Renaissance Neoplatonism Research Articles

A Study on Raphael: One of the Three Masters of the Renaissance

In the 14th century, the Renaissance first emerged in various city-states in Italy, and then expanded to Western European countries, reaching its peak in the 16th century. The influence of the Renaissance has been reflected in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, science and technology, politics, religion, and intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars took a humanist approach to their research and looked for realism and human emotion in art. As one of the three masters of the Renaissance, Raphael represents the pinnacle that Renaissance artists can achieve in the career of ideal beauty. Raphael was an unmistakable, unfettered, eloquent poet, painter, and extremely agile and superhuman. Raphael visualized the artistic ideals of Renaissance Neoplatonism as if they were easy to visualize. He embraced the artistic ideal of Neoplatonism, and with his refined painting skills, he brought the humanism of the Renaissance to the extreme. Although there are not many works left by Raphael, the talent displayed in his works has a far-reaching influence on future generations. This article will analyze Raphael's influence on the artistic creation style of the Renaissance and the artistic creation of later artists from the perspective of humanism and classicism by appreciating Raphael's six works.

The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics by Jessie Hock

Reviewed by: The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics by Jessie Hock Philip Hardie Jessie Hock. The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 234 pp. Cloth, $59.95. LCCN: 2020019209. ISBN: 9780812252729. This reworking of a 2015 Berkeley thesis puts the spotlight on the response, by a number of French and English Renaissance poets writing between the 1550s and the 1670s, to the fusion of erotics and poetics in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura: in France, Pierre de Ronsard and his associate in the Pléiade, Remy Belleau; in England, John Donne and two female writers, Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish. In the "Introduction," Hock identifies as Lucretius' central strategy of persuasion a poetics of seduction. Whatever other purposes the opening hymn to Venus may have, it establishes erotic desire as that which the poem instils in its readers: the lepos "charm" that ensnares all living creatures to follow Venus in the business of procreation is, as universally recognised, the same as the aeternus lepos that the poet asks the goddess to lend his own words. Hock reads back into the relationship between poem and reader the "eternal wound of love" that disarms Mars in the presence of Venus, in the ensuing prayer for peace. The honeyed cup simile is also read as an image of seduction (true, the tenor for which it is the vehicle is the musaeus lepos with which Lucretius touches that of which he sings, 1.934). Perhaps surprisingly, nothing is made of the amor musarum which impels the poet to roam over his trackless ways (1.924–5). But more surprising for many will be the claim that the notoriously vivid description of the frustrations of sexual desire at the end of book 4 "is central to DRN's wide-ranging discussion of poetics and the imagination, as well as to the reception of those ideas in early modernity" (5). Where most readers find a disturbing disjunction between the procreative and pacific Venus of the opening hymn, and the psychologically destructive Venus of erotic delusion in book 4, Hock sees the two as part of the same nexus of erotics and poetics. Of recurrent importance for Hock's readings throughout the book are the atomic simulacra of the object of desire, the fine films of matter which both provoke desire, as material things, and frustrate its fulfilment by their insubstantiality. Much is made of Foucault's paradoxical phrase "incorporeal materiality" with reference to simulacra, a phrase extended by Jonathan Goldberg to atoms themselves, as being matter that cannot be directly apprehended by the senses. But this is to obscure the absolute division in Epicurean between matter (atoms) and non-matter (the void). Invisibility does not verge on incorporeality. The claimed "here-not-here" quality of both simulacra and atoms is mobilized for the reading of a materialist poetics into the passage on desire at the end of book 4, via the analogy that [End Page 181] "Just as images stoke desire for bodies, Lucretian poetry stokes desire for the atom itself, or rather, for materialist teachings about the atom" (15; I am not sure that this is a desire that I recognise in myself). The impossibility of sensory apprehension of the atoms is important also for a recurrent identification of a Lucretian "scepticism" in the early modern reception. simulacrum et imago may be Lucretius' necessary route to knowledge of the atoms, but this most dogmatic of philosophical poets is no sceptic. I was puzzled to see myself quoted (twice: 181 n. 18, 210 n. 31) as ascribing "a rhetoric of uncertainty" to Lucretius' didactic voice, until I checked and found that what I had in fact written was "a rhetoric of certainty." More productive is the enlistment of simulacra for a thesis about the materiality of fantasy and of poetry, convergent with the analogy, merging into identity, between atoms and the letters of the poem, in the pun on elementa. This ontological identity of representations and things, undermining the Platonic hierarchy of reality and imitation, is later put to good use in tracing the collision between Renaissance Neoplatonism and Lucretian poetics. Chapter 1, "Materializing...

Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga by Anya P. Foxen

Reviewed by: Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga by Anya P. Foxen Nicholas E. Collins yoga, psycho-physical practices, orientalism, harmonialism, calisthenics, authenticity, colonialism, Indian metaphysics, Western esotericism anya p. foxen. Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 336. In this valuable contribution to the history of yoga, Foxen uncovers and establishes a Western lineage for the psycho-physical practices that have come to be colloquially called—perhaps inappropriately, Foxen contends—"yoga" in a large part of the world, but especially Europe and America, purposely excluding those schools consciously affiliated with an Indian lineage for the sake of her argument. This history can be subdivided into four dimensions: the exoteric history of "Western" physical practices that come to be associated with modern postural yoga; the esoteric history of Western metaphysical thinking (here termed "harmonialism," following Ahlstrom) underlying such practices; the meeting of these two during the modern period with Indian yoga as physical practice; and the broader assimilation of Indian philosophical and religious ideas.1 A comparison between Western harmonial and Indian metaphysical views is not pursued, purposefully, in an attempt to circumscribe the specifically Western roots of modern yoga, leaving the issue of deeper metaphysical continuities, substrates, and isomorphisms between Indian and harmonial ideas relatively unexplored. With regard to the Western history of yogic physical practices—characterized by flow-like sequences of āsanas combined with breathing techniques—Foxen is inspired by Singleton's assertion that "the fitness-oriented yoga available in virtually every health club . . . may represent a direct historical succession from those regimes of New Age, quasi-mystical body conditioning and calisthenics devised exclusively for women in the first half of the twentieth century."2 She takes up this idea and attempts to substantiate the claim by delving into this history. The key figures in this story are the nineteenth-century innovators of holistic gymnastics systems, chiefly Pehr Henrik Ling, whose system was influential on subsequent popularizers of female-oriented dance-like calisthenics such as Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyons; Francoise Delsarte, a French composer and musical instructor who developed a widely popular theory of spiritualized bodily aesthetics; those influential in spreading "American Delsarteism" such as Isadora Duncan and Genevieve Stebbins; and lastly, figures in early modern forms of dance like Ruth St. Denis [End Page 435] and Marguerite Agniel, who creatively absorbed and performed "yoga" (or rather Indian culture more generally) as dance for largely modern Western audiences. In India, such gymnastics-oriented practices, as well as other Western physical culture practices like strength training and bodybuilding, became influential on the development of modern Indian yogic systems, alongside indigenous methods of physical culture: club swinging, wrestling, and āsana—many newly innovated but also drawing on haṭha yoga traditions. This occurred in the context of rising nationalism, both in India and the West, that sought to use physical culture as a means of strengthening the body of the nation by strengthening the bodies of its citizens. By contrast, Western physical culture as it was prescribed for women in the nineteenth century emphasized neither physical strength nor endurance (traditionally masculine adaptations) but aesthetics. This took place within a context of perceived female decline in health and vitality, where women were seen as the most susceptible to nervous disorders brought on by modern life-ways. Gymnastics and calisthenic movement practices offered a means of combating this, while conflating aesthetic beauty with health. All of these figures share not only an influential role in the genesis of the physical aspects of modern postural yoga, Foxen contends, but also a metaphysical outlook, loosely defined and connected not always by actual contact but more so by a "common logic" (154), that of "western harmonialism," which refers broadly to the history of Western esotericism originating with the Greek presocratic philosophers Pythagoras and Empedocles, elaborated by Plato and Aristotle, and continuing in the Italian Renaissance Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, Ficino, and a few centuries later, Swedenborg and Mesmer, "last of the renaissance magi" (90). She cites as its essential features; "an explicit monism . . . rendering the material continuous with the immaterial," an intermediary spiritual reality underlying and linking humanity, divinity, and...

