The Song of Songs and Its Tradition in Renaissance Love Lyric

This book offers the first systematic and wide-ranging investigation of the multifaceted use of the Song of Songs—one of the most fascinating and controversial biblical books—in Renaissance love lyric poetry, with specific attention to Italian, French, and, especially, English poetic production. At the same time, this investigation is embedded within a narrative that, comprising two initial chapters devoted to medieval poetry and to Petrarch, represents an unprecedented attempt to trace the role of the Song of Songs in the rise and development of the European love lyric, following its path—or rather one of its paths—from the medieval origins of this tradition to the end of the sixteenth century. The picture of the general impact of the Song of Songs in the development of the European love lyric is combined with in-depth analysis of key works by specific authors—including Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Torquato Tasso, Marguerite de Navarre, Anne de Marquets, Clément Marot, Richard Barnfield, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Elizabeth Melville, and Aemilia Lanyer—promoting a contextualization of their significance within a new interpretative framework. While the comparative standpoint characterizing this study fosters a deeper comprehension of the evolution of the European love lyric, its multidisciplinary approach, which considers the Song of Songs as the centre of a web of dynamics pertaining to the fields of literature, philosophy, theology, and religious and cultural history, contributes to the understanding of the thought and spirit of ages crucial to the shaping of European culture.