A Classical Source for Petrarch’s Conceit of the Binding Knot of Hair: Apuleius’s Metamorphoses

The conceit of the beloved’s hair ensnaring and binding the poet’s heart and soul is common in Renaissance poetry and particularly widespread in the tradition of Petrarchan love lyric. The topos can be traced back to Petrarch’s canzoniere, or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, in which Laura’s golden hair is often described in terms of knots and laces tying both the poet’s heart and soul. No classical antecedent has previously been identified for the image. In this study, I propose a possible classical source for the characteristic Petrarchan motif of Laura’s binding hair knot: Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, a manuscript of which the poet owned and which he read and annotated several times. In particular, I show how passages such as Lucius’s celebration of the beauty of women’s hair (Metamorphoses, II.8–9), and especially his declaration of love to Photis, an oath he takes on ʻthat sweet knot of your hair with which you have bound my spiritʼ (ibid., III.23), can be convincingly regarded as a source for Petrarch’s conceit. In addition to the value inherent in the detection of a new source for an influential Petrarchan topos, the present study may have some further implications. It could offer novel arguments for the dating of a series of Petrarchan poems, and it could foster a potentially fruitful reappraisal of the influence of Apuleius’s work on Petrarch’s vernacular poetry.

AZERBAIJAN-ARABIC MUSIC RELATIONS

The article examines the features of Azerbaijani art and musical culture of the Near and Middle East. Referring to fundamental scientific sources, the author informs about the revival of the Arab world, oriental culture and art in the Middle Ages, characterizes interstate relations of this historical period. Lyric and philosophical poems, love-lyric songs (gazelles), epic and religious legends, odes and praises became the subject of consideration. The work of the great Nizami Ganjavi and other Azerbaijani poets is discussed, their works are analyzed, which reflect the role of music in human life, emphasize its importance in the formation of personality and the impact on his emotional and spiritual-psychological state. The author provides examples from musical treatises of great Azerbaijani thinkers, gives a comparative description of these treatises with scientific and theoretical studies of oriental musicologists who lived and worked in the Middle Ages. They are included in the article as paragraphs.

The Lyric Mode

Dante is before all other things a lyric poet and this chapter explores his commitment to lyric from his earliest compositions to the Commedia. For Dante, lyric is the natural mode for expressing desire and is particularly marked by pleasure. Indeed ‘modo’ is the word he uses in both Vita Nova and Commedia to represent the indissoluble bond between love and speech that animates the desiring subject and leads to the production of poetry. This chapter traces the significance of this word in the Occitan and early Italian love lyric, especially in its associations with measure (misura) and desire’s tendency to transgress it. It considers how the lyric mode is employed to convey the intensity of the love experience and the porous nature of the desiring body, especially in Dante’s relationship to Beatrice and as expressed in flexible and expansive forms of textuality that resist closure.

Introduction

The Introduction explains how this book represents a new departure in the study of Mandelstam and, more broadly, reflects on what poetic difficulty means. It explains how the rise of structuralist poetics/subtext criticism and Judaic studies coincided with the rediscovery of Mandelstam, leading to an explosion of scholarly work on his poetics (essentially limited to his first two collections) and biography on those terms. Those paradigms have run their course, and work less well for the post-1930 writings because of fundamental changes in Mandelstam’s poetics that require new critical thinking. There are virtually no studies of his love lyric or the later poetry. A vast amount of new material (contextual, textual, and biographical) makes this the right time to produce a major study that sets out a revisionist picture of a poet who, far from being in retreat from his time, was an engagé in the task of cultural revolution.

Defining and Defending the Middle Ages with C. S. Lewis

The scholarly writings of C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) have both inspired the study of the Middle Ages and confirmed the relevance to the humanities that medieval literary texts can have for the present. He was aware that the straitjacket implied by periodisation can blind us to the universal values presented in medieval literature. Qualitative assumptions made about the (usually undefined) Middle Ages include an alienating remoteness, and also a general ignorance, especially of science and technology. Lewis drew attention to the knowledge of astronomy, for example, and pointed out that medieval technical skills in architecture, agriculture and medicine are important for us to be aware about. Three medieval works illustrate this universality with respect to technical skills (the Völundarkviða); identity and the self (the Hildebrandslied); and the popular love-song (the courtly love-lyric). Lewis cautioned against pejorative terms like ‘Dark Ages’, noted problems of perspective in assessing all pre-modern literature, and showed that earlier works have a continuing value and relevance.

Cynic and Lyric Balanced

The war poet Keith Douglas wrote in 1943 that he sought a “balanced style” where “cynic and lyric” might meet. In focusing on a set of four poems that he had written in May and June of that year—“Vergissmeinnicht,” “Aristocrats,” “How to Kill,” and “Enfidaville”—I propose that the cynic and lyric met for Douglas as two forms of special knowing, the “combat gnosticism” of war poetry, and a parallel gnosticism in love lyric. Each proposes that a special experience can utterly transform a subject: the soldier’s kind of knowing transformed by battle experience, and the lover’s by the experience of a beloved’s body. Douglas’s poetry arrives at the balancing of cynic and lyric, then, by confusing and conflating these special gnostic conditions, and its resonant image is the battlefield corpse conflated with the lover in repose.

Trazas del mito y la tradición clásica en la cantiga profana gallego-portuguesa

This article goes through some of the coincidences between the classical literary tradition and the Galician-Portuguese lyric, which provide sometimes a new signification to the Greco-Roman mythical tradition. In this sense, certain classical myths are reworked from a moral perspective. Additionally, the resource to erotic topics from the Greco-Roman tradition in the Galician-Portuguese love lyric is exemplified, such as the love at first sight, the madness of love, the judgment loss, the evasive lover, irrisor amoris and servitium amoris

UT ANIMALIUM PICTURA: ARISTOTLE'S HEART IN THE POETRY OF GIACOMO DA LENTINI

The essay analyzes the formation of the oft-cited trope of the image engraved (or painted) in the heart, topical in the Sicilian lyric of the thirteenth century, and the ways in which it re-discusses a painstaking issue of Aristotelian physiology. The trope of the “pintura nel core” (figure in the heart), as described in Giacomo da Lentini's Meravigliosa⋅mente and Madonna mia, a voi mando, is immediately assimilated to the faculty of memory, and the human ability to represent external reality by means of signa. This process of formation that happens in the heart and allows the poet to fall in love is reworked in the image of the “pintura” carved like a seal into wax. The lexical choices of Giacomo's poems point to an Aristotelian understanding of sense perception, centered around the key role of the heart, dependent upon the fluidity of its bodily part, and resulting in an internal representation of phenomenal reality. The link between love lyric poetry and physiological learning shows the interdependence of these two fields of medieval culture, and the ways in which a debated scientific issue can be illuminated by the comparative analysis of vernacular literature and philosophical investigation. Giacomo's reworking of these Aristotelian physiological tenets testifies to his poetical ability to engage with medicine and aesthetic representation.