Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century

The Popularization of Romance

I. Moulton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137405050
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century explores the impact of print on conflicting cultural notions about romantic love in the sixteenth century. This popularization of romantic love led to profound transformations in the rhetoric, ideology, and social function of love - transformations that continue to shape cultural notions about love today.

C H A P T E R 1

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE’S BOOK OF THE COURTIER: LOVE AND IDEAL CONDUCT

Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier was quite possibly the single most popular secular book in sixteenth century Europe, published in dozens of editions in all major European languages. The Courtier is a complex text that has many reasons for its vast popularity. Over the years it has been read as a guide to courtly conduct, a meditation on the nature of service, a celebration of an elite community, a reflection on power and subjection, a manual on self-fashioning, and much else besides. But The Courtier must also be seen as a book about love. The debates about love in The Courtier are not tangential to the main concerns of the text; they are fundamental to it. To understand the impact of The Courtier on discourses of love, one must place the text’s debates about love in the context of the Platonic ideas promulgated by Ficino, Bembo, and others, as well as the practical realities of sexual and identity politics in early modern European society. Castiglione’s dialogue attempts to define the perfect Courtier, but this ideal figure of masculine self-control is threatened by the instability of romantic love.

Castiglione has Pietro Bembo end the book’s debates with a praise of Platonic love that attempts to redefine love as empowering rather than debasing, a practice of self-fulfillment rather than subjection. Castiglione’s Bembo defines love as a solitary pursuit, and rejects the social in favor of the individual. His speech is also, in subtle ways, a rejection of women, and the threat of male debasement perceived to be inherent in the love of women. The Neoplatonic theory of love outlined by Bembo was already fashionable in elite intellectual circles when Castiglione wrote The Courtier.¹ But with the volume’s dissemination throughout Europe, The Courtier spread the Neoplatonic idealization of love to a much broader demographic than Marsilio Ficino, Castiglione himself, or the actual Pietro Bembo could have imagined.

THE USES OF RENAISSANCE PLATONISM

Let us begin with one of the many products of that dissemination. In 1596, almost 70 years after the initial 1528 publication of The Courtier, Edmund Spenser published a collection of philosophical poems on the topic of love and beauty called the Fowre Hymnes. The Hymnes are paired; the first two, the Hymne to Love and the Hymne to Beauty, are based primarily on Classical philosophy and poetry. They deal with physical or earthly love and the beauty that is its object. The second two, overtly Christian poems, deal with the love of God and the beauty of Heaven.² The first of the four poems, the Hymne to Love, provides an elegant summary of the conflicting notions about romantic love circulating in the sixteenth century, combining elements of Classical and Medieval poetic traditions with concepts from Classical philosophy and Christian theology.

The first six stanzas of the poem introduce Love as a martial, tyrannical figure, a characterization found most influentially in Ovid’s Amores³ and elaborated in Petrarch’s Triumph of Love and elsewhere.

LOVE, that long since hast to thy mighty powre

Perforce subdude my poore captived hart,

And raging now therein with restlesse stowre,

Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part,

Faine would I seeke to ease my bitter smart

By any service I might do to thee,

Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee. (lines 1–7)⁴

As in Ovid, the speaker is a helpless captive, subdued and wounded by the mighty god of love. Paradoxically, the poet is grateful for his suffering, and his hymn of praise is an attempt to placate his master (lines 8–10).

The hymn the poet sings blends elements of various classical accounts of Love’s genealogy and powers. There is little effort to reconcile these often conflicting versions. The poem simply runs them together and ignores the contradictions. For example, drawing on Diotima’s account in Plato’s Symposium (203b–d), Spenser asserts that Love is the child of Plenty and Penury (line 53), but whereas Plato insists Love is not a god (202a–e), Spenser begins his paean by calling Love, “Great God of might” (line 43). Spenser’s Love is not only a martial conqueror, but also a cosmic force of harmony; it is at once a principle of concord and a destructive flame of desire. Spenser attempts to separate the divine fire of love from the earthly flame of lust, but the distinction is weak: lust desires pleasure; love desires “to enlarge his lasting progenie” (line 105). But the two desires remain intimately connected.

