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School of Modern Languages & Cultures: Department of French

Staff in the Department of French

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Publication details for Dr Kathryn Banks

Image: Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance: French Love Lyric and Natural-Philosophical Poetry.2008 Banks, Kathryn. Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance: French Love Lyric and Natural-Philosophical Poetry, Legenda, 219 pp.

Author(s) from Durham

Abstract

Renaissance images could be real as well as linguistic. Human beings were often believed to be an image of the cosmos, and the sun an image of God. With Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance, Kathryn Banks explores the implications of this for poetic language and argues that linguistic images were a powerful tool for rethinking cosmic conceptions. She reassesses the role of natural-philosophical poetry in France, focusing upon its most well-known and widely-read exponent, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas. Through a sustained analysis of Maurice Sceve's delie, Banks also rethinks love lyric's oft-noted use of the beloved as image of the poet. Cosmos and Image makes an original contribution to our understanding of Renaissance thinking about the cosmic, the human, and the divine. It also proposes a mode of reading other Renaissance texts, and reflects at length upon the relation of 'literature' to history, to the history of science, and to political turmoil.