victorian” poetry from Britain to Bengal. Still, if we are to develop a full exploration of Dutt's cultural presence, we may need to move further as well, connecting Indo-Anglian literature to that of France.

In the modern world, Globalization, Colonialism, Technology, Politics and Economy have changed many cultural identities and contributed to the appearance of multilingual literature. Code-Switching could occur in different institutional languages, slangs, dialects, and sociolects; so, translators should find strategies to tackle this literary phenomenon and preserve the source text identity. But how could the translator (who is a reader and a transmitter at the same time) deal with these types of literary texts? And how could he/she produce a target multilingual text that preserves the identity and the magic expressed in the source text? The multilingual text is a specific genre of literature which combines two or more languages in the desire to express a multilingual and multicultural reality inherent to a particular group of individuals. Multilingual Literature appeared for the first time during the Middle Ages, but it was called originally Macaronic literature. The term 'Macaronic' is commonly used to indicate any hybrid language that mixes the vernacular with Latin. This mixture was frequent during the Middle Ages in all romance literature. Macaronic literature is therefore a phenomenon that represents the cultivated, highly educated and sophisticated categories of society like academics, novelists and poets. However, translators who used to identify the translation as an inter-linguistic transfer between two formal systems (source and target institutional languages) have faced obstacles in working with multilingual texts in which the author uses code-switching as an alternative to reflect the unfair categorization of people and registers in modern societies). This paper aims to examine the different strategies proposed by Venuti, Cincotta, Bojanin, Qoates and other scholars to transfer the code-switching device in the literary texts; and eventually proposes an integrated strategy that will preserve the code-switching aspect in the translation process, namely in Farah CHAMMA’s poem ‘I am No Palestinian’. Our strategy aims at creating such equilibrium between the translator’s creativity and identity losses, which will allow the target reader to be an active participant in the understanding process and revealing the otherness of the source text. The poem of Farah CHAMMA is chosen as a case study in this research, because it reflects the human being struggle for independence and freedom. However, the independence in this context does not mean the liberation from the colonizer who enters with his armed forces and military weapons to your country, the colonizer nowadays enters your brain trough globalization, migration, media, internet, and all these factors contributed to the fusion of the traditional notion of identities. The Islamic Arabic identity is contaminated by the French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Christian and Jewish identities due to this kind of colonialism which destroys all the identity and patriotism fundamentals such as: ethics, religion, thought, and of course language. This is why Farrah writes in her poem that she had lost her language and all the Arabic Palestinian identity that comes with, she masters many foreign languages but her mother tongue. She thinks, acts and does like the British, the French, The Portuguese poets and artists do, but she just knows little tales about the Palestinian poet Ziad RAFFIF who defends the Palestinian issue in his literary works. So, the poet Farah Chamma used the multilingualism in her poetry to draw a picture of the struggle that exists within herself, and to show us how a language can embody an identity with all its features. The multiplicity of identities may create a new identity for the writer of the source text. Thus, the translator will not deal anymore with all the different cultures that belong to the languages of the text, but he must instead, discover the new identity of this community that uses this kind of speech system i.e., the Code-Switching system.

