Stone, Gregory B.

Guido Cavalcanti poet of the rational animal / [electronic resource] : Gregory B. Stone. - [London] : Routledge, 2020. - 1 online resource. - Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture .

Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's intellectual mentor, is widely considered among the greatest Italian lyric poets; his famous and notoriously difficult philosophical canzone Donna me prega is often characterized as the most studied lyric poem in Italian literature. This book situates Cavalcanti's poetry in the context of the Arabic Aristotelian rationalism that entered the Latin West in the 12th century--a tradition marked by questions concerning whether humans can ever transcend their animality. Cavalcanti's poetry is a focal point where one can view, circa 1300 AD, Arabo-Islamic philosophy in the process of being assimilated and naturalized in Western Europe, eventually leading to values (associated with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) that we now call modern and secular--in particular, to a notion of human reason as bound up with imagination and with ethical praxis rather than as a means for the attainment of knowledge concerning God and the cosmos. The book features a radically unprecedented interpretation of Donna me prega, starkly opposed to all previous accounts: far from treating love as a threat to reason that would best be eliminated, the canzone praises loving as the essential operation of rational human flourishing. This study of Cavalcanti serves as a prelude to the formulation of a new paradigm for understanding Dante's Comedy.

9780429555794 0429555792 9780429560262 0429560265 9780429564734 0429564732 9780429265242 0429265247

10.4324/9780429265242 doi


Cavalcanti, Guido, -1300 --Criticism and interpretation.


LITERARY CRITICISM / General

PQ4299.C2

851.1

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