COML5450 - Topics: Renaissance Culture

This seminar will explore the dual nature of love: as a physical, erotic passion and as a spiritual, noble emotion. We will also investigate how love can lead to violent passions—jealousy, possessiveness, cruelty, hatred, and physical harm, among others—in literary and historical accounts from the Middle Ages to the end of the sixteenth century.


We will begin with an introductory session dedicated to Plato’s notion of love as expressed in the Symposium and Phaedrus and Aristotle’s elaboration of emotions, alongside Marsilio Ficino’s integration of the two perspectives in his dialogue On Love. We will then proceed in clusters of texts grouped by genre. We will start by exploring selected poems by Michelangelo, which combine elements of the dolce stil novo, Petrarca’s Canzoniere, and Ficino’s neo-Platonic notion of love. We will continue by reading selected poems by women authors such as Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Franco, Gaspara Stampa, and Louise Labé. Our peregrination will continue by reading several love treatises in the tradition of and in response to Ficino’s dialogue: Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love, Pietro Bembo’s The People of Asolo, Baldassarre Castiglione’s The Courtier, and Tullia D’Aragona’s On the Infinity of Love. Our next stop will explore the representation of love in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, focusing not only on Orlando’s love madness and Tancredi’s love melancholy, but also on the female characters who embody various responses to the emotion and passion of love: Angelica, Olimpia, Bradamante, Isabella, Armida, Clorinda, and Erminia, among others. We will conclude our investigation with novelle and theatrical plays that represent love from an ennobling emotion to a lustful urge. We will read selected novelle by Giovanni Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello, as well as William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. A brief selection of legal, medical, and historical sources will help us further contextualize the aforementioned texts and address, among others, the following questions:

• How are the tensions between body and soul on the one hand and erotic passion and spiritual emotion on the other elaborated in these texts?

• In which way did the Neo-Platonic fifteenth-century elaboration of Plato’s Symposium and Petrarch’s sonnets affect the love literature written between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century?

• Do genre and gender influence the way love is enacted in these works, and how?

• What insights can we gain about the cluster of negative and violent emotions linked to love in several literary texts we will explore?