Topographia, the description of a place, does not quite catch what you describe, though a lover's complaint for an emptied place could be seen as a species of topographia. It could be worth looking in Menander Rhetor who lists a large number of kinds of panegyric suitable for a multiple occasions. In among the paraclausithyrons and the epibaterions you might stumble across a name for weeping over the beloved's cold pillow etc. Menander was printed in Oratores Graeci (1508), the same volume which contained Aristotle's Poetics, and he influenced Scaliger and probably through him though conceivably also directly Spenser.
Colin Burrow
Senior Research Fellow
All Souls College
Oxford OX1 4AL
-----Original Message-----
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Khoddam, Salwa
Sent: 18 July 2010 21:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SIDNEY-SPENSER: emotion ( was Renaissance rhetoric question)
Hello,
My question is a little off-topic but has to do with the rhetorical topos that we're discussing. Is there a special term, beyond "apostrophe," for the topos of a lover's addressing the empty house of his beloved after she had departed from it as in Troylus's addressing the empty palace of Criseyde in Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde (5. 540-553)? Does anyone know of other examples of this rhetorical topos in early modern literature? It seems to me to be part of the courtly love tradion, but I do not know that for certain.
Thanks,
Salwa
Salwa Khoddam, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita of English
Oklahoma City University
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrew Strycharski [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2010 7:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SIDNEY-SPENSER: emotion ( was Renaissance rhetoric question)
Another late addition on the topic of emotion/affect:
I think 16C concepts of affect would have been influenced by humanist
discussion of "affectus," which nuanced the active/passive issue even in
the simplified forms students got in grammar school.
Melanchthon's dialectic textbooks, for example (popular in the English
schools), discuss "affectus" under the predicament of quality. He
distinguishes between "affectus" and the merely passive reception of
sensory data specifically because affect, though similarly
physical/embodied, involves judgment or cognition. (Perhaps a fair
distinction would be between the pain of being poked by a stick and the
pain of fearing a poking.)
Affects are the movement/excitation following judgment, and awakened by
that judgment, through which the heart either pursues or flees some
object [Sed affectus cordis sunt motus sequentes cognitionem, & excitati
cognitione, quibus cor aut prosequitur aut fugit obiecta] (from the
_Erotemata Dialectices_). Significantly here, the definition includes
some of the "motion" of e-movere.
For Melanchthon, there are four basic affects: delight [laetitia]: the
pleasant feeling when something is judged presently to be good (or when
a present good is followed); hope [spes]: the pleasant feeling when the
heart pursues a a future good; grief [tristitia]: present evil; and fear
[metus]: future evil. All other affects (love, hate, anger) are some
combination of these four.
Similarly Cicero, in Tusculan Disputationes 4 (iirc), breaks the affects
down into these four categories, only including a good and bad version
of each, depending on whether the judgment is rational or irrational.
(So, e.g., irrational judgment about future evils is fear, rational
judgment about future evils is caution. Appropriately for Cicero's
stoicism, there is no rational form of experiencing pain at something
judged presently to be evil, only aegritudo.) The Tusc. Disp. was also a
popular grammar school text.
And, since Joel brought up Wendy Olmstead's book, it may be worth
mentioning that she would probably point out that this humanist
framework would have been one among several (e.g. neoplatonic,
courtly/aristocratic) conceptions of feeling/affect available.
FWIW
-Andy
Joel Davis wrote:
> This is late & obviously on a tangential topic, but I've written on both Leontes' inscrutable speech & on a really admirable book on emotion in the Renaissance. With respect to Leontes, he's referring to a capacity for quite irrational (all the more compelling for its irrationality) mental predilection for making free associations (that's why he uses the words "coactive" and "cojoin"). If his "affection" is directly related to what we think of as emotion, then he's using affection very metaphorically in that speech. The book on emotion in the renaissance is Wendy Olmsted's _The Imperfect Friend_, and it will reward close attention.
>
> Best wishes,
> Joel
> ________________________________________
> From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Marshall Grossman [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, July 16, 2010 10:00 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: SIDNEY-SPENSER: Renaissance rhetoric question
>
> The normal reference might have been to 'affection,' as in Leontes' speech in the The Winter's Tale. The
> difference between to affect and to emote does nicely point up a shift from passive to active, though of course one can "Affect to do something."
>
> On 7/16/10 9:25 AM, Charlie Butler wrote:
> On 16 July 2010 14:12, Brad Tuggle <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> Late Sixteenth century England had no word for "emotion" (except in the
> sense of "political disturbance"), which does not arise in English
> until, I think, Florio's translation of Montaigne. Of course, they had
> "passion," but one doesn't always want to emphasize the passive side of
> feeling.
>
> In that context, it's interesting how often emotion is expressed in terms of being made effectively inanimate, which is after all as passive as it gets: astonied, astownd, etc. (The hints of resemblance to a stone are plain, even if the etymology is doubtful.) But this seems less paradoxical if we think of emotion as a kind of temporary emigration from the body, leaving it a senseless stock.
>
> Charlie
>
> --
> Website: www.charlesbutler.co.uk<http://www.charlesbutler.co.uk>
> Blog: http://steepholm.livejournal.com/
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