Maren-Sofie Røstvig, Ars Aeterna and Other Essays on Literary Structure

Abstract

Maren-Sofie Røstvig (1920–2014) came from one of the rugged Lofoten Islands off north-west Norway, and like them her public demeanour was flinty and uncompromising—staunch in friendship, inveterate in enmity. During the Nazi occupation she worked for the resistance in Oslo, courageously editing an illegal newspaper. She is said to have duplicated and distributed it from the basement of a building containing Gestapo offices. Being in consequence a familiar figure, she was able to cycle with the paper through a Nazi cordon. After graduating in 1947, Røstvig won a bursary that took her to California, where over three formative years she learned scholarship—and learned literature too—from Louis B. Wright, the formidable Lily B. Campbell, and especially from Edward Niles Hooker. Her independence and strength of character showed in her later choice of field, as well as in the direction she eventually gave to the Institute for British and American Studies. She chiefly put her energies into encouraging the study of Renaissance and neoclassical culture, fields previously neglected in Norway. She herself wrote her doctoral dissertation on ‘The Theme of Retirement in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry’ and, developing the same line of research, in 1954 published her best known work, The Happy Man. The present volume, however, offers a representative selection of later work, concerned with Renaissance authors’ structural use of number symbolism.