The art of meditation and the French Renaissance love lyric : the poetics of introspection in Maurice Scève's Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544) / Michael J. Giordano.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 619-658) and index.

Includes some text in Middle French and Latin.

1 Two Models of Meditation for Délie: Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises and Augustine's Confessions -- 2 Meditative Praxis and the Tensions of Transvaluation -- 3 Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma -- 4 The Triple Way -- 5 Via purgativa -- 6 Via illuminativa -- 7 Via unitiva -- 8 Conclusion -- Appendix 1 Joannes Mauburnus, Scala Meditatoria -- Appendix 2 Augustine, Confessions, X: 30 -- Appendix 3 Intersections of Illustrations and Dizains: Translation of Mottoes.

"The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric examines the poetics of meditation in the French love lyric at the height of the Lyonnais Renaissance as illustrated by one of the country's most prominent writers. Maurice Scève's Délie is the first French sequence of poems devoted to a single woman in the manner of Petrarch's Rime. It is also the first Renaissance work to use emblems in a sustained work on love.

At their core, most amatory lyrics involve a triple relation among lover, beloved, and the meaning of love. Whether the poet-lover is a man or woman, poetic discourse generally takes the form of an interior monologue frequently intermingled with direct and indirect address to the beloved. Though the dominant quality of this lyric is personal introspection, Michael Giordano finds Délie to be consistent with traditions of Christian meditation. He argues that the amatory lyric served as a vehicle for contests of value and paradigm change not only because it was conditioned both by sacred and profane sources, but also because it occurred at a time of religious upheaval and scientific revolution."--Jacket.

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