Love and Fear of the Foreign

The medieval legend of Mélusine is strongly linked to Greek and Latin literary imagination. This is not only because of the presence of the metamorphosis topic, but also due to a specific similarity with the myth of Cupid and Psyche, narrated in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The article analyzes and compares the two stories and takes a brief look at the theme of Mélusine in two twentieth century authors: André Breton and the Italian poet Antonio Porta, author of Melusina. Una ballata e un diario (1987). Through this relationship between mythological and fictional contents of the Melusinian theme, the above mentioned writings might be considered as an outcome of the indirect influence exerted by the classical story of Cupid and Psyche in the following centuries.

Medieval Feminist Forum, 1990

2019

Special thanks to Jane Bonsall, Minna Helminen, and Dr. Jeremy Smith, without whose advice I could not have completed this project.

Renaissance and Reformation, 1969

Because we attribute to him purposes as much literary as scientific, and because he is such an engaging stylist, we assume that th eapparentplurality of etiological systems governing the course of erotic love in the body is merely evidence of his particular indifference to scientific rigour, or the result of his penchant for ambiguity. Hence we are not surprised when, on a single page, we find that love is an "anguish of mind in which a man con- tinually meditates of the beauty, gesture, manners of his mistress," but that "Languis will have this passion sited in the liver, and to keep residence in the heart, to proceed first from the eyes, so carried by our spirits, and kin- dled with imagination in the liver and heart . . ."* We accede to the various truths inherent in his compound description -that erotic desire is a disor- der of the mind, but that it is also a phenomenon of the liver, which is the seat of the passions, and of the eye, which is the organ through which the object of beauty makes its attack -yet without abandoning our belief that beneath this encyclopedic variety, with its many contradictions, there lies âcentral medical philosophy, familiar at least to that age, according to which the many effects of desire upon the lover's body can be accounted for as components of a rational, coherent pathological system. In his pioneering study The Elizabethan Malady, Lawrence Babb, some 37 years ago, set out to explain to the readers of English Renaissance litera- ture the scientific basis for the diseases of melancholy, including lovesick- ness, with the understanding that to account for melancholy love was tantamount to explaining the pathology of eros in general as it was understood by the medical philosophers of that age. His strategy was to take a synoptic survey of the principal medical texts of the Renaissance con- cerned with this disease -its causes, symptoms, and cures -and thereby Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXIV, 1 (1988)

L'antiquité classique, 2005

In: L'antiquité classique, Tome 74, 2005. pp. 83-110. Abstract Maria Ypsilanti (Nicosie), Literary Loves as Cycles : From Meleager to Ovid. The importance of Meleager for later Greek and Roman erotic poetry is well known. The present paper offers observations on the cyclical approach by Meleager in his poems on girls and boys and, within this, his pair-of-epigrams technique. A comparison with similar techniques in later Greek epigrams and Roman erotic poetry of the first century B.C. allows a greater appreciation of Meleager's importance and influence on later poets and reveals the manner and the extent to which his poetic works have inspired and constituted a guide for Latin love poetry. Résumé Les amours littéraires en cycles. De Méléagre à Ovide. L'importance de Méléagre pour la poésie érotique grecque et latine est bien connue. Cet article livre des observations sur le traitement cyclique de Méléagre dans ses poèmes sur des filles et des garçons, et sur sa des couples de poèmes. La comparaison avec des techniques semblables dans des épi-grammes grecques plus tardives et dans la poésie romaine de l'âge d'or permet de mieux l'influence de Méléagre sur les poètes des siècles ultérieurs et montre comment et dans quelle mesure la poésie érotique de Rome a puisé à son programme poétique.

2013

Pacific Coast Philology, 1984

Seventy years ago, in 1913, John Livingston Lowes wrote his classic article on the 'Loveres Maladys of Hereos,' in which he brought to light a tradition of medical texts which contain descriptions of an illness called amor hereos, or erotic love.' Although Lowes pointed out Chaucer's use of the tradition in Troilus and the Knight's Tale, he did not undertake to interpret the significance of a medical paradigm of love in either text. I would like to propose that the medical model of love provided Chaucer with a materialistic, deterministic, and ethically neutral view of love which he used to shape the thematic development of Troilus and Criseyde.2 Love figured as illness is of course a commonplace of medieval literature. One need go no further than Ovid and the Romance of the Rose for literary sources of love symptoms and cures which Chaucer certainly knew and certainly drew upon for Troilus and Criseyde. The flourishing medical tradition of amor hereos duplicates much in the literary tradition at the level of symptoms and cures: one might say that the Ovidian and the medical "codes" of love overlap to a certain extent. In this paper I would like to focus on a particular constellation of attitudes toward passionate love that seem to be distinctively medical, and which Chaucer manipulates precisely for its contrast to other forms of discourse on love which he uses in the poem. The history of lovesickness in the Middle Ages is the record of physicians' attempts to understand what happens to the body and the mind when passion renders a lover a patient. Of some twenty medieval medical texts containing chapters on lovesickness, three were considered particularly authoritative and shaped subsequent medical discussions of the subject. They are the Viaticum of Constantinus Africanus, Chaucer's "cursed daun Constantine," author of De Coitu; a gloss on the Viaticum by Gerardus Bituricensis; and Avicenna's Canon medicinae.3 The Viaticum, a translation of an Arabic medical guide for travellers, was the most popular of all medieval medical handbooks and survives in a rich manuscript tradition: over 90 MSS prior to the fifteenth century are extant, and more will no doubt be identified. It was fundamental to the medical curricula at Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Montpellier. Every university-trained physician would have been familiar with its chapter on lovesickness. Constantine's text was read by a wider audience than academic physicians alone, however, since medical courses in England were open to many more students than those studying for medical degrees. Copies of the work were also owned by educated non-physicians. In addition, medical reference books known as concordantiae popularized Constantine's chapter on lovesickness. Widely used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, these were alphabetically arranged medical dictionaries which gave brief references to the standard medical