Hello -- I think it's great that SpR is taking on the "big [old] ideas".  It's a great help to younger generations, of course, esp given the effort it takes to keep up with everything new today, where so much is published and so much so easily available and readable, hence distracting.  Being out of grad school for a time also makes one forget what the critical narratives are.  

I often discover, furthermore, that the most retro is the most progressive (witness Hillary Clinton's mantra "it takes a village to raise a child":  is she advocating paleolithic social mores or modern, feminist ones?).  A "radical" return to roots, etc.  --Tom
________________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Hannibal Hamlin [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 12:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: a comment by David Miller

More and more interesting. We've passed the 75th birthday of Lewis's Allegory (1936), but who says one can't celebrate (or commemorate, or excoriate) a 77th? The problem with the idea of "courtly love" may have to do more with naive later expressions of it, or with the conception of it in popular culture, than with Lewis or other major expositors. Certainly, Anne's right (as always) about distinctions between courtly, petrarchan, and platonic love. But it's pretty easy to blur these distinctions too. How often, for instance, does one find petrarchan poems (especially in sequences) without some admixture of the platonic? (And does one really mean platonic, or rather neoplatonic a la Bembo in Castiglione?). Having just taught a course on the English Petrarchan tradition, I'm also sensitive to the artificiality of beginning this tradition with Petrarch himself. There is such a tradition, of course, but it is not as if Petrarch invented everything in "petrarch love" -- he depended heavily on the troubadours and trouveres, which means there is rather a lot of the "courtly love" in the petrarchan. It sounds as if Donaldson was exploded the whole notion of courtly love at the root, but I don't know enough of that early poetry to weigh in on the debate. Just based on Anne's anecdote, I'd say that the fact that animals court each other based on some innate biological impulse does not invalidate analyses of more historically determined human behaviors (let alone their literary representation). It's not in our genes to luxuriate in the despondency of an unrequited desire, is it? (I don't know.) Or to embrace a love which is impossibly chaste and idealized? Or to allegorize human emotions? Anyway, all this would presumably be the focus for the kind of discussion we're talking about, which should be fascinating.

More generally, isn't the current discomfort with Tyndale and Lewis part of a general trend in the history of ideas -- actually a trend which is uncomfortable with the whole notion of such a history? Our preoccupation with certain kinds of politics and "new" historicizing comes with a broader rejection of the "big ideas" of earlier generations of scholars, doesn't it? Someone mentioned Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, but I expect we could add to this list -- Burckhardt's Renaissance? Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages? the cultural structuralism of Frazier-Levi-Strauss-Frye? or various BIG studies by Auerbach, Kristeller, Don Cameron Allen, Edgar Wind, etc. etc. Are we now feelng the tug of a backswing, recognizing that we're missing something these earlier studies provided? Have Spenserians perhaps hung onto such ideas longer than most? (Or might Spensians then be in the vanguard of such a backswing -- "turn" -- the "New, New"?)

Hannibal




On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Anne Prescott <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
I entirely agree--and I love the idea. I've been a bystander on this thread--what an image, sort of like Ariadne merely watching after Theseus got going--but it's probably time to revisit. At the very least I'd love advice on how to tell students that "courtly love" doesn't mean Petrarchan, or Platonic, is possibly--or not--a modern delusion, and it doesn't mean just being fancy and upper class. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a Robertsonian, but open to persuasion.
     Years ago, at K'zoo, I saw a debate between my Columbia colleague Joan Ferrante and Judith Anderson's wonderful late husband Talbot Donaldson. She was pro-Lewis et al., he was pro-Robertson et al. At one point, in the large room that opened on to an enclosed lawn with cardinals (bird variety) fluttering around, Talbot whirled around and pointed to the birds and said something like "You see? even birds court; there's nothing specifically medieval or even human about their fluttering and bowing and beseeching." We all laughed in appreciation and Joan's reply was "Professor Donaldson is arguing through charm and that's just not fair." She was smiling.
      The whole Tillyard/Lewis question is fascinating and I'd love to hear a panel on it; what David W-O says is so true--a book can be "wrong" but valuable. One thought: unless there's a certain orthodoxy, even if only one orthodoxy among several, then going up against it or undermining it or treating it with irony is impossible. Similarly, if there wasn't a bit of a "Tudor myth," then Shakespeare's irony and questioning wouldn't be as interesting. Maybe somebody has already said all this. Sorry. I've been preoccupied . . . with Spenser.
      And now back to the copy-edited pages of the Norton Spenser--just to fix one essay for the critical section that somehow had its footnotes shorn off and then back to the publisher with all 1200 pages to move to the next stage. There is progress, after all these years. Anne.


On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Ayesha Ramachandran <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
It would be wonderful to do a Spenser Roundtable or MLA/RSA session (or even a series) that re-evaluates Spenser and the paradigm of 'courtly love' a la Lewis. We've talked in terms of pleasure, eroticism, sexuality etc of late, but the term "love" seems to have become awkward. I'd love to know if there are people who would be interested on being on a panel on this topic!

ayesha

Ayesha Ramachandran
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5350
(631) 632-7628<tel:%28631%29%20632-7628>
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

-----Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote: -----
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
From: David Wilson-Okamura
Sent by: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
Date: 07/16/2012 10:09AM

Subject: Re: a comment by David Miller

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Thomas Roche <[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> LET'S NOT FORGET The Allegory of Love, which still has many  earnest
> souls held in the clutches of "courtly Love."

Yes, it would be sad if people stopped reading that book just because
it's wrong. Like many great books ("War and Peace," for example), it's
great in spite of its thesis. I don't know how many times I've read
it, but I never leave its pages without learning something.

--
Dr. David Wilson-Okamura    http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
English Department              Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University        Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet




--
Hannibal Hamlin
Associate Professor of English
Editor, Reformation
Co-curator, Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible
http://www.manifoldgreatness.org/
The Ohio State University
164 West 17th Ave., 421 Denney Hall
Columbus, OH 43210-1340
[log in to unmask]<[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">http:[log in to unmask]>
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>