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] 
>
>
>
>