Love's Wounds. Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe by Cynthia N. Nazarian

Abstract

Reviewed by: Love's Wounds. Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe by Cynthia N. Nazarian Elena Kazakova (bio) Cynthia N. Nazarian. Love's Wounds. Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe. Cornell UP, 2016. xii + 299 pages. Cynthia Nazarian's Love's Wounds asks why the language of Petrarch's sixteenth-century imitators is much more violent than that of the original. The study centers on four main figures in addition to Petrarch himself: Maurice Scève, Joachim Du Bellay, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and Edmund Spenser, thus allowing the author to analyze and compare the literary traditions of Italy, France, and England. She recognizes the potential influence of historical circumstances on each poet, that is, the amount of violence that each faced in real life during the restless sixteenth century, which could have found reflection in their respective interpretations of the Petrarchan tradition. However, she is more interested in the lyric and political possibilities presented by the incessant insistence on and amplification of suffering. Nazarian carefully acknowledges her debt to various critical traditions, specifically feminist criticism and New Historicism, as she explains in the introduction and at various moments in the rest of the book. At the same time, she is just as careful to point out the ways in which her study is unique. Nazarian often presents conflicting interpretations by previous scholars and then attempts to reconcile those conflicts or go beyond them by proposing to read together concurrent works that are often considered too different for comparison. Chapter 1 focuses on Petrarch and his first French follower, Maurice Scève. Nazarian argues that although Petrarch's poet is vulnerable, that he is wounded by his unrequited love, he is not silenced. He speaks because he is vulnerable; he cannot keep quiet. It is in this unstoppable voice of the abject poet that Nazarian sees a connection with political speech. She insists that political poems of the Canzoniere should not be read differently or separately from those addressed to Laura, as a lot of scholarship has done. She sees a "deep consanguinity" (19) between them, a perspective that will be utilized in the rest of the study, underlining connections and even dialogues that exist between sonnet sequences of different authors and their more obviously political texts. The political model that she identifies in this vulnerable but unstoppable voice is the principle of parrhē: bold, truthful speech, potentially with a risk to the speaker. But it is this risk that makes the speech more powerful. Through a detailed comparison of Petrarch's political letters and his sonnets, Nazarian reveals a connection between the persona of a concerned citizen fruitlessly addressing those in power and that of a suffering unrequited lover, which together present the possibility of opposing the will of the powerful. Nazarian then argues that Maurice Scève did not simply imitate the rhetoric of the wounded but unsilenced lover of the Canzoniere. He modified and contested various elements of that rhetoric. His poet's suffering is increased to the point of dehumanization; his pain is more concrete, more physical; his voice is shattered and it is non-verbal signs that continue to show his suffering. But what Nazarian sees as Scève's most influential change is "the figure [End Page 829] of the sovereign Beloved" (49), a promising connection with the political that will be repeatedly explored in later chapters. Through the victimization of the poet—his own undeserved suffering and his Beloved's hinted abuse of power—Scève renders the Petrarchan model more critical and thus lays the groundwork for the future French Petrarchists and their much more politicized sonnets. Chapter 2 is dedicated to Joachim Du Bellay's La Deffence and L'Olive, through which Nazarian traces the emergence of the concept that will be explored and examined in the rest of the book and that she terms "counter-sovereignty," defined as "perspective, which seeks to take vulnerability and turn it into agency" (108). She offers a comparative and nuanced reading of La Pléiade's manifesto as an exercise in the Petrarchan rhetoric of unsilenced abasement and Du Bellay's first sonnet sequence as an expression...