In this thesis, a literary historic path on the development of the lyric expression of courtly love will be created. The path will take us from the Provence through Germany and Sicily, and up to the Tuscany of the thirteen's century. The poetic characteristics of the hohe Minne and dolce stil novo will be particularly highlighted in order to facilitate the comprehension of their similarities and differences. It is understood that it will not be possible to offer a complete interpretation of the two lyric expressions. Rather, this thesis wishes to offer a basis for the development of further comparative studies between the German and Italian lyric expressions that were inspired by the Provencal courtly love. As representatives of the evolution of the poetry of love in Germany and Italy, Walther von der Vogelweide and Guido Cavalcanti were chosen for the innovative character of their poetry and the artistic quality of the results they achieved.

Orientador: Marcio Orlando Seligmann-Silva / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-07T08:00:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sterzi_Eduardo_D.pdf: 2837671 bytes, checksum: 39cae6f53388a9a2a74341ffa23d7fbf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Neste estudo, propomos uma compreensão renovada da obra de Dante Alighieri a partir da hipótese de que seu primeiro livro, a Vita Nova, oferece uma representação da irrupção da lírica moderna. Inicialmente, buscamos determinar o sentido desta irrupção (e, pois, dessa representação) com base na teoria da origem (Ursprung) de Walter Benjamin. Depois, insistimos na pertinência de uma reconstrução do conceito de modernidade, desde suas primeiras formulações ainda no Medievo, ao termos em vista a obra de Dante, e mais especificamente a Vita Nova. Finalmente, analisamos a Vita Nova a partir de quatro figuras fundamentais que esta legou ¿ não apenas como eixos temáticos, mas como elementos de formalização ¿ à lírica posterior: a Memória, o Amor, o Segredo e a Morte / Abstract: In this study, we propose a renewed understanding of Dante Alighieri¿s work based on the hypothesis that his first book, the Vita Nova, offers a representation of the irruption of modern lyric. Initially, we try to determine the meaning of this irruption (and, then, of this representation) inspired by Walter Benjamin¿s theory of origin (Ursprung). After, we insist on the pertinence of a reconstruction of the concept of modernity, since its first formulations still in the Middle Ages, as we have Dante¿s work in view, and more specifically the Vita Nova. Finally, we analyze the Vita Nova from four fundamental figures it bequeaths ¿ not just as thematic axes, but as elements of formalization ¿ to the forthcoming lyric: Memory, Love, Secret, Death / Doutorado / Literatura Geral e Comparada / Doutor em Teoria e História Literária

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The reputation of the Florentine politician, political thinker, and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) has been largely shaped by his controversial political treatises, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. However, Machiavelli left us a broader and diverse corpus of writings. This dissertation focuses on what is perhaps the least-known portion of this corpus: Machiavelli’s poetry. Traditionally, scholars of Machiavelli have considered his engagement with poetry as a narrow and marginal component of his intellectual biography. Conversely, this project showcases how Machiavelli’s poetic activity, which he pursued throughout the vast majority of his adult life, intersected a broad spectrum of human and intellectual concerns, cultural practices, and social interactions. In light of this, poetry provides a unique opportunity to reassess the figure of Machiavelli across its full range of dimensions. Concurrently, Machiavelli’s poetic writings offer valuable insight into the manifold roles that poetry could play in the cultural and social world of Renaissance Florence. To illustrate the scope of Machiavelli’s poetic activity, this dissertation analyzes selections of Machiavelli’s political, amorous, and comic poems. In Chapter 1, devoted to Machiavelli’s political poetry, I address the three poems On Fortune, On Ingratitude, and On Ambition (also known as the Capitoli on account of their meter). I begin by assessing how Florence’s tradition of civic and poetic rhetoric influenced Machiavelli’s three poems, which allows me to then elucidate how the poems fit into Machiavelli’s anthropological-political laboratory. Indeed, my analysis shows how a rhetorically-informed approach facilitates the task of interpreting Machiavelli’s political thought across prose and poetry. In Chapter 2, I look at Machiavelli’s love poetry in relation to notions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I focus on two poems that appear to voice homoerotic desire as well as on the two poems that Machiavelli addressed to the Florentine courtesan, virtuosa, and poet Barbera (b. 1500). My analysis highlights two complementary functions that the practice of love poetry had for Machiavelli and his contemporaries. On the one hand, love poetry was a vehicle for articulating reflections on love, gender, and sexuality. On the other, the practice of love poetry facilitated an array of homosocial and mixed-gender interactions. In Chapter 3, I move on to consider Machiavelli’s comic poetry. In particular, I analyze Machiavelli’s three sonnets to Giuliano de’ Medici and his two political epigrams. In so doing, I foreground how Machiavelli’s comic poetry intertwined humor and gravity by leveraging four ingredients: wordplay, parody, satire, and gallows humor. As part of my analysis, I also call attention to the role that those ingredients played in some literary and social practices of the Italian Renaissance.