In Fortune Fair and Foul

This article focuses on the idiosyncratic conception of happiness Sir Kenelm Digby develops in the letters he wrote after the death of his wife in 1633. It contextualises Digby’s vision of happiness through an examination of the different traditions he revisits and appropriates to develop his personal and subjective ethics of self-care, mainly Renaissance Neoplatonism, the idealisation of conjugal love, the idealism of Italian poetry, and an ascetic model of widowhood linked to the tradition of spiritual mourning. It analyses how Digby’s conception of happiness, through its vindication of subjectivity and excess, challenges the early modern ethos of consolation and speculates on the reasons that may have led Digby to present his readers with such an extraordinary self-portrait.

Nature Transformed: English Landscape Gardens and Theatrum Mundi

Nature Transformed: English Landscape Gardens and <i>Theatrum Mundi</i>

A short history of the Italian Renaissance

List of Figures List of Maps and Table List of Genealogies Acknowledgements A Note to the Reader A Timeline of the Italian Renaissance Popes Following the Great Schism 1. Defining the Renaissance 2. Before the Renaissance 3. Social Continuities 4. Petrarch 5. Humanism 6. The Republic of Florence 7. Rome and the Papacy 8. The Maritime States: Pisa, Genoa, and Venice 9. The Principalities 10. Renaissance Neo-Platonism 11. The Age of Crisis 12. Medici Popes and Princes 13. The Counsel of Experience in Changing Times 14. Art and Architecture 15. The End of the Renaissance in Italy Conclusion Bibliography Sources Index

Nothing of Woman: The Feminine Void of Matter in Shakespeare

Studying the metaphysics of Renaissance Neoplatonism might arguably help throw into sharper relief some of the more haunting figures in Shakespeare’s work. Referring to the Neoplatonic concept of matter, this paper attempts to expand and further illuminate the figure that Philippa Berry has termed “Shakespeare’s tragic O’s” (2002) by showing it to connect multiple images of matter as the maternal/infernal void. In Shakespeare’s darker plays, the “O” as feminine prime matter can figure as a locus for the encounter with primordial matter, the womb/tomb that (en)matters and thus kills, “hell” and “nothing” that can indicate both unformed matter and the vaginal orifice, and the nothing – the 0 – out of which everything is made.

Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England by John Henry (review)

Reviewed by: Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England by John Henry Leen Spruit Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England. By John Henry. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xii, 328. $170.00. ISBN 978-1-4094-4458-9.) The essays collected in this book focus on a central issue in the history of early-modern science: the rise of mechanical philosophy. New philosophers and scientists such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes claimed that physics could be confined to kinematics—the motions of bodies and the interactions arising from their motions were all that was required to explain any set of circumstances. For many authors, however, a strictly mechanicist kinematics seemed unworkable. Inspired by ideas derived from theological, magical, and alchemical traditions, many physicists, neo-Platonic philosophers, chemists, and physicians held that any physical body, or matter in general, was endowed with “active principles.” The animate nature of the Earth in William Gilbert’s De magnete, Robert Boyle’s “cosmical qualities,” and Isaac Newton’s action at a distance are cases in point. Until recently, efforts to trace the intellectual origins of Newton’s concept of active principles concentrated either on the influence of alchemy or on that of Cambridge Platonism. However, it was not Newton who reintroduced occult qualities into natural philosophy. Several exponents of English mechanical philosophy before him entertained the possibility of unexplained active principles in matter. In the present volume, John Henry reconstructs a highly interesting [End Page 370] “prehistory” of Newton’s natural philosophy. Walter Warner (1570–1642/43), who arrived at his mechanical philosophy by blending elements from medieval and Renaissance neo-Platonism with ideas from Thomas Harriot and Galileo, held that all bodies possess an efficient power or virtue. Walter Charleton, following his mentor Pierre Gassendi, argued that the atoms at their creation by God are endowed with “internal energy.” Francis Glisson (Regius professor of physics at Cambridge) wrote an entire treatise on the “energetic nature of substance.” Also, Boyle did not subscribe to a strictly mechanicist account of physics, as he acknowledged the need of active principles, and assumed the existence of “aerious, etherial, luminous” spirits in all mixed bodies. Robert Hooke used inherent vibrations of matter to explain light and gravity. Thus, Newton’s introduction of active principles in matter cannot be seen as his major philosophical innovation, as has been usually assumed in historical studies. However, Newton vigorously rejected Leibniz’s objection that gravity was an occult quality. Active principles are manifest; only their causes are occult. The author further develops his central claim in essays devoted to Henry More, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton. He shows that the differences between More and Boyle—apparently allies brought together by common interest in Cartesianism and the use of mechanical philosophy—were crucial, extending from their epistemological views to their beliefs about the nature of the world and of God. Hooke’s matter theory cannot be seen as simply mechanicist: his defense of the magician John Dee, written in 1690 toward the end of his career, shows a real concern for the importance of natural magic in the “improving of natural knowledge.“ A close reading of Newton’s frequently quoted letters to Richard Bentley, apparently excluding the possibility of action at a distance, shows that Newton’s pronouncements upon gravitational attraction are consistent with the view that he believed gravity to be a super-added inherent property of bodies that was capable of acting at a distance. In the final essay, the author argues that the leading figures in the magical tradition (including Girolamo Cardano, Girolamo Fracastoro, Giovan Battista Della Porta, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon) turned to the occult not because they were fools with an occult mentality, but because occult traditions seemed to offer a source of help to find solutions to problems that the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions could not resolve. With this collection, Henry offers a surprising and innovative perspective on the intellectual history of early-modern Europe with particular attention to the impact of theology and Christian faith on philosophical and scientific views of natural reality. Most of the authors discussed here assumed that God endowed...

