Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to ShakespeareM. L. Stapleton's Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare traces the influence of the early elegiac poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C.E.-17 C.E.) on European literature from 500-1600 C.E. The Amores served as a classical model for love poetry in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and were essential to the formation of fin' Amors, or "courtly love". Medieval Latin poets, the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare were all familiar with Ovid in his various forms, and all depended greatly upon his Amores in composing their cansos, canzoniere, and sonnets. Harmful Eloquence begins with a detailed analysis of the Amores themselves and their artistic unity. It moves on to explain the fragmentary transmission of the Amores fragments in the "Latin Anthology" and the cohesion of the fragments into the conventions of medieval Latin and troubadour "courtly love" poetry. Two subsequent chapters explain the use of the Amores, their narrator, and the conventions of "courtly love" in the poetry of both Dante and Petrarch. The final chapter concentrates on Shakespeare's reprocessing and parody of this material in his sonnets. Medievalists, classicists, and scholars of Renaissance studies will find Harmful Eloquence particularly engaging and useful. This work has received early praise for its Shakespearean content and is vital to scholars in this area. Stapleton's scholarship is both enjoyable and readable with a contemporary approach. |
Contents
The desultor Amoris before 1100 | 39 |
Ovid and the Troubadours | 65 |
Dantes Vita nuova and the desultor Amoris | 91 |
Copyright | |
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accessus amatoria amica amicus Amores attempts auctor Baudri Beatrice Bernart Bernart de Ventadorn C.S. Lewis Cambridge Carmina century Christian classical concept conventions Corinna Courtly Love critical cuckold Dante Dante Alighieri Dante's dark lady desultor Amoris discuss elegiac Epistulae ex Ponto Ernst Robert Curtius erotic poetry erotica Guillaume Guillaume's Harvard University Press heart Heroides husband imitation Latin Poetry Laura libri Light in Troy literary Literature lover lust lyric Marlowe Marlowe's Maximianus Metamorphoses Middle Ages mihi mistress moral Orator Ovid and Medieval Ovid's desultor Ovidian Ovidius Ovids Elegies Oxford paradigm persona Petrarch poem poetics praeceptor prose puella quae quam quod reader Remedia Remedia amoris Renaissance rhetorical Rime Ripoll Roman seems sequence sexual Shakespeare sine Sonnets speaker subversion suggests Tibullus tion trans translation Tristia trobairitz troubadours trouvère twelfth twelfth-century vernacular Vetula Vita nuova voice vols Will's woman women writes