Download or read book Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance written by Ullrich Langer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Italian Renaissance written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four new titles in the series of comprehensive critical overviews of major literary movements in Western literary history The Renaissance was a turning point in the development of civilization. The great flowering of art, architecture, politics, and especially the study of literature began in Italy the late 14th century and spread throughout Europe and the Western world.
Download or read book Montaigne and the Life of Freedom written by Felicity Green and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Concept of Freedom in the Writings of St Francis de Sales written by Eunan McDonnell and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Poetic Relations written by Constance M. Furey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God. As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether. For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Furey reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.
Download or read book The Envy of Angels written by C. Stephen Jaeger and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton written by David Louis Sedley and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boldly investigates the relationship between the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem
Download or read book Love s Wounds written by Cynthia N. Nazarian and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Charting Change in France Around 1540 written by Marian Rothstein and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature written by Anita Gilman Sherman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern skepticism contributed to literary invention, aesthetic pleasure, and the uneven process of secularization in England.
Download or read book Nominalism and Literary Discourse written by Hugo Keiper and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Perfect Friendship written by Ullrich Langer and published by Librairie Droz. This book was released on 1994 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cl ment Marot written by Ehsan Ahmed and published by Rookwood Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ahmed presents the political, religious, and poetic explorations of Marot's relation with King Francis I of France.
Download or read book Practising Reform in Montaigne s Essais written by Dorothea Heitsch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2000-02-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume permits a new approach to Montaigne's essays from the point of view of the art of writing and style. Its particular hermeneutic position, which distinguishes it from other investigations, is that Nietzsche is used as a mediator.
Download or read book Performance Poetry and Politics on the Queen s Day written by Virginia Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collaborative, interdisciplinary study explores a variety of issues in theatrical and literary history that converge in two performances given at the palace of Fontainebleau on 13 February 1564. Part of the fabled Fêtes de Fontainebleau, this carnival Sunday entertainment was produced at the behest of Catherine de Médicis and created by courtiers and artists including Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest lyric poet of the French sixteenth century. While focused on the text and production of Ronsard's Bergerie and the choice and production of the tale of Ginevra from Ariosto's Orlando furioso, the study also examines the urgent circumstances of the festival - the moment, shortly after the end of the First War of Religion, was critical and highly charged - as well as its political program and the rhetorical strategies employed by Catherine and Ronsard to promote harmony among the opposing factions of nobles. The authors' exploration of the Queen's Day also leads them to consider a range of questions pertaining to Renaissance and early modern court performance practices and literary-cultural traditions. The book is distinctive in that it crosses disciplinary and national boundaries, and in that a number of the issues it addresses have received little or no previous scholarly attention.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne written by Ullrich Langer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the great Renaissance skeptic and pioneer of the essay form, is known for his innovative method of philosophical inquiry which mixes the anecdotal and the personal with serious critiques of human knowledge, politics and the law. He is the first European writer to be intensely interested in the representations of his own intimate life, including not just his reflections and emotions but also the state of his body. His rejection of fanaticism and cruelty and his admiration for the civilizations of the New World mark him out as a predecessor of modern notions of tolerance and acceptance of otherness. In this volume an international team of contributors explores the range of his philosophy and also examines the social and intellectual contexts in which his thought was expressed.
Download or read book Nothingness Negativity and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch written by Benjamin Boysen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being exposed to the Nominalist expansion in early modernity, Petrarch and Shakespeare are highly preoccupied with a Nominalist dimension of language and representation. Against this background, the study shows how these Renaissance poets advanced a special notion of subjectivity and identity as rooted in negativity, otherness, and representation. The book thus argues for a new understanding of negative modes of subjectivity in Petrarch and Shakespeare. A new and sharpened understanding emerging from an interpretation of Francesco Petrarch’s notion of exile and of love in his great poetical cycle Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as well as a meticulous examination of the concept of nothingness in William Shakespeare’s works. Petrarch and Shakespeare poetically show how identity is alien and decentred – yet also free and expanding. In other words, these poets illustrate how subjectivity is constituted by heterogeneity. Moreover, pointing to other examples of this negative subjectivity in Renaissance philosophy and poetry, the study suggests that these models for subjectivity could be extended to other early modern writers.