Reading Marsilio Ficino in Quattrocento Italy. The Case of Aragonese Naples

This essay focuses on the reception of Marsilio Ficino’s works and ideas in Naples at the time of the Aragonese domination, and it offers a preliminary discussion of this neglected area of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Based on a contextualization of Ficino’s letters to Giovanni d’Aragona, four manuscripts produced at the Aragonese library and other pieces of evidence such as Pierantonio Caracciolo’s Farsa de l’Imagico and Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Actius, it argues that the works and ideas of Marsilio Ficino did circulate at king Ferrante’s court, but were criticized by Giovanni Pontano and his elite of followers. In particular, the essay provides new evidence about the existence of a Ficinian workshop based at the King’s library, and about some of its protagonists such as the scribe and scholar Ippolito Lunense.

Sergius Kodera, Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy

In many ways this is an excellent book with much to offer scholars interested in Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and in particular those interested in the work of Marsilio Ficino and Leone Ebreo. However, for those (like this reviewer) schooled in philosophy as it has developed in the British (or Anglo-American) empiricist tradition, and with expectations of historical scholarship that go hand in hand with that tradition, reading it will require some mental adjustment. Indeed, when I first started to read this book I became convinced that there was a major disciplinary rift between me and this author—I thought it must have been written by someone trained as a literary scholar, but evidently the author has been raised in the traditions of Continental philosophy. One manifestation of this was the author's tendency to mix indiscriminately his own interpretations with those interpretations which can be seen to derive from historical evidence. ‘I tend to view abstract concepts such as “potency” and “act”’, he tells us at one point (p. 58), ‘as manifestations of originally gendered concepts.’ This tells us something about the author, but does nothing to help our understanding of historical categories.

Alternative Saints: Eucherius, Paulinus of Nola, and Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans

(2011). Alternative Saints: Eucherius, Paulinus of Nola, and Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. The Seventeenth Century: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 264-278.

