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Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Values in French Petrarchan Collections (1549–60)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Cécile Alduy
Cécile Alduy*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

Between 1549 and 1560, French Petrarchan sonnet sequences proliferated in the wake of Du Bellay's Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue and Ronsard's Amours. Yet this proliferation relied on a remarkable economy of means, in large part due to the constant recycling of metaphors, tropes, and forms. In fact, the genre can be read as a cost-efficient system that addressed the economic anxiety of a generation of poets caught between the aspiration to impose the autonomy of their art and their social dependence on a patron. It also preemptively solved the potential credit crisis that could have resulted from having had to borrow from the Italians in order to establish a new French canon. Looking at Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Ellain, this essay examines French Petrarchan collections as complex lyric economies that manufacture and negotiate aesthetic, literary, monetary, and national values.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , Fall 2010 , pp. 721 - 753
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to express my gratitude to William J. Kennedy, whose conference Petrarch as Homo Economicus (2004) gave a decisive impulse to the line of thought developed in the present essay; to Roland Greene and Timothy Hampton for their inspiring remarks; and to the early modern group at Stanford University. A modified version of this paper was presented at The Renaissance Society of America annual conference in San Francisco, March 2006, under the title “The Economy of Praise: Dispositio and Retribution in French Love Sonnet Collections.” All translations are mine except where otherwise noted.

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