The volcanic area west of Naples known as the Phlegraean Fields, or Campi Flegrei, has been an alluring destination since antiquity. Then as now, it is characterized by monumental ancient buildings, natural hot springs and a gentle climate. Yet the same underground supervolcano that is responsible for its thermal power charges the area with instability. This dissertation centers the Campi Flegrei as a specific environment whose unique properties artists responded to during the early modern period. Picturing this place in a variety of media, they made visible its inherent contradictions—the coexistence of loss with continuity, the entanglement of the natural with the humanmade—and brought these tensions to bear on local history and identity. Manuscripts, prints, maps, and images from printed books form the core body of material discussed. Taking an interdisciplinary and embodied approach, this study draws on the history of medicine, science and the environment and is based in firsthand experience of many of the sites discussed. The first chapter concerns a body of illustrated manuscripts and printed books that figure the bathing sites of the Campi Flegrei. It traces the popularity of Peter of Eboli’s late twelfth-century or early thirteenth-century poem De balneis Puteolanis (On the Baths of Pozzuoli) through the Renaissance and early modern periods, when it was copied and its images elaborated upon. The practice of bathing itself connected people directly to a rich local history, and these images emphasize the potency of that direct physical experience embedded in the landscape. The second chapter brings us to the extensive subterranean spaces of Naples, especially its underground aquatic infrastructure. The viscera of the city played an important role in daily life, but were also fertile settings for stories of the city’s past. This chapter contrasts the lack of imagery figuring the Neapolitan underground with the plethora of artworks showing a more porous relationship between above and below in the Campi Flegrei. The visual identities of Naples and the Campi Flegrei were consistently evolving, but constructed and perceived in relationship to one another. During periods in which Angevin, Aragonese, and early viceregal Spanish rulers attempted to impose a new order on the urban fabric of Naples, the Campi Flegrei were pictured in contrast, as the city’s untamable chthonic neighbor. The third chapter follows specific artists and writers into the Campi Flegrei, where their works turn towards mistaken topographies, visual lacunae, nonlinearity, and loss, teasing out visually the mechanisms by which transformation could come about. Working in an expanded context in which images of the Campi Flegrei and Naples circulated beyond the local, they developed new ways to tether their visual languages in drawings, prints, and paintings to local identity.

This dissertation explores Moderata Fonte’s Tredici canti del Floridoro from a new critical perspective, by taking into consideration Fonte’s authorial positionality, situating the text within its literary and historical contexts, and devoting sustained attention to its extradiegetic and structural components. Through this framing, this study highlights Fonte’s innovation as an author of chivalric epic and reveals the Floridoro to be a text with political motivations. The first chapter examines Fonte’s authorial persona and her metapoetics, both as they are written about by her contemporaries and as they are made manifest within the Floridoro. The remaining two chapters are devoted to an analysis of the two ekphrastic sub-narratives found within the Floridoro, and how they mirror Fonte’s dual dedication of the poem to Francesco I de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello: chapter 2 considers Fonte’s Medici genealogy as a response to a specific political moment and to the unique anxieties of her first dedicatee, while chapter 3 explores how Fonte’s history of Venice functions as a civic genealogy for her second.

This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.

xiv, 479 p. : ill. (some col.) A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / My dissertation examines the ethical engagement of political invective poetry in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. Modern criticism tends to treat medieval invective as a playfully subversive but marginal poetic game with minimal ethical weight. Instead, I aim to restore these poetic productions to their original context: the history, law, and custom of Tuscan cities. This contexts allows me to explore how humor and fury, in the denunciation of political enemies, interact to establish not a game but an ethics of invective. I treat ethics as both theoretical and practical, referring to Aristotle, Cicero, and Brunetto Latini, and define ethics as the pursuit of the common good in a defined community. Chapter I introduces the corpus, its historical and cultural background, its critical reception, and my approach. Chapter II discusses medieval invective in Tuscany and surveys the cultural practice of invective writing. Chapter III approaches invectives written by Rustico Filippi during the Guelph and Ghibelline wars. Chapter IV explores invectives by Cecco Angiolieri set in Siena, which polemicize with the Sienese government and citizenry. Chapter V examines invectives in Dante's Commedia (Inf. 19, Purg. 6, and Par. 27), focusing on his unexpected humor and his critique of the papacy, the empire, and Italian city governments. My conclusion examines the ethical function of slanderous wit in wartime invective. These poems balance verbal aggression with humor, claiming a role for laughter in creating dialogue within conflict. Far from a stylistic or ludic exercise, each invective shows the poet's activism and ethical engagement. This dissertation includes previously published material. / Committee in Charge: Regina Psaki, Chairperson, Romance Languages; Massimo Lollini, Member, Romance Languages; David Wacks, Member, Romance Languages; Steven Shankman, Outside Member, English

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.