The Lost Cause of Platonism in The Faerie Queene

AS WE ARE REMINDED in Jon Quitslund's recent book Spenser's Supreme Fiction, the notion that Spenser is in some sense a disciple of Platoes School is as old as Digby's Observations of 1628, which is to say, pretty much as old as Spenser criticism itself.1 But of course to say that Faerie Queene is might mean, and has meant, very different things, some more plausible than others. For Quitslund, while Spenser is not doctrinaire-is not a Platonist as opposed, say, to an Aristotelian, and certainly not as opposed to a Christian-he does partake deeply both of what C. S. Lewis calls The diffused and Christianized Platonism which descends to the Middle Ages through St Augustine, Boethius, Macrobius, Chalcidius, Pseudo-Dionysius, and many others, and of the programmatic Neoplatonism revived by the Florentine academy, which itself reached the Elizabethans to a large degree by indirect routes.2 In this, Quitslund is close to the late writings of Lewis himself, those that have one eye on the weighty polemics of Robert Ellrodt's Neoplatonism in the Poetry of SpenserIn Faerie Queene, says Quitslund, It is useful to distinguish between the programmatic Platonic design evident in certain places and the diffuse Platonism that is in the broad and deep discursive structures of Spenser's poetry. While the deep structures are sourceless, transmitted through Western culture like inherited traits from the gene pool, programmatic Platonism can sometimes be traced to specific sources-above all, he argues, directly or indirectly to certain of Ficino's works.4My question here is whether even such a cautious return to a broadly Platonic Spenser, who integrates features of Renaissance Neoplatonism into an essentially conservative (or revivalist) medieval-Platonic worldview, is sustainable, or whether, as my title suggests, there are reasons for regarding that vision of Faerie Queene as something of a lost cause. Not that I doubt that the Platonic tradition, taken at its broadest, is a great influence on Spenser's poetry; but that there is a difference between drawing deeply on a tradition, and writing a work whose worldview is essentially of that tradition.To take first the Platonism said to be present in the broad and deep discursive structures of Spenser's poetry: two of the broadest ways in which we are used to thinking of Faerie Queene as Platonic in structure consist firstly in its regular indications that truth, while certain and unchanging, is veiled, and accessible only by way of derivative copies, secondly in the broad narrative shape proposed by the Letter to Ralegh, and partly realized in the poem, whereby the various knights' quests seem to emanate from and return to the still point of glory that is the Fairy Queen's court.1 two meet in Arthur's search for Gloriana, which as the returning vector of that cyclical narrative shape, and a that strives by ethical means to rise from images towards their originals, has seemed to many critics to represent the eminently Platonic quest of eros for the heavenly beauty.6 Notoriously, a true ladder of love is hard to find in Spenser, even in the apparently Platonic Hymnes to love and beauty; and if we are to find its like anywhere, I think it is in Arthur, who on seeing the Queen's image on Guyon's shield aspires to its original, thence from the beauty of her face to that of her mind (II.ix.2-3), and potentially, as Guyon suggests elsewhere, even from her beauty to that of the God of which she herself is but an image (II.ii.41). Arthur's love, even if an isolated case, may be an extremely important one, firstly because his is the frame narrative and the principal ethical example of the whole poem, and secondly because the poem (predominantly through its proems) recurrently places its reader in a position similar to Arthur's, with a rhetorically sublimated Elizabeth in Gloriana's place, and the poem itself, with its colourd showes (III. …

The renaissance self

The scope and accomplishment of Renaissance literary and visual forms of self-expression, regardless of the mode of their interpretation today, offer proof of the idea of the Renaissance as an age of creation of the modern self. Extensive research has indicated that selfconstruction is the product of a combination of social, economic, political and intellectu-al forces. Still, can they determine the self fully or is there also something that cannot be processed? Letters, astrological and alchemical studies, drama and theatre and, in particular, Renaissance Neoplatonism, indicate that the Renaissance self, the elite self at least, is free and resistent, strongly individualized. Homo humanus is in harmony with the constructed ego ideal of his age but he is also focused on gnothi seaut?n, conscious of his own singolarita, unique and inimitable.

