Love’s Wounds takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, this book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped his model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. Cynthia N. Nazarian argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new "countersovereignty" from within the heart of vulnerability—a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered.
Love’s Wounds tracks the development of the countersovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, Nazarian reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.
Cynthia N. Nazarian is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Strategies of Abjection: Parrhesia and the Cruel Beloved from Petrarch's Canzoniere to Sceve’s Delie2. Violence and the Politics of Imitation in Du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse and L’Olive3. Martyrdom, Anatomy, and the Ethics of Metaphor in d’Aubigne’s L’Hecatombe a Diane and Les Tragiques4. Petrarchan Tyranny and Lyric Resistance in Spenser’s Amoretti and The Faerie QueeneConclusion: The Paradoxes of Pain: Shakespeare beyond Petrarchism
What People are Saying About This
Tom Conley
"Through close and sustained analysis of strategies of abjection in verse from Petrarch to Spenser and D'Aubigné, Love’s Wounds examines how early modern poets craft expressions of suffering to challenge inherited orders of sovereignty. Reading lyric sensuously and forcefully, Cynthia N. Nazarian offers a fresh and vigorous study of canonical works. Her work is stunning, and this book will be an enduring point of reference in the years to come."
William J. Kennedy
"In Love's Wounds, Cynthia N. Nazarian makes a splendid contribution to Renaissance studies by questioning conventional notions of powerless desire, by uncovering unsuspected relationships between psychological abjection and political subjection, and by using lyric poetry to position ethical and political critique in dialogue with each other and with various forms of literary epic, romance, drama, and manifesto."
Anne Prescott
"The fascinating Love's Wounds contains phrases that are as sharp as poniards. To relate images of political struggle against kings and empires to the rebellion of a Petrarchan lover against the sovereignty of an immovable lady is ingenious."
Ullrich Langer
"In this impressive book, Cynthia N. Nazarian takes seriously the hyperbolic stance of the vulnerable lover, from Petrarch to Shakespeare, and demonstrates the surprising political uses and strengths of such weakness. Love's Wounds deals provocatively with a range of canonical literary works and areas such as rhetoric and ethics, the practice of literary imitation, and the representation of early modern martyrdom and violence."
