Petrarch was confused by love, it seems, the cause of his first youthful
error, a shameful one, and Love took aim and ambushed him again in revenge,
and his power was unable to defend itself or get up above the fray (up the
fatiguing, high mount, like Dante at the opening of the Inferno, on the Good
Friday that Beatrice intervenes to rescue him from his potentially
disastrous course): "It was the when the rays of the sun paled in grief
with pity for its maker" (RS 3); and indeed love chose a small village for
Laura to be born in, as God provided the revelation of the Savior by
bestowing him not on Rome but rather on humble Judea (RS 4). -- So the
inaugural poems of Petarch's Rime Sparse, and thus his licensing of
liturgical patterns for sonnet sequences or series on his model or in his
mode. For Laura died on the same day - April 6 - as Petrarch elsewhere
reports (a note in his Virgil) he first saw her in Church, in Avignon (as it
were in a Babylonian captivity), the historical anniversary of the
Crucifixion, though not actually Good Friday of the year in question (but
nonetheless "the common dolor" in RS 3, line 8). (Like Beatrice, Laura died
relatively young, in about her 22nd year (?).) The Christological analogies
recur in places like RS 270. where the harrowing of hell is assigned to
Amor: "Love ... Find my beloved treasure in the earth ... and, if it is
true that your power as great in Heaven as it is said to be in the abyss ...
take back from Death what she has taken from us, and raise your standard [as
it were the red and white flag of the crucifer] in the [= her] beautiful
face." (Compare FQ III.xii.19 and Romeo & Juliet V.iii.93ff.) (The analogy
between Spenser's myth of love and the Christian mythos (Creation, Advent,
Passion, Rebirth) is bruited in AnFQ 562-67. The use of the Christian year
in the Amoretti--as in the forty-six sonnet interval of the Lent and Easter
sonnets, suggests "a Lenten period of discipline, trial, and abstinence--the
'sad protract' preparatory to the sacrament of love" [AnFQ 71]. Such
patterns and relations to the liturgy or scripture are observed by several
Spenserians, esp. Prescott and Alexaner Dunlop. But I suppose that erotic
devotion can always be construed as spilt religion, once Eros is forsaken or
found guiltily lurking among our confiscated gods. -- Jim N.
On Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:50:29 -0500
"David L. Miller" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Leave me O love, that reachest unto dust.
>
> I do.
>
> Anne, I'm pleasantly shocked by this reading. Bravo!
>
>>>> [log in to unmask] 11/16/2007 8:45 PM >>>
> Well, sure. There's tension, of course, but Petrarch himself knows
> that, which is one reason he's a great poet and not just the source
> of clichés that some think him (let alone the dismemberer of women).
> But one idealism can slide into another. I don't agree with all of
> it, and the neglect of France is personally discouraging to me, but
> Tom Roche's book on the Petrarchan sequence would have something
> useful. So would Roger Kuin's Chamber Music. Spenser gets around the
> tension (if you can get around a tension) by marrying the lady,
> something Petrarch, Ronsard, and Sidney couldn't do for obvious
> reasons, although Spenser was not the first to play it that way. Du
> Bellay at least merges the two in his Olive by tying the (probably in
> his case imaginary) lady to the Christian year--like Spenser in
> Amoretti. One way to reconcile a Petrarchan passion for a married
> lady (Renaissance commentators usually thought Laura was married) was
> to kill her off, of course. Then she gets to come to you and chat in
> ways the living Laura wouldn't do.
> One other thing: many later critics tended to see opposition,
> in a respectable sort of way, and would somehow try to make "Leave me
> oh Love" by Sidney part of A&S. My favorite instance of this is the
> 19th c. edition of the quite Petrarchan poems by Gaspara Stampa. The
> original edition, edited posthumously by her sister, has love poems,
> some religious poems, and then some poems about hopes for poetic
> fame. Her 19th c. editor, whose name I forget, rearranged the lyrics
> so they now go Petrarch, fame, and God. But that isn't what Stampa's
> sister had wanted. And in any case you don't have to be Petrarch to
> start with love and then move on or even regret (Watson was to do
> that in England, too). Ovid has the same pattern.
> I'm wandering. My point is that even Petrarch--especially
> Petrarch--could see both tension and connection. Petrarch and many
> others have in the long run to give up the lady; Spenser marries her,
> adding some Song of Songs on the way--but you don't have to be very
> cynical about marriage to know that that's another form of giving it
> up. In any case, Roche and Kuin might be one place to start. Anne P.
>
> On Nov 16, 2007, at 7:35 PM, lipke wrote:
>
>> Has anybody teased out any relationships between Petrarchism and
>> Christianity in the Early Modern Period? Is there an argument that
>> they were oppositional movements/beliefs/philosophical systems or
>> that they simply ran in tandem? Can anyone recommend some reading
>> I might find useful? Somebody suggested C.S. Lewis. The Allegory
>> of Love. I’ve read that but didn’t find it very helpful.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>>
>>
>> Ian Lipke
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>>
>>
>>
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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