The sins of the flesh and the mortification of the flesh characterize the biography of the saint known as Mary Magdalen. The polychrome wooden sculpture by Donatello from c.1455 was described by Vasari as: “wasted away by her fastings and abstinence." The extreme emaciation of the figure contrasts with the image of the beautiful and mournful Magdalen frequently seen at the foot of the cross in medieval crucifixion scenes. With virtually no documentation concerning its commission, much of the scholarship on this particular piece focuses on dating and the intended installation site. This thesis aims to examine the relationship between the emaciated style and the manner of polychromy in Donatello’s Penitent Magdalen as an example of the redeeming power of penance. On a figure known for a life of sin and prostitution but also redemption, the gilding juxtaposed with a haggard and ugly body creates a dynamic relationship between sanctity and beauty (or the lack thereof) and demonstrates the effect of penance on the sinner. The extreme emaciation and rough finish of the piece, in tandem with the gilding of the hair, created an effect of light that was significant to the Renaissance understanding of the saint’s character but also to a larger discourse on female sexuality and spirituality. The multifaceted character of Mary Magdalen and Donatello’s depiction of her was understood by Quattrocento Florentines on a variety of levels. Higher social classes would readily grasp the sculpture’s affinity with Petrarchan tropes and philosophical ideas, particularly in terms of light imagery and descriptions of love. But the average viewer would also make more prosaic associations between the figure of the Magdalen and popular preaching and prostitution. Through an examination of the cultural climate of fifteenth century Florence, this investigation will situate Donatello’s uniquely emaciated and gilded sculpture in the visual tradition of Magdalen imagery, motifs of female spirituality in Donatello’s career, the literary tradition of describing female beauty, and societal concerns about prostitution and female sexuality. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-26 21:24:46.128

This thesis project surrounds the life of sixteenth-century poet Vittoria Colonna, and the poetry she wrote following the death of her husband Ferrante D’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, in 1525. Often regarded in tandem with the works of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna’s literary accomplishments in the face of personal tragedy speak for themselves as she became one of the foremost female poets of her time. Beyond her relationship with Michelangelo, the surrounding literature on Colonna looks at her widowhood as a stage for her poetry, her use of Neoplatonist imagery, and the influence of the Petrarchan sonnet. Expanding on the arguments presented by scholars Abigail Brundin and Virginia Cox, who are the foundation for my research with their thorough understanding of these connective elements, my thesis explores how Colonna actively used gender and grief specifically within her widowed poetry to pursue social and spiritual transcendence through a comparison of primary texts. In merging these elements together, I find that Colonna complicates the role of the female widow. She uses her widow’s grief as a tool to remain within the lines of social propriety while also seeking personal freedom. Benefitting from her performance of what Erasmus calls a “true” widow, Colonna presented her grief within the parameters of social expectation but provided a way to break free from them. Within this public space, Colonna’s complicated relationship with gender comes into play as she uses it to her advantage to transcend socially through subversions of Petrarchan convention, while also dismissing gender entirely through Neoplatonism in order to transcend spiritually. In this, Colonna maintains a complex widowhood as she both fulfills and dismantles the boundaries set in place for her, finding a sense of freedom within the blurred lines of propriety.

Following the path of the use of the Petrarchan sonnet in Renaissance England, this article explores why this specific form was so prevalent from the court of Henry VIII to that of his daughter, Elizabeth I. The article pays specific attention to the works of Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, paying close attention to social, political, and gender issues of the period.

This study maintains that although Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1554) appears to straddle two popular literary genres-lyric poetry and autobiography-analysis of the Rime within its cultural context demonstrates that while Stampa (1523-1553) used Petrarchan conventions, she also both borrowed and swerved from Giovanni Boccaccio's Elegy of Lady Fiammetta (1334-1337) to imagine a non-Petrarchan narrative of an abandoned woman. In the Renaissance, lyric poetry and autobiography were distinguished not only by their style-prose vs. verse-but, more importantly, by the treatment of their distinctive subject matter. Lyric poetry focused on those emotions involving love, whereas Renaissance autobiography shunned emotions. A comparative analysis of the Rime with the Elegy concludes that the Rime is not a lyric version of Boccaccio's Elegy; however, a consideration of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" demonstrates that although Stampa borrowed the Boccaccian idea of the woman as narrator to tell the story of love and abandonment, she creatively adapted-or, to use Bloom's term, swerved from-Boccaccio's presentation of the abandoned narrator's psychological pain. Instead, Stampa depicts the frustrations and the pain of the narrator whose love is unrequited although her beloved remains nearby.

No description available.