Love and Death in Goethe: "One and Double." (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Ellis Dye, Love and Death in Goethe: "One and Double." Rochester, NY: Camden House,'2004. xiv +333 pp. This is an idiosyncratic book by a penetrating reader. Even though much of the material has appeared earlier in periodical publications, it is so extensively rewritten and so enriched by the central theme and its structure of repeated reflections that the book merits the attention of even those readers already familiar with some of the essays. While in harmony with current Anglo-American readings, the book is original in two important ways—first in its insistent juxtaposition of Goethe with the love-death tradition, and second in its unusually broad definition of that tradition. For love-death here extends beyond the Liebestod à la Tristan and Isolde to include any situation that brings love and death into conjunction, with or without causality. Romeo and Juliet is as valid an example as Tristan, but so too is any kind of love that connects the lover to psychological or theological otherness.Thus Dye addresses the connection between death and sexuality, but also wants to fill gaps left by Denis de Rougemont (Love in the Western World) and Edgar Wind (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance), and thus analyze love and death as the passage from the world to the divine, whether conceived in Christian or in Platonist terms. Ultimately in this book the love-death exemplifies the conjunction of unity and duality, the central issue for Goethe and for the German Romantics, and thus Goethe's fundamentally Romantic stance.This proposition consists less of a narrative or of a syntactically arranged argument than of fluent, indeed cascading, juxtapositions—in the book as a whole, within chapters, and even within individual readings of texts. Love-death may seem like an odd concept for organizing one's thinking about Goethe, but Dye marshals a commanding array of texts both to justify the choice and more valuably, to use Goethe to rethink the significance of the love-death. The breadth the concept must take on becomes clear in the first chapter, where Dye lays out his basic categories—individuation, coincidentia oppositiorum, Romantic dialectics and irony, and gender. They derive obviously from psychoanalysis , identity theory, Renaissance Neoplatonism, Romantic philosophy, and contemporary theory. Even within these categories Dye draws on a broad range of thinkers; in the first, for example, he cites with almost equal frequency Freud, philosophers, cultural critics and literary critics. The categories define the themes to which Dye's readings continually return as they situate Goethe texts in juxtaposition to one another, to examples of (mostly) European and American literature from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, and to the philosophical tradition. The further one reads, the more abstract and general the concept of Goethe Yearbook XIV (2007) 208 Book Reviews love-death becomes, so that the summary chapters at the end focus on truth, paradox, irony and virtuosity The book lands squarely on the paradox that Goethe, like all Romantics, valorizes the higher unity represented by the lovedeath , yet equally valorizes our imperfect life in time: Virtually everything Goethe thinks and writes about the human and the divine, Nature and human nature, subject and object, self and other, fate and freedom, time and eternity, spirit and word requires that a presupposed duality be sublated in a higher unity, as in the Liebestod. The yearning of subject for object or of subject for opposed subject is always for absolute identity, but approximation of this ideal is all that contngent, derivative, time-bound beings can have. Let us grasp, and glory in, the gifts that are ours—the ability to move toward, if never in life to gain, the true, the timeless, the beautiful and the boundless. Perfection is death, says Goethe."Gedenke zu leben!"(282). The middle eight chapters cover Goethe's work in roughly chronological order. Chapter two deals with Clavigo and ballads from the 1770s, while three addresses Götz under the alluring title "FrauWelt. Venereal Disease. Femmes fatale." The fourth chapter elegantly undoes the clichés about Werther with which it begins; the fifth focuses on substitution in relation to unity in Stella, Iphigenie, and "Die neue Melusine "The next chapter deals with...

Genius, Madness, and Knowledge: Ficino, Landino, and Ariosto's Lovers

The epic Orlandofurioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) both celebrates human creativity and warns of the perils that can accompany journeys of the mind. In Ariosto's text, Orlando and Astolfo represent two aspects of the human imagination and its role in the journey towards knowledge. One is an earth-bound voyage of desire and insanity, the other is an otherworldly journey incorporating the metaphor of flight. Through this earthly odyssey and its lunar counterpart we will examine the places in Ariosto's text that are caught in the balance between reason and love's madness. The focus will be on Ariosto's portrayal ofknowledge and its relationship to the self and to poetry. The danger inherent in the imagination and the search for knowledge, concepts that connect Ariosto, a Renaissance humanist, to other scholars of his time will be of particular interest to this examination. Ariosto's treatment ofmadness and the selfechoes the ideas of his contemporaries clustered at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent. His portrayal of these concepts, as reflected in the very title of his work, places the Neoplatonic emphasis on divine fury at the heart of his epic' Ariosto's language in the Furioso lead me to focus on two scholars central to the circle of Florentine Renaissance Neoplatonism: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), and his friend, teacher and supporter, Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498), a poet and a critic. The differences in Ficino and Landino's respective treatments of knowledge and the imagination remind us that the Neoplatonic circle was not homogeneous in its thinking, but varied, evolving and dialectical. In this article I will show how Landino defines the creative imagination in terms of an external relationship, that is, as an activity that seeks knowledge in the divine sphere, while Ficino's definition, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between genius and the internal, human self Ariosto would have known well the works ofboth Ficino and Landino,

