Original scientific paper
New Insights on the Female Voiced Poems in Love Lyric of the Croatian Renaissance
Tomislav Bogdan
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
Love poets of the Croatian Renaissance were in their own way devoted to the convention of the female voice. This is a marginal but at the same time very interesting form of male-authored lyrical discourse in which the lyrical subject is a woman in love. Until the mid-sixteenth century every relevant love poet featured at least one such female voiced poem no matter the size of his poem collection. Moreover, such texts can be found among the anonymous poems of Ranjina’s Miscellany (Ranjinin zbornik). “Female” poems have several recognizable common traits: the woman in them always addresses the absent man; the poems depict a love relationship of requited love; lovers are usually separated due to certain practical, unfortunate circumstances; stylistically the poems are situated in a somewhat lower register than most “male” poems; frequently they simulate written, epistolary communication. Such poems by Croatian lyrical poets raise a series of interesting and complex questions, one of which pertains to the causes of attraction of such gender metathesis, that is, to the need of male authors to express themselves in female voice. Having already written about the female voiced poems by Croatian Renaissance male poets, I now return to the topic with several new insights and considerations. For example, I have recognized new, so far unnoticed poems with female lyrical subject in Ranjina’s Miscellany, which prompts a formulation of new hypotheses about the complex way in which some parts of that famous codex were composed. I also present new arguments about the origins of this convention in Ragusan and Dalmatian authors, because I am now more confident than before that its origin should be sought in the works of Italian courtly poets from the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of sixteenth century, especially in the different forms of their vernacular adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides.
Keywords
Renaissance love poetry; female voiced poems; gender metathesis; Italian courtly poetry; Ranjina’s Miscellany
Hrčak ID:
312596
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2023.
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