Lukrecja – wzór dla Rzymianek. Historia niezbyt słodka

The article presents the story of Lucrece, legendary heroine and noble wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, whose suicide was presented many times in the ancient Roman and Renaissance literature by historiographers and poets. The author compares few versions of Lucrece’s story focusing on her virtues (like castitas, obstinata pudicitia, decus muliebris) that became canonical features characterising the Roman matrona.

Love Elegy, Propertius, and Soliloquy

This chapter argues that soliloquy as problem and opportunity was central to the aims of Latin love elegy, especially to Propertius’ Elegies. Drawing comparisons with the Lydia, Dirae, Tibullus’ elegies, Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, and Propertius’ elegiac predecessors, it studies Propertius’ corpus to demonstrate the relationship between the poet’s insanity and his solitude. It shows how seasonal indications inscribe this solitude in time and space, and how Propertius worked to rewrite love as a secret fiction. Propertius’ elegies, it argues, use solitude to shape the harmonization of elegiac subjectivity and the poets’ other political personae, culminating in the last of his elegies (4.11), which encapsulates the relegation of truth telling, love, and poetry to the solitary sphere, thus embodying new coordinations of public, the private, and the individual. In conclusion, it points to the impact of Propertius’ solitude on Renaissance literature, including the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster.

Italian treaties on literature as the style model for English secular early Renaissance literature

The article deals with the matter of the English belles-lettres style of the 16th century. The style phenomenon is interpreted as some representative of the whole in particular. The fact in turn makes condition of interpreting the work of literature as belonging to some type of culture. Within the scope of the interpretation of the kind the style phenomenon is considered within the scope of the global context of changes which took place in European Renaissance. The notions of culture and literature are identified, the latter is believed to be one of the principle sphere of intellectual activity of the representatives of the humanistic thought devoted their time. The kind is marked by an outstanding rise during the analysed period of time. Perceiving the analysed time period culture as one of the cultures’ communication gives an opportunity to trace the ways of artistic transforming of the ideas about particular features of stylistic construction of a piece of literature. The study is based on the material of the creative heritage of Philip Sidney, the salient representative of the Elizabethan culture, whose individuality and style were under the influence of Italian humanistic thought.