White Mythology: From Linear to Virtual Value Chains in E-Business

This article examines the development of the concept of the value chain from the linear to the virtual conception of the chain, through the evolution of the literature from Michael Porter’s writings of the mid 1990s to the theorists of e-business and e-commerce in the later 1990s I argue that Porter’s account employs white metaphors and that writings on the virtual value chain both extend the white metaphors of Porter’s linear chain, and suggest a pronouncedly metaphysical system of thought — one which has correlates in areas of thought, including Renaissance Neo-Platonism, cybernetics and the discourse of cyberspace. I suggest that this offers a model of the advance of metaphor — of its usure, as described by Derrida in his White Mythology — and that this model can be synthesised with the views of Ricoeur about the evolution of metaphor towards symbolism. When we apply these ideas of Derrida and Ricoeur to the development of the White Metaphor of the linear chain towards a progressive symbolism, we can see a correlation between the complex causality inferred as a feature of the virtual chain and the cosmological affinities of Renaissance notions of causation.

Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole

Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. By Sabina Magliocco. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii + 76, preface, notes, bibliography, photographs. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper) Sabina Magliocco's empathic narrative discloses the secretive and often misunderstood world of through a close look at its material culture-its shrines, masks, and body adornments. She shows ways in which practitioners and ascribe personal meanings to an array of mythological images, including animals, Mother Earth, and maiden goddesses, giving material form to their own individual religious and political outlooks. A fast-growing religion in the United States, covers a range of groups broadly encompassing revival Witchcraft (Wiccan) and revival Paganism (non-Wiccan). Although some sects (or traditions) follow a particular ethnic, philosophical, political, or regional lore, or emulate the spirituality of Afro-Caribbeans or Native Americans, Neo-Pagans and Witches on the whole see themselves as the offspring of European pagan magical traditions-some ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, some later (Renaissance Neoplatonism), and others quite recent (nineteenth-century syncretism) (2). An initial Neo-Pagan bond to the myth of a matriarchal golden age has by now been critiqued within the movement, but some practitioners continue to view feminism and environmentalism as the moral basis for their religious and political ideologies (3). The book begins with a framing vignette in which Magliocco candidly relates her own physical experiences upon entering the world of Witches and Pagans; in her view, folk aesthetics provides the best lens through which to gain insight into Neo-Pagan culture and its politics, and so her project is to draw attention to Neo-Pagan material culture (x-xi). The chapters that follow are organized straightforwardly. The first, Neo-Paganism and Sacred Art, offers the lay reader a succinct introduction to the movement's values and esthetics. The second chapter, Altars, details the making of various altars and their components, and the third, Costumes, features jewelry, body modification, ritual dress and undress, and masks. The author's descriptions of various ritual objects and body adornments are often accompanied by the words of their creators (and are suitably enriched by several dozen color plates and halftones). The main argument of the book is that for Neo-Pagans, ritual and art, far more than being merely connected, are one and the same thing-inseparable. The artistic nature of their rituals explains their beliefs, and vice versa. For most Pagans, it is the creative process itself which is the core of religious experience; it matters little whether the artist is a beginner or has a lifetime of experience (xi); all practitioners are artisans or artists of some sort (x). Another important point is that Neo-Pagan art and religious belief are explicitly oppositional to dominant American culture, especially as elaborated by a puritanical Christian ethos that has historically viewed the corporeal realm as sinful. Part of the process of identity creation implies embracing exactly those stereotypes that are excluded from the dominant paradigm: in this case, Romantic notions of the natural, the feminine, the primitive, the corporeal, and the wild. …