Léon X est élu au trône pontifical en mars 1513 dans un moment historique caractérisé par une crise profonde des institutions ecclésiastiques et des mœurs du clergé. Au début du XVle siècle, le mythe atemporel et universel de l'âge devient ainsi la clé de lecture d'un programme politique complexe, dans lequel les ambitions des Médicis concourent au renforcement de l'autorité du pontife et à l'élan réformateur tant des laïcs que des factions les plus pieuses du monde catholique : ceux-ci considèrent l'élection de ce pape comme la source d'un nouvel espoir pour la tant souhaitée Reformatio ecclesiae. Léon X, par son origine, son soutien aux Lettres et à l'imprimerie et notamment par sa décision de poursuivre le Concile de Latran (1412-1517), semblait incarner le Pasteur angélique attendu depuis longtemps, celui qui serait capable de gouverner et de guérir une Église catholique en plein désarroi. Notre étude porte sur la production poétique en langue latine qui acclame le nouveau pontife dans l'attente d'un renouveau. Nous avons mis au jour les multiples implications du mythe au sein d'une production poétique protéiforme, avec une attention particulière pour les implications religieuses. Dès son élévation à la chaire de Saint Pierre, les poètes rivalisent de vers pour célébrer le nouveau pontife. Considérés généralement par la critique comme des panégyriques répétitifs, ces poèmes nous ont cependant permis d'apporter un nouvel éclairage sur le mythe de l'âge d'or de la décennie léonine. Ces poètes laudateurs reprennent les thèmes marquants de la propagande médicéenne et contribuent à la construction méticuleuse d'un programme iconologique et spectaculaire, axée sur la consécration du pape-roi. L'analyse de cette riche création poétique fleurissant sous le premier pape Médicis dévoile une réalité complexe et contrastée. À l'image irénique des poètes regroupés en solidarités sur le fond romantique des ruines de Rome se superpose une autre vision plus tourmentée, dans laquelle la confrontation entre factions adverses présage de la réforme à venir. Derrière la dorure d'une poésie imprégnée de classicisme, cristallisée dans une tradition historiographique désormais dépassée, les réminiscences mythologiques alternent avec des apparitions monstrueuses suggérant la hantise permanente de l'invasion ottomane. À la tension religieuse millénariste succède une sincère dévotion chrétienne de groupes réformateurs à la recherche désespérée d'une régénération de l'Église. L'examen et la traduction de nombreux poèmes, dont certains inédits, nous a permis de recueillir les aspirations les plus profondes et les obsessions récurrentes d'une époque de transition, qui allait faire bientôt face à la crise des valeurs de la Renaissance
In the eyes of those who had experienced it, the time of Leo X shone with a shining light.The election of Pope Lee X in 1513 was initially welcomed as the beginning of a new era for the Catholic Church. With the newly elected pope setting out to reassert Rome's role as the centre of Christianity, many contemporaries soon interpreted his pontificate as a return to the Golden Age of myths. At the beginning of the 16th century, the timeless and universal myth of the Golden Age thus became the key to a complex political programme, in which the ambitions of the Medici were combined with the strengthening of the pontiff's authority and the reforming impetus of bath the intellectuals and the most pious groups in the Catholic world. In fact, this topos-myth of Golden Age gave expression to the general atmosphere of optimism but is also intricately linked the hopes and aspirations of the Christian community to renewal and reform. Lee X, with his patronage of the arts, his support of education and the printing press, and his decision to proceed with the Fifth Lateran Council (1412-1517), seemed to confirm all the high expectations placed upon him as the long-awaited Pastor ange/icus, capable of leading and healing a Catholic Church in disarray.Durîng his pontificate, a multitude of poetic works in praise of Leo X were composed and published, with some simultaneously proposing ideas for urgently-needed improvements to the Church - aware perhaps of the imminent dangers facing the Occident : the possibility of a further fragmentation within the Christian faith and the external threat posed by the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the East.This study is focused on significant examples of this type of poetry in Latin, an often underrated, perhaps even neglected form of literature, which manages to address questions of Christian faith and religiosity in the form and style of classical antiquity.The analysis of this rich poetic production flourishing under the first Medici Pope has revealed a complex and faceted reality. These laudatory poets take up the important themes of Medici propaganda and contribute to the meticulous construction of the iconological and spectacular program, centred on the consecration of the new « Pope-King ».At the irenic image of poets grouped in cultural circlESagainst the romantic background of the ruins of Rome is superimposed another more tormented reality, in which the confrontation between opposing factions is already a burst of reform. Behind the gilding of a poetry steeped in classicism, crysta llized by a historiographie tradition now obsolete, mythological revivais alternate with monstrous apparitions and the permanent haunting of the Ottoman invasion, millenarian religious tension alternate with a sincere Christian devotion of reforming groups in searchinq desoeratelv for a reqeneration of the catholic communitv. Amonq the canters of Leo X, Zaccaria Ferreri,theologian and reformer who had been involved in the Council of Pisa (1511- 1513), has deserved special attention in our study . His poem Lugudunense Somnium, written under the pressure of events, presents to us the celestial ascent of an initiatory journey, which is intended as a political act and a divine manifesta of the pontiff's superiority over the councils.The analysis and translation of many poems (many of which are unpublished) allowed us to collect the deepest aspirations and the recurrent obsessions of an era of great transformations, to highlight a network of prominent indlviduals pushing for a Renovatio Ecc/esiae on the eve of Protestantism, shortly before the crisis of values of the Renaissance

This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.

This chapter outlines the rise and the development of an autochthonous strain of Italian sepulchral poetry and the employment of Gothic themes in the late eighteenth century. It emphasises the complex imagery that will provide nineteenth-century popular literature with a set of macabre and deathly motifs contributing to the creation of a Gothic writing. Scholarship has traditionally considered eighteenth-century Italian sepulchral poetry as derivative from foreign models, primarily focusing on the influence of British ‘graveyard poetry’. However, the chapter investigates the largely autochthonous roots of Italian sepulchral poetry (e.g. Dante’s works, religious texts, Christian eulogy) as well as the specificity of the ways Italian literature deals with what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘abjection’ of death (e.g. from a Classical viewpoint) through thematic close readings of selected texts. Therefore, this contribution provides a gallery of poetical deathly images like horrific depictions of dead bodies, corpses, and visions of one’s own death.

