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Arcadia is a pastoral poem written around 1480 by Jacopo Sannazaro and published in 1504 in Naples. Sannazaro's Arcadia influenced the literature of the 16th and 17th centuries (e.g., William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, [1] Marguerite de Navarre, Jorge de Montemayor, [2] Garcilaso de la Vega and John Milton).
Arcadia by Sannazaro could be considered a prosimetrum – a combination of prose and verse. The alternation of prose and verse is consistent, but each varies considerably. Many portions of the prose are merely descriptive. Others sections, especially in the second half of the poem, are more narrative. Like the prose, the poetry is varied with a number of different poetical forms, including frottola, barzelletta, madrigal, and canzona. [3] Because of the pastoral subject and the sections in prose, Arcadia could also be considered an example of the Pastoral novel genre. Sannazaro can be considered the founder of this literary genre, another well known example is L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé.
The publication history of Arcadia has two phases. The first follows the tradition of manuscripts consisting of an introduction ("proemio") and ten units in prose and verse. Initially this literary collection was called Aeglogarum liber Arcadium inscriptus then Sannazaro decided to change the name to Libro pastorale nominato (intitulato) Arcadio.
Some years later Sannazaro modified the whole Arcadia again. The title became simply Arcadia and now consisted of a dedication, an introduction, twelve units of prose and verse, and an epilogue (A la Zampogna – To the bagpipes). [4] Three eclogues (I, II and VI) were probably composed before Sannazaro planned to write Arcadia. [5] They were modified and added to the Pastoral Novel. The first version of Arcadia with introduction and the ten units of prose and verse was completed towards the end of 1484. A flawed version was published in Venice in 1501 without the approval of the author. The same edition was reprinted by Bernardino da Vercelli in 1502. The second edition was completed by Sannazaro around 1495. This last version was published by Pietro Summonte, who was a humanist and member of the Accademia Pontaniana, in Naples in 1504.
The early fame of Arcadia in Italy was due to its linguistic merits. [6] What made this literary work so original was Sannazaro's decision to write in the Italian language instead of in a regional dialect or in Latin, which was extremely popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its style created a completely artificial literary idiom, unspoken by either Florentines or Neapolitans. [7] The language used in Arcadia seems to blend Giovanni Boccaccio's prose and Petrarch's poetry.
When Arcadia was printed in the 16th century, it became a bestseller. [8] [9] In Italy alone more than 66 editions were printed. Inspired in part by classical authors who described the pastoral world (Virgil, Theocritus, Ovid, Tibullus), and in part by Giovanni Boccaccio's Ameto, Sannazaro wrote a literary work that can be considered the first production of the European Renaissance. [10]
Later audiences grew impatient and hostile. Modern readers tend to consider the text confused and frustrating. [11] But towards the end of the 17th century, the Academy, founded in Rome, was named after the Pastoral novel.
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. He was known par excellence as the Certaldese, and one of the most important figures in the European literary panorama of the fourteenth century. Some scholars define him as the greatest European prose writer of his time, a versatile writer who amalgamated different literary trends and genres, making them converge in original works, thanks to a creative activity exercised under the banner of experimentalism.
Year 1458 (MCDLVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
Pietro Bembo, O.S.I.H. was an Italian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller, and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the Italian Renaissance, Pietro Bembo greatly influenced the development of the Tuscan dialect as a literary language for poetry and prose, which, by later codification into a standard language, became the modern Italian language. In the 16th century, Bembo's poetry, essays, books proved basic to reviving interest in the literary works of Petrarch. In the field of music, Bembo's literary writing techniques helped composers develop the techniques of musical composition that made the madrigal the most important secular music of 16th-century Italy.
Jacopo Sannazaro was an Italian poet, humanist and epigrammist from Naples.
A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music (pastorale) that depicts such life in an idealized manner, typically for urban audiences. A pastoral is a work of this genre, also known as bucolic, from the Greek βουκολικόν, from βουκόλος, meaning a cowherd.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1504.
An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.
Jorge de Montemor was a Portuguese novelist and poet, who wrote almost exclusively in Spanish. His most famous work is a pastoral prose romance, the Diana (1559).
Italian literature is written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in Italy in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian. Italian literature begins in the 12th century when in different regions of the peninsula the Italian vernacular started to be used in a literary manner. The Ritmo laurenziano is the first extant document of Italian literature.
Remy Belleau was a poet of the French Renaissance. He is most known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things and his poems about precious stones.
French Renaissance literature is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in French from the French invasion of Italy in 1494 to 1600, or roughly the period from the reign of Charles VIII of France to the ascension of Henry IV of France to the throne. The reigns of Francis I and his son Henry II are generally considered the apex of the French Renaissance. After Henry II's unfortunate death in a joust, the country was ruled by his widow Catherine de' Medici and her sons Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, and although the Renaissance continued to flourish, the French Wars of Religion between Huguenots and Catholics ravaged the country.
The Italian poet and musician Serafino dell'Aquila or Aquilano is alternatively named Serafino dei Ciminelli from the family to which he belonged. He was born in what was then the Neapolitan town of L'Aquila on 6 January 1466 and died of a fever in Rome on 10 August 1500. As a writer he was one of the foremost of the stylistic followers of Petrarch and his work was later influential on both French and English Petrarchan poets.
A prosimetrum is a poetic composition which exploits a combination of prose (prosa) and verse (metrum); in particular, it is a text composed in alternating segments of prose and verse. It is widely found in Western and Eastern literature. While narrative prosimetrum may encompass at one extreme a prose story with occasional verse interspersed, and at the other, verse with occasional prose explanations, in true prosimetrum the two forms are represented in more equal measure. A distinction is sometimes drawn between texts in which verse is the dominant form and those in which prose dominates; there the terms prosimetrum and versiprose are applied respectively.
Pietro Summonte (1463–1526) was an Italian Renaissance humanist of Naples, a member of the learned circle of friends in the Ciceronian manner that constituted Pontano's Accademia Pontaniana. Summonte's care in preserving his correspondence on artistic matters with the Venetian Marcantonio Michiel resulted in a precious archive mined by art historians. His major poem was the Canzone intitulata Aragonia. To him Jacopo Sannazaro and Benedetto Cariteo addressed verses, in Latin and the vernacular, and Sannazaro entrusted his Arcadia, which had circulated in manuscript since about 1485, but of which corrupt pirated editions appeared at Venice (1502) for a carefully corrected printing by Sigismondo Mayr (1504), in which Brian Richardson has detected revisions that brought the language closer to Boccaccio and Petrarch, so that it lost many of its southern dialect forms. Summonte, who took on the guidance of the Accademia Pontaniana after Pontano's death (1503), edited for publication Pontano's two books of Hendecasyllables, to which he applied the subtitle Baiae.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The Seven Books of the Diana is a pastoral romance written in Spanish by the Portuguese author Jorge de Montemayor. The romance was first published in 1559, though later editions expanded upon the original text. A sixteenth-century bestseller, the Diana helped launch a vogue for stories about shepherds, shepherdesses, and their experiences in love. One of its most famous readers was William Shakespeare, who seems to have borrowed the Proteus-Julia-Sylvia plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona from Felismena's tale in the Diana.