From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance EpicEpic poets of the Renaissance looked to emulate the poems of Greco-Roman antiquity, but doing so presented a dilemma: what to do about the gods? Divine intervention plays a major part in the epics of Homer and Virgil—indeed, quarrels within the family of Olympian gods are essential to the narrative structure of those poems—yet poets of the Renaissance recognized that the cantankerous Olympians could not be imitated too closely. The divine action of their classical models had to be transformed to accord with contemporary tastes and Christian belief. |
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... adversaries but his family , and more often than not his concern for preserving harmony in heaven outweighs his attachments to particular mortals . The lesser Olympians recognize that they cannot prevent destiny , the Latin fatum or ...
... adversaries , fights in God's name . The ideological consequences of this notion of divine partisanship will be considered 11. Milton , Paradise Lost ( 1998 ) . Subsequent citations refer to this edition . 12. See Aen 1.12–28 ...
... adversaries were now distinguished along religious lines. Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, Trojans and Latins in the Aeneid pray to the same gods; the poems of the Renaissance, however, pit Christian against Muslim, Protestant against ...
... adversaries . It is not to say that in Renaissance epic religious difference is the only difference that matters , nor that the Mosaic distinction is asserted in every Renaissance poem with equal force , nor that the Mosaic distinction ...
... adversaries, allies and others, us and them. The distinction between godly and infidel is never the only differ- ence that matters. In the epic poetry of the Renaissance, the Mosaic distinction operates in conjunction with a range of ...
Contents
1 | |
Homer and Virgil | 31 |
EpicPetrarch and Vida | 56 |
Orlando furioso | 102 |
Gerusalemme liberata | 140 |
Paradise Lost | 178 |
AFTERWORD | 217 |
WORKS CITED | 225 |
INDEX | 237 |