Thesis ID: CBB001560990

Lines of Sight: Love Lyric, Science, and Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern French and Italian Culture (2006)

unapi

Singer, Julie (Author)


Duke University
Finucci, Vlaeria
Solterer, Helen


Publication Date: 2006
Edition Details: Advisor: Finucci, Vlaeria; Helen Solterer
Physical Details: 253 pp.
Language: English

In the later Middle Ages, poets and medical writers often treated shared subject matter, as both sought to describe the human body and its relationships with the outside world. Conventional wisdom holds that medical writings of the period are possessed of a sort of absolute cultural authority, while poetic texts that engage with concepts typically claimed by the scientific domains are ciphers to be "decoded" through the lens of these scientific treatises. However, a closer look at the interplay between specific poetic texts and the medical texts with which they share their language and their ideas reveals a far more dialogic system of references and debates. Lines of Sight focuses specifically on the image of the eye in the French and Italian textual tradition in order to problematize the accepted model of scientific authority. The eyes--and the ambiguous space between not seeing, seeing, and even seeing too much --provide a laboratory in which to test poetic writers' acceptance of medical models of "wholeness" and "remedy." Seeing is crucial to knowledge and to the model of love, prevalent in medical, poetic, and philosophical texts, that I have termed the love-imprint. According to this model love was held to be a physiologically-based phenomenon arising from the contemplation of the beloved, whose image passes through the eyes and brain before becoming imprinted in the lover's heart. But if love is a bodily process that begins in the eyes, then how does blindness affect the form and content of love poetry? Through close readings of literary and medical texts, I argue that late medieval and early modern authors complicate a unidirectional model of authority by constructing alternate literary remedies to blindness. Guido Cavalcanti's appropriation of "scientific" language in Donna me prega, Petrarch's attacks on physicians in the Invective and the rhetorical remedies he proposes in De remediis utriusque fortunae, and Guillaume de Machaut's poetic prosthesis in the Livre du Voir Dit may all be construed as proposing thematic and formal remedies designed to rival or replace the dominant medical understanding of the eye and its (dys)functions.

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Description A study of poetics and science through a focus on the image of the eye and its physiological relationship to love. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/06 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3267931.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001560990/

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Authors & Contributors
Carlo Gelmetti
Bartoli, Evangelista
Mares, Donatella
D'Angelo, Edoardo
Takami Matsuda
Viterbo (di), Girolamo
Concepts
Medicine
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Vision
Natural philosophy
Medicine and literature
Time Periods
16th century
15th century
17th century
Renaissance
Early modern
Medieval
Places
Italy
France
England
Europe
Naples (Italy)
Florence (Italy)
Institutions
Venice. Collegio di Medici
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