Lyric in the Renaissance
From Petrarch to Montaigne

A wide-ranging study of the lyric as a literary genre in Renaissance Europe, by a leading scholar of the period.

Ullrich Langer (Author)

9781107526990, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 October 2017

226 pages
23 x 15 x 1 cm, 0.34 kg

'… a rhetorically meticulous reading, historically informed without being historicizing, showing how a few carefully deployed rhetorical devices produce the startling affective jolts, the impression of wrenching selfhood and inexplicable, inexpiable yearnings that this poetry can still call forth.' William N. West, Modern Philology

Moving from a definition of the lyric to the innovations introduced by Petrarch's poetic language, this study goes on to propose a new reading of several French poets (Charles d'Orléans, Ronsard, and Du Bellay), and a re-evaluation of Montaigne's understanding of the most striking poetry and its relation to his own prose. Instead of relying on conventional notions of Renaissance subjectivity, it locates recurring features of this poetic language that express a turn to the singular and that herald lyric poetry's modern emphasis on the utterly particular. By combining close textual analysis with more modern ethical concerns this study establishes clear distinctions between what poets do and what rhetoric and poetics say they do. It shows how the tradition of rhetorical commentary is insufficient in accounting for this startling effectiveness of lyric poetry, manifest in Petrarch's Rime Sparse and the collections of the best poets writing after him.

1. Introduction
2. Petrarch and the existential singular
3. Minimal lost worlds: the rondeaux of Charles d'Orléans
4. Ronsard's singular erotic reciprocity (Les Amours de Cassandre)
5. Singularity as emptiness: Du Bellay's Regrets
6. Montaigne and his 'sublime' lyric
7. Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]