The Song of Songs and Its Tradition in Renaissance Love Lyric

by Caporicci, Camilla

• ISBN13: 9780192848833
• ISBN10: 0192848836
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-03-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and called by Rabbi Akiva the “Holy of Holies” among sacred Scriptures (Mishnah, Yadayim 3:5), the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial biblical books, and played an essential role in the shaping of European spirituality and culture. Combining in a unique way a sensual and deeply lyrical celebration of love with a well-established tradition of Christian allegorical interpretation, this text, crucial to both the Middle Ages and the early modern period, held a particular appeal for poets devoted not only to religious verse, but also to love poetry.

The Song of Songs and Its Tradition in Renaissance Love Lyric is the first systematic and wide-ranging investigation of the multifaceted use of the Song of Songs in Renaissance love lyric poetry, with specific attention to Italian, French, and, especially, English poetic production. At the same time, this investigation is embedded into a narrative that, comprising two initial chapters devoted to medieval poetry and to Francesco Petrarca, represents an unprecedented attempt to trace the role of the Song of Songs in the rise and development of the European love lyric, following its path - or rather, one of its paths - from the medieval origins of this tradition to the end of the sixteenth century. The picture of the general impact of the Song of Songs in the development of the European love lyric is combined with in-depth analysis of key works by specific authors -- including Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Torquato Tasso, Marguerite de Navarre, Anne de Marquets, Clément Marot, Richard Barnfield, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Elizabeth Melville, and Aemilia Lanyer - promoting a contextualization of their significance within a new interpretative framework. While the comparative standpoint characterizing this study fosters a deeper comprehension of the evolution of the European love lyric, its multidisciplinary approach, which considers the Song of Songs as the centre of a web of dynamics pertaining to the fields of literature, philosophy, theology, and religious and cultural history, contributes to the understanding of the thought and spirit of ages crucial to the shaping of European culture.

Author Biography

After obtaining a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Perugia (2013), Camilla Caporicci was the recipient of a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, which she carried out at the Ludwig Maximilians UniversitÃt München (2015-2017). In 2018, she was awarded the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence for her project on the Song of Songs in Renaissance love lyric, which led to a research fellowship at the University of Padova (2018-2021). Since 2021, she has worked at the University of Perugia, where she is currently Associate Professor of English Literature.
She has published widely on early modern poetry and drama. She is the author of the Introduction and notes to the Bompiani edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets (2019), of the monograph The Dark Lady: La rivoluzione shakespeariana nei Sonetti alla Dama Bruna (2013), and of the edited collections The Song of Songs in European Poetry (Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries): Translations, Appropriations, Rewritings (2024), The Art of Picturing in Early Modern English Literature (with Armelle Sabatier, 2020), and Sicut Lilium inter Spinas: Literature and Religion in the Renaissance (2018).

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsNoteIntroduction1. A long journey: The Song of Songs and the rise of medieval love lyric2. The transition to modern poetry: Petrarch's Canzoniere 3. Still central: The Song of Songs in the Renaissance4. Engaging with the Petrarchan code: The Song of Songs in Italian Renaissance poetry5. Echoing and rewriting the Cantique des Cantiques: The Song of Songs in sixteenth-century French poetry6. The English Spouse: The Song of Songs in sixteenth-century England7. Blooming again: The Song of Songs in the Elizabethan love lyric8. Awaking the turtle dove: Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and EpithalamionConclusion: The hidden archetypeIndexBibliographyAppendix 1Appendix 2