The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet

THE ORIENTAL FRAMEWORK OF ROMEO AND JULIET Abdulla Al-Dabbagh There has always been a tendency in literary and cultural scholarship to barricade oneselfbehind narrow specificities and a one-sided sense of "uniqueness," a tendency that may ultimately give the wrong emphasis to national, cultural, or even racial factors. The truly comparative counterapproach has, however, always reached for the universalist standpoint , from which literary phenomena can be regarded across borders and within a complex variety of cultural contexts. In the field of East/ West Uterary relations, and specificaUy in the area ofArabo-Islamic legacies in Western traditions, major strides have recently been taken in this direction. Although most of the advance has been in Spanish, and in general medieval Uterature, such work has impUcations for nearly the whole ofthe Western Uterary tradition. And even though numerous deta üed investigations have been successfully accomplished, a systematic overview of the field is yet to be achieved. The acute absence of such a comprehensive cross-cultural perspective —exemplified here by a lack of awareness or an incomprehension of the Oriental factor in certain Western Uterary phenomena—can sometimes lead to symptomatically misguided conclusions. This paper, however , is inspired by the broader, comparatist approach. It has been written to offer a corrective to the imbalance in many current interpretations of Romeo and Juliet and to contribute to recent advances in medieval/ Oriental studies by extending their spirit to Shakespeare, hopefully as a major stepping-stone to the field of Renaissance humanism generaUy. Emphasis faUs on the Oriental framework as an important key to the play and on its close Unk with the genre of Oriental tragic romance, an emphasis needed to foreground a major factor and to redress a crucial omission. Still, the essay should not be read in terms of the narrow, onesided "interpretation" approach and certainly not of the old-fashioned, cultural aggrandizement streak in comparative studies. Indeed, such a reading would defeat its purpose. The paper offers the Oriental framework as a necessary enhancement for any fuU appreciation of a complex, multidimensional piece of world Uterature, hoping to contribute, within its Umited scope, to genuinely cross-cultural genre studies. The Tragic Romance in Cultural Context—A Scholarly Enigma Three critics have been especially well placed to bring out the Oriental framework of Romeo and Juliet: Ahdaf Soueif and M. A. Manzalaoui, both scholars of EngUsh literature ofArab origin, and Denis de Rougemont , a master of comparative studies in the West. Yet each of them managed to overlook or failed to address the connection to be proposed in this essay. The most comprehensive attempt to encompass the play's VcH. 24 (2000): 64 ??? COHPAnATIST full range of cultural affiliations—unhappily termed its "symboUc context " by Soueif, the Egyptian scholar and later a well-known novelist— rightly affirms, from the beginning, the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of locating Shakespeare's works within an intellectual, or conceptual, framework. Soueif dismisses the view of Shakespeare as the miraculous natural genius happUy "untainted" by any need for systematic thinking. Unfortunately, her essay opts for an eclectic conclusion which, whüe claiming that Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted within the framework of more than one context, ends disappointingly with a conventional recourse to "the miracle [. . .] that in the fire of creative genius even contradictory material may be drüled to work together in harmony." The article tries to "harmonize" three different contexts for the play: Christianity , courtly love, and Renaissance Neoplatonism. In the end, it is the critic's own bewüderment that bursts to the surface. The goal of harmonising the Christian with the non-Christian and the physical with the platonic leads to the unsatisfactory compromise of "sticking" to the golden mean as "the safest and most credible path to take" (Soueif 18). Manzalaoui and de Rougemont, whom one would have thought were the most likely to uncover the conceptual framework overlooked by Soueif , sadly have nothing but the most perfunctory and en passant remarks about the play. Manzalaoui's rich and stimulating essay, on "Tragic Ends of Lovers: Medieval Islam and the Latin West," mentions Romeo and Juliet only in its very last lines. Could the play have been deUberately preserved for a...

Nemoroso's Odyssey: Garcilaso's Eclogues Revisited

A reading that foregrounds the Renaissance Neoplatonism of Garcilaso's eclogues rather than the autobiographical elements views the eclogues as a single macrotext that recasts in poetic form ideas discussed in such Neoplatonic dialogues as Bembo's GliAsolani This ideological agenda can be seen through the de- velopment of Nemoroso, when contrasted with the other three lovers. The four principal male characters ap- pear as four points on a hypothetical scale of Neoplatonic love. Nemoroso, the only shepherd/lover to remain free from the temptation of physical desire, may attain a celestial union with his beloved. Albanio and Salicio are doomed to fail because they are governed by appetite. Garcilaso's development of Fernando, the only male lover who is not a shepherd, indicates a belief that Christian marriage may represent the way to both spiritual and sensual fulfillment.

Garcilaso Between the World of the Incas and That of Renaissance Concepts

The Spanish conquests of the Americas were not yet completed when famous Humanists already began to appear in the first generation of native-born Spanish-speaking Americans. A mestizo born in 1539 and who liked to call himself “the Indian whose mouth is full” thus published in 1590, in Madrid, the first-fruits of the Humanism of the New World. The son of an Indian woman, he succeeded in very unusual circumstances in writing a superb Castilian version of a classic work of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Its title reads: The Indian's translation of the three Dialogues of Love by Leone Ebreo, from Italian into Spanish, by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, a native of the great city of Cuzco, capital of the Kingdoms and provinces of Peru.