Re-evaluating the dialogue’s place in the literary landscape of the Italian and French Renaissance, 'Speaking of Love' presents the love dialogue at the intersection of a revival of the form and the period’s philosophies of love and desire. Between 1540 and 1580, authors such as Speroni, Tullia d’Aragona, the Venetian poligrafi, Tyard, Le Caron, Pasquier, Taillemont, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labé, feature interlocutors not only deliberating on love but imitating the experience of love in their dynamics of speaking. These love dialogues allow early modern ideologies and discourses of love to be imitated by the reader and rival lyric poetry in conveying amorous experience, validating dialogue as an authentic literary form rather than a tool of philosophical thinking.
Author(s): Reinier Leushuis
Series: Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, 18
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 340
City: Leiden
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Thought, Speech, and the Poetics of Love in Renaissance Dialogue Theory 22
Introduction 22
Carlo Sigonio and Torquato Tasso: The Dialectical Turn 25
Sperone Speroni: Speech, Drama, and Love in Dialogue 37
2. The Mimesis of Love: Dialogue and Poetics in Sperone Speroni’s 'Dialogo d’amore' 53
3. The Infinite Practice of Amorous Speaking: Tullia d’Aragona and the Venetian 'poligrafi' 108
Introduction 108
Infinite Speaking in Amorous Dialogue: Tullia d’Aragona’s 'Dialogo della infinità di amore' 113
The Love Dialogue among Venetian literati-lovers: Betussi, Sansovino, and Gottifredi 137
Amorous Speaking and the Return to the Ciceronian Model: Betussi and Domenichi 161
4. Toward a French Love Dialogue: Philosophy and Literary Mimesis in Translations and Emulations by Claude Gruget, Pontus de Tyard, and Louis Le Caron 171
Introduction 171
Translating Speroni and Ebreo: From Paradox to Dialogical Labor of Love 176
Dialogue between Amorous Philosophy and Amorous Poetry: Pontus de Tyard’s 'Solitaire premier' 184
Staging the Speaking Beloved Other: Louis Le Caron’s 'La Claire, ou de la prudence de droit' 201
5. 'À l’imitation... d’un Bembe j’ay un peu voulu fourvoyer de ma course encommencée'. Innovation and Gender in French Love Dialogues: Claude de Taillemont, Etienne Pasquier, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labé 220
Introduction 220
The Collective Speaking of Love: Adapting and Emulating Bembo’s 'Gli Asolani' in France: Claude de Taillemont and Étienne Pasquier 228
Toward a Female French Love Dialogue: Marguerite de Navarre’s 'La Coche' and Louise Labé’s 'Débat de Folie et d’Amour' 247
Conclusion 282
'Amor ordinem nescit': Montaigne’s Dialogue on Love in 'Sur des vers de Virgile' 282
Bibliography 309
Index 327
