Description
Book SynopsisThis volume sheds new light on the extraordinary richness and variety of love poetry written in Latin from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. It shows how Latin love poets reworked classical Roman and Greek models, and engaged in dialogue with mediaeval and contemporary vernacular traditions of poetry. They used the poetic language of love in Latin to reflect and comment on wider social, ethical and literary issues, and reconfigured its codes of representation in response to changing conceptions of love in the philosophical and religious spheres. Their poetry often aligned itself with dominant discourses of power and gender, but it could also be subtly subversive or even openly transgressive.
Table of ContentsAbstract Keywords 1 Love Elegy 2 Neo-Catullanism 3 Excursus: Art and Life 4 Petrarchism 5 Mediaeval Presences 6 Virgilian Pastoral and Horatian Lyric 7 Greek Models 8 Women’s Writing and Female Voices 9 Philosophical and Spiritual Currents 10 Conjugal Love and Family 11 Obscenity 12 Homosexuality 13 Love’s Transformations; Metamorphosis and Mannerism 14 Conclusion Index
