Italian Love Poetry from the Sicilians to the Stil Novo (IT0020)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : LLC-4-IT0020

From being a luxury foreign import for high officials at the court of Frederick II in Sicily, love poetry rapidly became acclimatised and outstripped its models. By the end of the thirteenth century in Italy, vernacular love poetry was well on its
way to being a dominant art form.
Reading between the lines of this intense production of vernacular love poetry produced in thirteenth century Italy, you will discover a surprisingly playful and inventive use of notions from contemporary science, medicine, psychology, theology, law and even sociology. Often what looks like a trite declaration of love turns out to be an investigation into something else, something much more challenging
and original.
You will learn to admire the technical skill exercised by these writers as they grapple to express the inexpressible, and set themselves fiendish challenges in terms of language and poetic form.
Finally, you will be able to understand how, in the space of less than one hundred years, Italian literature could progress from being tongue-tied to being capable of producing a fertile linguistic and cultural context for writers like Dante and Petrarch.

Entry Requirements

none

Subject Areas

Home subject area

European Languages and Cultures - Italian, (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Schedule G)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 4th year

? Delivery Period : Semester 1 (Blocks 1-2)

All of the following classes

Type	Day	Start	End	Area
Lecture	Monday	09:00	10:50	Central

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

Working knowledge of early Italian prosody and literary vernaculars; understanding of the intellectual currents in philosophy, medicine, astronomy in the late middle ages; general skill in 'decoding' enigmatic, compressed texts.