This thesis interpolates medieval and modern authors and theorists, namely Dante, Petrarch, and Proust on the one hand, and Freud, Kristeva, and Derrida on the other. I propose that these writers are intimately connected and differentiated by their meditations on grief and loss. I compare, confront, and contrast these narratives of mourning in a discursive shuttling to and fro between medieval and modern, French and Italian, and literature and theory, in order to delineate the specificities of different forms of melancholia as legible in Dante’s Commedia, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and as illuminated by Freudian melancholia, Kristeva’s Soleil noir, and Derrida’s concept of ‘demi-deuil’. I challenge the homogeny of the modern concept of melancholia and juxtapose it with the medieval sin of acedia in Dante (Inferno VII) and Petrarch (considering both the Secretum and the Canzoniere). From the examples of the treatment of the myth of Orpheus and the book of Lamentations, I argue that discourses of mourning are trapped in a fruitful tension between a desire for uniqueness or originality and a desire for legibility or the comfort of communality. In Girardian terms, I define literary representations of mourning as ‘mimetic’, that is, caught in a web of intertextual imitation and preoccupations of genre and tradition which are at odds with a quest for new forms of writing. Finally, I contend that the relationship between content and form is particularly close in grief-stricken texts, and characterise my chosen primary texts – including Dante’s Vita nuova – according to the twin poles of endlessness (which I equate with melancholia) and finitude (the teleological, closed nature of the work of mourning), with a Derridean alternative of unstable oscillation between the two (‘demi-deuil’).

No description available.

Les « maladies de l’âme » ont existé de tout temps et l’homme s’est employé à les nommer, à en rechercher les causes dans un déséquilibre organique, ou encore un mauvais usage de la raison qui le priverait de la félicité, celle-ci étant reconnue comme tranquillitas animi ou salut éternel. L’aspect le plus fécond de ce mal de vivre, d’un point de vue artistique et littéraire, repose sur le concept de mélancolie, tandis qu’aujourd’hui, sa forme diffuse en est la dépression. Lacan dans Télévision, décrivant cette dernière comme « une faute morale, comme s’exprimait Dante, voire Spinoza : un péché, ce qui veut dire une lâcheté morale », place la question sur un plan décidément éthique et incite à reconsidérer la subtile réflexion des Pères de l’Eglise et de Saint Thomas, concernant la relation entre péché et « maladie de l’âme », soit encore l’acédie dans ce contexte. Dante, cité explicitement par Lacan, et puis Pétrarque vivent et écrivent durant une période cruciale, qui voit coexister diverses conceptions médicales, philosophiques et artistiques de l’acédie, la mélancolie, l’aegritudo, toutes présentes dans leurs œuvres. Si Dante semble s’appuyer sur la conception médiévale de la maladie de l’âme, essentiellement engendrée par un usage incorrect de la raison et donc une perversion de l’amore di natura, Pétrarque reste, bien que de manière non déclarée, un poète « mélancolique », de fait : il souligne en premier lieu l’irréductible antagonisme entre savoir et félicité et puise dans l’ignorance et l’insatiable désir sa définition de l’essence de la nature humaine. Il fait de ce désir, incarné par la figure éternelle et inaccessible de Laura, la matière même de son chant. / “Maladies of the soul” have always existed, and so humanity seeks to define them and to find their cause and a cure. Over the course of time they have been given many names and their origin has been identified, at different times, in an organic imbalance or in a faulty use of reason, one that drives away happiness, identified in turn as tranquillitas animi or eternal salvation. The most fertile aspect of this malaise from the artistic and literary viewpoint consists in the concept of melancholy, while the form it most commonly takes today is depression. Lacan, defining the latter in Television as a moral failing, as Dante, and even Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness, places the question on a declaredly ethical plane and prompts us to re-examine the penetrating reflection of the Fathers of the Church and St Thomas on the relationship between sin and ‘malady of the soul’, embodied, in this context, by sloth. Dante, cited explicitly by Lacan, and Petrarch both lived and wrote in a crucial era, in which different medical, philosophical and artistic conceptions of sloth, acedia, melancholy and aegritudo coexisted, and figured in their works. If Dante still appears bound to the mediaeval conception of the malady of the soul, stemming essentially from the faulty use of reason and thus from a perversion of the ‘love of nature’, Petrarch is, not declaredly, but in effect, a ‘melancholic’ poet: he was the first to point out the rift between knowledge and happiness, and to grasp that the essence of human nature lies in ignorance and in insatiable desire. And he makes this desire, embodied in the eternal and unattainable image of Laura, the subject of his poetry.