In deciding to take the pagan poet gil as his guide in a Christian enterprise, Dante offers a sustained reperformance of Virgil’s poetry. His Commedia—which is, arguably, as dramatic in form as it is narrative or epic—represents in equal measure a celebration and a critique of classical culture. Dante’s own poetry distinguishes itself from Virgil’s in two particular ways, both of which demand attention to performative considerations. The first emphasizes the properties of vernacular speech in, significantly, the ‘mother tongue’ where a palpable physicality of voice and linguistic texture characterizes Dante’s Italian. The second—reflecting the theological action that impels the Commedia—requires that liturgical praxis, represented above all by the Psalms, be given a central position in this text.

This essay focuses on the famous friendship between Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). The pair met in Rome some time in the 1530s, and continued to correspond until Colonna’s death. Despite Michelangelo’s towering artistic reputation, Colonna was the dominant party in the friendship. Michelangelo looked to her for spiritual guidance and openly acknowledged his need for her support in ‘refashioning’ him as a better man and Christian. In the poetry that these friends exchanged, the Neoplatonic emphasis is clearly in evidence. In particular, in a manuscript gift of 103 sonnets that Colonna sent to Michelangelo in around 1540, Colonna demonstrates how far she has advanced in her journey towards God, and offers her example as a model for Michelangelo’s own spiritual ascent. Notably, the Neoplatonic frame allows the female poet to adopt the role of teacher and leader, confidently claiming this status as a result of her greater spiritual understanding, which ultimately transcends gender so that Michelangelo describes her as ‘a man within a woman, or even a god’.

The seventh chapter of this project examines the transmission of Roman plague in literary and visual arts, beginning with the early Christian period and proceeding up through the present day. Such a survey is necessarily selective and meant to indicate the range of interpretive possibilities available for readers who are sensitive to the conventions developed in the hexameter treatments of Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. The chapter focuses on three areas of reception: early Christian poetry and prose (Endelechius’ Carmen de Mortibus Boum; Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum), visual arts of the Italian Renaissance (e.g. Raphael’s Vergilian Plague of Phrygia [1520’s]) and Anglo-American novels (e.g. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy). The visual and literary arts discussed here crystallize the interplay between civil strife, familial discord, and epochal evolution evident in the pestilence narratives examined throughout this project. Roman conventions of representing pestilence help us understand how narratives of contagious disease up to the present day have dramatized a tension between ideals of autonomy and distinction and those that foster group cohesion and collectivity.

This chapter discusses the work and poetic correspondence (1538–1547) of Michelangelo and Colonna. It shows that both eschew the kind of grace espoused by Castiglione and Pietro Bembo and perfected by Raphael and Ariosto. Instead, Michelangelo and Colonna cultivate an image of the artist as hardworking and intense. Their desire to reveal — rather than conceal — the labour behind their art can be compared in the Pietàs through which the artist and the poet articulate an alternative aesthetics of grace: one that resists humanist connotations, criticises courtly abuses of the term, and promotes a more Christian vision of the artist as the receiver rather than the giver of what is essentially God's gift. Restored here to the domain of religious experience, grace acts as a reminder that art and literature should praise God, not the artist, and in so doing reflects an age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Italy.

Abstract Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his siblings, William Michael and Christina, were the children of an Italian patriot who came to England in 1824. A poet, highly influenced by Keats, and painter apprenticed to his mentor and life­ long friend Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), and driven by his own aesthetic principles, Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 to re­ form the styles and manners of Victorian art. His interests in poetry and painting are inextricably combined, as he demonstrates in his important early sequence Sonnets for Pictures. His later sonnet sequence, The House of Life (1870), in part a response to his wife’s suicide, explores the metaphysics of erotic love, death, and spirituality. In 1871 Robert Buchanan (1841-1901) attacked it as pornography.

Boccaccio’s allegorical dream vision Amorosa Visione should rightly be considered the foundational manifesto of the Italian Renaissance. Written in the meter of Dante’s Divina Commedia and replete with Dantesque reminiscences, the Visione is nonetheless a deliberately anti-Dantean vision in which the concept of the Christian Otherworld has been replaced with the world of human grandeur and myth that is celebrated by literature and the arts. In this re-imagined version of the eternal world, the earthly paradise at the end of the Purgatorio from which Dante and Beatrice ascend to the heavenly Jerusalem has become a paradise accessible in this life, where the erotic dominates. In his dream, the narrator encounters abstracts over which he “triumphs,” the so-called trionfi that came to constitute a tradition carried forward by Petrarch and others in the early Renaissance; in the erotic context the poet did not hesitate to equate the Dantesque motto of “virtù e canoscenza” (Inferno XXVI) with his own new concept of the union of literary learning and erotic felicity.

