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Du Bellay's Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrarchist Sonnet Sequence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Wayne A. Rebhorn
Wayne A. Rebhorn*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

Les Antiquitez de Rome has long been praised as the first sonnet sequence in the Renaissance to have abandoned the subject matter of love, which Petrarch established as the almost exclusive concern of sonneteers. To be sure, Italian and French poets had occasionally written sonnets on other subjects—in fact, Petrarch's own Rime includes a small number of poems not concerned with love—but no sequence before Du Bellay's so radically departs from tradition as his seems to do.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , Winter 1980 , pp. 609 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1980

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References

1 Robert Griffin states that Du Bellay “discarded the conventional topics of the Petrarchan sonnet in composing the Antiquitez“; see his Coronation of the Poet: Joachim Du Bellay's Debt to the Trivium (Berkeley, 1969), p. 130. See also Chamard, Henri, Histoire de la Pléïade (Paris, 1940), 2, 46–47 Google Scholar; Alfred W. Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (Princeton, 1960), p. 26; and Verdun L. Saulnier, Du Bellay (Paris, 1951), p. 72.

2 Saulnier, Du Bellay, p. 80.

3 All quotations from Les Antiquitez are taken from Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris, 1910), 2. Each quotation will be followed by the number of the poem from which it is taken.

4 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence et illustration de la langue fiancoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris, 1948), pp. 107-126.

5 Ibid., pp. 120-122.

6 See Walter Rehm's survey of these poems in his Europäische Romdichtung (Munich, 1960), 2nd ed., esp. pp. 43-86.

7 My discussion of the Petrarchist sonnet sequence is indebted to the work of many critics, but especially to Forster, Leonard, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar.

8 Verdun L. Saulnier claims that Petrarch provided the direct model for the form of Du Bellay's work, but that its substance was derived from Petrarch's Latin works and especially his letters to the ancients; see his “Commentaires sur les Antiquitez de Rome,” BHR, 12 (1950), 132.

9 All quotations from the Rime are taken from Francesco Petrarca, Rime e Trionfi, ed. Ferdinando Neri (Turin, 1953). Each quotation is followed by the number of the poem from which it is taken.

10 Walter Pabst, “Ehrfurcht und Grauen vor Rom: Zur Stilisierung des caput mundi in Les antiquitez de Rome,” RomanistischesJahrbuch, 24 (1973), 90.

11 Klaus Ley observes that the poems of in vocation leave us in doubt whether they are successful; see his Neuplatonische Poetik und nationale Wirklichkeit: Die Uberwindung des Petrarkismus im Werk Du Bellays (Heidelberg, 1975), p. 317.

12 “Commentaires,” 115.

13 Du Bellay, Joachim, Les Regrets et autres oeuvres poëtiques, ed. Joliffe, J., intro. M. A. Screech (Geneva, 1966), p. 28 nGoogle Scholar.

14 Margaret B. Wells, “Du Bellay's Sonnet Sequence Songe,” French Studies, 26 (1972), 1.

15 Gilbert Gadoffre, in a pair of articles, stresses the Christian perspective that he feels informs Du Bellay's mythic vision of Roman history: “Structures des mythes de Du Bellay,” BHR, 36 (1974), 273-289, and “Histoire et destin dans les Antiquites de Rome,” Zeitschriji für französische Sprache und Literature, 85 (1975), 289-304.

16 Gadoffre, “Structures,” 281.

17 See, for instance, Griffin, Coronation, p. 124. 18 See Nancy Andreasen, John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary (Princeton, 1967), pp. 22-28, for a convenient summary of this criticism.

19 I share the point of view of many critics, including Griffin, Coronation, pp. 116-117, 120; Saulnier, Du Bellay, pp. 75-79; and Rehm, Europaische Romdkhtung, p. 115.

20 Saulnier, “Commentaires,” 114-116; J. C. Lapp, “Mythological Imagery in Du Bellay,” SP, 61 (1964), 122-126; and Pabst, “Ehrfurcht und Grauen,” 77-81.

21 Pabst gives special emphasis to the nature of Les Antiqutiez as a lyrical sequence; see “Ehrfurcht urid Grauen,” 81.

22 Ingrid Daemmrich stresses the poet's uncertainty in this poem; see her “The Function of the Ruins Motif in Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome,” Neophilologus, 59 (1975), 16. Uncertainty, of course, may be, from another perspective, simply the modesty topos.

23 Griffin, Coronation, pp. 124, 136-137.

24 Saulnier, Du Bellay, pp. 76, 80; Frank Chambers, “Lucan and the Antiquitez de Rome,” PMLA, 60 (1945), 937-948.

25 “Commentaires,” 138.

26 See Colie, Rosalie L., The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Lewalski, Barbara K. (Berkeley, 1973), p. 21 Google Scholar.

27 P. 25.