Cette thèse porte sur le recueil des lettres en vers de Pétrarque, les Epystole. Michele Feo, actuel éditeur de l’œuvre, a démontré que Pétrarque conclut le livre et le publia en 1364. A partir de ses indications, la thèse essaie d’inscrire les Epystole dans les projets littéraires de Pétrarque entre les années Cinquante et la moitié de la décennie suivante. En particulier, ce travail met à profit l’hypothèse chronologique de Francisco Rico, qui fait du Secretum le présupposé idéologique des recueils élaborés à partir de 1350. Fragmenta, Familiares et Epystole naîtraient d’un même état d’esprit, le recolligere sparsa, et se constitueraient avec l’objectif de donner une image idéalisée de l’expérience de vie et de pensée de leur auteur. Si la question a été abordée et approfondie pour le Chansonnier et les Lettres Familières, les Epystole n’ont pas été considérées dans cette perspective. À l’ombre du Secretum, le chapitre central de la thèse essaie de démontrer que les Epystole participent au même projet que les Fragmenta et Familiares. En même temps, le chapitre justifie l’hypothèse du titre, à savoir que les Epystole sont construites comme un livre.Le deuxième chapitre se constitue des fiches, qui portent sur les lettres prises individuellement. Elles approfondissent les thèmes et les occasions d’écriture des épîtres, avec une attention particulière pour la chronologie, et elles essaient de les mettre en relation avec le reste de la production de Pétrarque.L’appendice coïncide avec la traduction italienne en prose des lettres. / This thesis concerns Petrarch’s collections of letters in verses, the Epystole. Michele Feo, currently editor of the work, has demonstrated that Petrarch has finished the book, and that he published it in 1364. Based on his indications, the thesis tries to frame the Epystole within the literary projects Petrarch developed between 1350 and the first part of the next decade.This thesis takes particularly advantage of Rico’s chronological hypothesis: changing the date of the Secretum to 1347-53, he made of the Secretum the ideological premise of the other projects of collection which Petrarch started in 1350. Petrarch develops the idea of Fragmenta, Familiares and Epystole at the same time, in the very same state of mind (recolligere sparsa), and with one objective: give to his contemporaries and to the posterity an idealised image of his own, of his experience and of his thinking. While the Canzoniere and the Familiares have been adequately studied from this perspective, the Epystole haven’t been considered. Keeping in mind the Secretum, the central chapter tries to demonstrate that the Epystole are involved in the same project of Fragmenta and Familiares. In parallel, it argues the hypothesis of the title, that the Epystole have the structure of a book.The second chapter consists of «files» for every letter. These files are focused on the themes, the occasions of writing, the chronological problems. They try also to link the letters to the rest of Petrarch’s writings.The appendix gives the prose Italian translation of the epistolary.

Dans notre thèse de doctorat, nous avons publié presque intégralement l’édition critique commentée de l’exégèse au Bucolicum carmen de Pétrarque réalisée par Francesco Piendibeni de Montepulciano, humaniste italien du Trecento tardif. L’exégèse, achevée à Pérouse en 1394, est conservée dans le manuscrit autographe Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1729. Dans son ensemble, l’oeuvre est restée jusqu’à aujourd’hui inédite : seul Antonio Avena, en 1906, a fourni une simple transcription, partielle et imparfaite, de quelques gloses. Notre édition a l’ambition d’être novatrice : non seulement elle établit et analyse de manière critique un texte resté longtemps méconnu, mais elle permet aussi d’approfondir la connaissance du poème bucolique de Pétrarque, de mieux évaluer sa réception auprès des érudits qui lui ont succédé et d’éclairer la connaissance de la tradition exégétique du premier Humanisme. Une source fondamentale pour Piendibeni est le commentaire au Bucolicum carmen réalisé par Benvenuto da Imola : nous enavons fourni une transcription inédite tirée du manuscrit Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8700. Enfin, nous avons mis à jour la liste des manuscrits connus qui appartinrent à Piendibeni et reconstruit ainsi pour la première fois de manière approfondie sa bibliothèque. / This doctoral thesis presents, almost in its entirety, the critical edition with commentary of the exegesis of Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen by Francesco Piendibeni of Montepulciano, an Italian humanist of the late Trecento. The exegesis, completed in Perugia in 1394, is preserved in the autograph manuscript Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1729. The work as a whole has remained unpublished until today; only Antonio Avena, in 1906, provided a simpletranscription, partial and imperfect, of some glosses. The edition contained in this thesis aims at being innovative; in effect, it not only establishes and critically analyses a text which has remained unknown for a long time, but also makes it possible to delve deeper into the knowledge of Petrarch’s bucolic poem, to better assess how it was received by the scholars who came after him and to shed light on the exegetical tradition of early Humanism. A fundamental source for Piendibeni was Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary on the Bucolicum carmen; an unpublished transcription is provided here, based on the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8700. Finally, the list of known manuscripts belonging to Piendibeni has been updated, so that, for the first time, his library has been exhaustively reconstructed.