The topic of the article is related to the second unfinished book of travel notes by the Czech and Slovak educator and poet Jan Kollar (1793-1852), emerging as a result of his trip to Italy in 1844. It was preceded by essays reflecting the impressions of a trip there in 1841, in which the author, citing curious arguments, puts forward the thesis that Upper (Northern) Italy belonged to the Slavic space in the Middle Ages, In the treatise Staroitalia slavjanská (“Old Italy Slavic”, 1853), Kollar extends the settlement of the Slavs to the whole of Italy, including Sicily. Special attention in the unfinished essays is paid to Rome. Considering it as the cradle and guardian of the great European culture, the faithful Kollar managed to “discover” a lot of Slavic traces there, including in St. Peter's Cathedral, in the Lateran Basilica and in other monuments of the ancient city. However, pan-Slavism did not prevent Kollar from connecting the identity of the Slavs with the Christian world, with an educated Christian Europe.

In 1820 Pushkin spent most of the summer with the Raevsky family in the Caucasus and then in Gurzuf, Crimea. As an aspiring poet he was inspired by Konstantin Batiushkov to create a myth of his life and represent himself in the same context as the ancient Greek and Renaissance lyricists. Key to this was Gurzuf, which, following the example of Petrarch’s stay in Vaucluse, he described as a locus amoenus, thereby, like the Italian poet, combining two traditions – Homeric and Christian symbology. He also developed the image of an (unnamed) ideal woman inhabiting the ideal place, like Petrarch’s Laura. Analysis of Pushkin’s representations of Gurzuf in prose and verse shows an increasing poeticization of this symbolic complex from the first description in a letter to his brother from Kishinev (1820) to the last mention in Onegin’s Journey (1829).

Abstract John Milton (1608-74), the last great poet of the English Renaissance, was educated at St Paul’ s School (c.1620-4, under Alexander Gill), and at Christ’ s College Cambridge (1625-32). After six years spent at his father’ s house in the country, where he gave himself up ‘ with the most complete leisure to reading through the Greek and Latin writers’ -a period in which he published Comus. A masque (1637), and Lycidas (1638)-he spent most of 1638---g in Italy, being accepted into the Svogliati academy in Florence, and meeting many Italian writers and musicians (including Dati, Frescobaldi, and the imprisoned Galileo). In 1640 he began tutoring private pupils in London, and became involved in controversies on behalf of the Puritans against the Church of England, publishing a series of tracts, including Areopagitica (1644). In 1649 the Council of State appointed him Secretary for the Foreign Tongues, with the duty of writing official defences of Cromwell’ s policies. Imprisoned in 1659, after the defeat of the Parliamentarians, he was allowed to resume private life, publishing Paradise Lost in 1667, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in 1671.

Communication Action Zones in Art and Technology, in portuguese Zonas de Ações Comunicacionais em Arte e Tecnologia – ZACAT – is a master's research developed in Brazil, made before and during the SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic, which causes the New Coronavirus disease. This artistic and academic work includes a set of sound and visual poetics based on an investigation of artistic communicational practices of an activist character, with the mediation of several questions about the current Brazilian history. Firstly, through diversified strategies and proposals for different interlocutors, with experiments in 2019, in different spaces in the city of Santa Maria, state of Rio Grande do Sul - streets, museums, art galleries, university, school, social networks, radio wave space. Subsequently, as a result of the world scenario presented from 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the poetic undergoes significant transformations. In addition to the artistic and communicational strategies undergoing changes in approach, the Santa Maria space moves to that of the Clube Naturista Colina do Sol (CNCS), a naturist community located in the municipality of Taquara, also in Rio Grande do Sul. Not urbanized and immersed with the wild environment the least interfered by human action, which provides other forms of listening and connection, in addition to the relationship with the body, communication and technology, such as the use of online virtual reality platforms to share the work carried out. To approach the construction of this research, studies on methodology by the researcher and artist Sandra Rey (1953) are used. As a theoretical foundation, reference is made to the idea of micropolitics, a concept that refers to philosophers Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and to art critic Suely Rolnik (1948). Activist artistic practices are based on the experiences of Brazilian collectives from the 1990’s to the present, as seen under the historiography of Art Activism from the 1950’s, with Italian autonomist philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben (1942) and Franco Berardi (1949). To support the notion of Art and Communication, authors such as Mario Costa (1936), Fred Forest (1933), Mônica Tavares, Priscila Arantes, Christine Mello and Giselle Beiguelman are based on. The concept of device emerges from theoretical research and mediates artistic practices, having as reference Agamben, Foucault, Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) and Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989). From performances, through installations, through audio, video and face-to-face interactivity experiments or via virtual networks, this research seeks to give visibility to everyday micropolitics, with their memories, affections, formalized or ephemeral life impulses in moments of encounters. And how the artistic works can unfold in different contexts, in front of different audiences and under challenging conditions in terms of a larger historical context.