Spenser also tries to unite the desire for “lasting progenie” to the contemplation of beauty. Plato argued that earthly beauty could entice a wise man to contemplation of a higher, heavenly or ideal beauty. But once that mystical transition had been made, for Plato the body became irrelevant. Spenser, on the other hand, needs the body, for “progenie,” if not for pleasure. In another contradiction of Plato’s account, Spenser’s Love is characterized as an “imperious boy” with “sharp, empoisoned darts”—the capricious and destructive figure of Cupid, ⁵ not the divine radiance that Plato associates with the ecstatic contemplation of Beauty.

Such paradoxes are ubiquitous in sixteenth-century writing about love. Spenser is well aware of these contradictions, and the speaker of the poem calls attention to them: Why does he honor a tyrant who abuses him and hardens his mistress’s heart against him? How can this brutal and capricious tyrant be “the worlds great parent, the most kind preserver / Of living wights, the soveraine lord of all” (156–157)? Is Love a child or an adult? A loving parent or a cruel tormentor? A force of desire that tears people apart or a source of concord bringing them together? Does Love subjugate or reconcile?

Spenser finds ostensible answers to all these questions in Neoplatonism.

A way of idealizing physical desire, Neoplatonic theories of love have their beginnings in Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium presents a series of speeches praising love given by a group of male friends enjoying a drinking party, or symposium. Socrates’s friend Phaedrus opens the dialogue by praising Love as the oldest and most glorious of the gods. Pausanias, a young man, beloved of Agathon, the banquet’s host, then makes a distinction between earthly love (physical attraction to boys or women) and heavenly love (a spiritual and sexual mentoring relationship between an adult man and a male youth). Erxyimachus, a physician, makes the third speech, praising love as a principle of universal harmony, active in the material world. Then Aristophanes the comedian recounts a fanciful myth explaining that in ancient times the original eight-limbed human beings were punished by Zeus by being split in two, and so now people want to have sex to rejoin themselves to their lost halves. Next comes Socrates, who in his usual fashion turns the entire preceding conversation on its head by redefining the terms of the argument. Drawing on the teachings of a wise woman named Diotima, Socrates posits that love is a transcendent spiritual experience that can lead the soul to a contemplation of beauty and truth. And finally Alcibiades the aristocratic general reels drunkenly in and gives a speech praising Socrates as the perfect lover because he is both wise and possessed of superhuman self-control.

From this summary it seems self-evident that the Symposium puts forth various competing and contradictory ideas about love. Based on the order of the speeches, their philosophic content, and the general rhetoric of the dialogue, it would seem that Plato endorses Socrates’s speech, and that it is intended as an implicit refutation of all the others. Early modern interpreters of Plato, on the other hand, tended to assume that despite their contradictions, all seven speeches, from Pausanias’s windy panegyric to Aristophanes’s joking myth, represented the unified thought of Plato on the subject of love. Ficino’s famous commentary, De Amore, takes this approach, treating each of the seven speeches with equal respect. While this snycretic approach is characteristic of Ficino, who believed Platonic thought could be reconciled both with Christian theology and Aristotelianism,⁶ his attempt to unify the many discordant voices of the Symposium made early modern Neoplatonic theory even more complicated and abstruse than it would otherwise have been. This eclectic approach underpins the confusions about love, both Neoplatonic and otherwise, that characterize Spenser’s Hymne to Love and many similar texts from the period.

