Review. Medieval Latin and the rise of the European love-lyric. Vol. I: Problems and Interpretations. Vol. II: Medieval Latin love-poetry. 2nd ed. Dronke, P.
AbstractNotoriously Aristotelian in his poetic theory, linguistics, and natural philosophy, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) also reimagined the lost love poetry that Aristotle himself was said to have written. Scaliger'sNew Epigramsof 1533 combine a distinctively humanist view of Aristotle as an elegant polymath with a sustained experiment in refashioning the Petrarchan love lyric. Most visibly in poems about dreams and dreaming, Scaliger educes his speaker's erotic despair from philosophical problems in contemporary Aristotelian accounts of the soul, knowledge, and personal identity. The strange but compelling texts that result form a crossroads for Scaliger's own identities as physician, philosopher, and poet.
This chapter describes the invitation poem, a genre of love poetry with its roots in the biblical Song of Songs that reflects on major questions that have always surrounded the nature of love. Does love entail recognition or fresh discovery, a completion of the self or a disruption of its contours? Is love primarily a natural passion or a cultural practice? The invitation poem, with its displacement of erotic desire onto an imagined landscape, negotiates these possibilities through its fusion of inward and outward, homecoming and exile, intimacy and alienation. The tradition initiated by the Song of Songs alters over the centuries, as poets including Christopher Marlowe and Charles Baudelaire, among many others, highlight different points of contact between the poetic and erotic imagination. The invitation genre can thus be seen as an archetypal form of love lyric, emphasizing some of the central paradoxes that link love to poetry.
This article addresses Thomas More's use of an especially complex Latin predicate, fio, as a means of examining the degree of classicism in this aspect of his writing. To this end, the main lexical-semantic and syntactic features of the verb in Classical Latin are presented, and a comparative review is made of More's use of the predicate—and also its use in texts contemporaneous to More, as well as in Late and Medieval Latin—in both prose and poetry. The analysis shows that he works within a general framework of classicism, although he introduces some of his own idiosyncrasies, these essentially relating to the meaning of the verb that he employs in a preferential way and to the variety of verbal forms that occur in his poetic text.
Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis, and the Dreams of Julius Caesar Scaliger*