All the same, the core doctrine of Neoplatonic love is based primarily on Socrates’s speech. He reports the wise words he was told by a woman named Diotima, “deeply versed in [love] and many other fields of knowledge” (201d). Diotima tells him that love cannot be a god, for love desires beauty. You can only desire something if you lack it, and no god could lack beauty; therefore love must not be a god, but rather an intermediary being. Love is neither good nor bad, ugly nor beautiful. After this syllogistic opening, Diotima shifts to mythology and allegory, saying that love is the child of Resource and Need (Spenser’s Plenty and Penury), begotten on the same day Aphrodite was born, and thus devoted to her service (203b–d).

Socrates then raises an important question: What use is love to human beings (204c)? This question, which may seem disingenuous, lies behind much sixteenth-century discourse about love. Is there any benefit to being in love, or is it simply something we must suffer because we are physical beings? Diotima answers that, because love is an intermediate creature, hovering between ignorance and knowledge, it is an ideal conduit for ignorant mortal humans seeking enlightenment. She explains how this process would work in an argument characterized by a series of bold and reductive redefinitions. She begins by redefining sexual desire as a desire not for pleasure, but for progeny, a deeply problematic move, since sexual desire throughout the Symposium is presumed to be that of adult men for adolescent boys, and thus fundamentally non-procreative in any commonly understood sense of the term. Diotima gets around this obstacle by redefining desire for progeny as the desire for immortality—the only reason we want children, apparently, is so that some bit of us can live forever (assuming our children also go on to have more children). Thus reconfigured, “Love is a longing for immortality” (207a).

But any notion of immortality based on the body must be illusory, because all bodies die. So Diotima posits that the only true immortality must be spiritual. She goes on to explain that the spiritual bonds between friends are much more significant than the (primarily physical?) bonds between parents and children. According to Diotima, true fatherhood consists in the spiritual bond between an adult man and the adolescent boy he loves (209c). This loving, mentoring, relationship is the true meaning of “progeny.” Rather than generating new bodies of physical children by having intercourse with women, the loving man generates new ideas in the mind of his adolescent male companion by educating him (209a–c).

Despite the male-centered nature of Athenian society, Diotima’s misogynistic assumption that women’s attractiveness is merely physical whereas males can be both physically and intellectually attractive is remarkable. Not only is it reductive of human experience and explicitly denied elsewhere in Plato’s writings, the wise woman Diotima would seem to refute it by the very fact that she is both wise and a woman. In the Republic Socrates insists that women have the same intellectual potential as men (454d–e). But in the Symposium the culturally powerful notion that women are physical creatures and men intellectual ones is not questioned. The realm of true (spiritual) love thus becomes an entirely masculine one.

Diotima’s argument proceeds: Ideally, what is beloved is not a particular beautiful body or beautiful soul, but Beauty itself. Love ought to focus not on one person but on the contemplation of all manifestations of Beauty. Spiritual beauty is superior to physical beauty, and intellectual beauty, the beauty of knowledge itself, is superior to the beauty of any one spirit (210d). From the beauty of ideas, one may come to the contemplation of Beauty itself, “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades” (211a). And since truth is necessarily beautiful, the soul of Beauty must also be the soul of Truth, and therefore of Virtue—goodness itself. Thus, through this Platonic “ladder” of love (known as the scala in Italian), sexual desire is adroitly transformed into spiritual enlightenment. The physical becomes spiritual; sexual desire for transient bodily pleasure becomes a spiritual longing for the infinite. Rather than seeking sexual pleasure, “love longs for the good to be its own forever” (206b).

Though logic is employed at various stages, this is not a logical argument. Diotima’s theory of love is rooted in sexual desire, but sexual pleasure, or simple physical gratification, has no part in her theory of sexuality. In her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Love, the Book Market, and the Popularization of Romance
• 1   Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: Love and Ideal Conduct
• 2   Mario Equicola’s De Natura d’amore: Love and Knowledge
• 3   Antonio Tagliente’s Opera amorosa: Love and Letterwriting
• 4   Jacques Ferrand’s On Lovesickness: Love and Medicine
• Conclusion: Romeo + Juliet
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index