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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... intervene with even greater frequency and are described with even more thorough anthropomorphism. In each of three classical poems the Renaissance would recognize as the foundation of the epic tradi- tion, the Olympian gods are present ...
... intervene but when , and furthermore — and which is just as important , as we shall see — why they do not , why even the mightiest of the gods should choose to stay his hand over the course of a very long story . The narrative ...
... intervene in the mortal action when they do, and not before or after. The infi- nite Christian God, however, cannot be understood as temporarily absent, indisposed, or not paying attention; anything that happens must be presumed to ...
... intervenes in mortal affairs. For all its subsequent theological refinements, Christianity never jettisoned the anthropomorphic narratives in the earlier strands of the Hebrew Bible, in which Yahweh walks in the garden of Eden, sends ...
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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 |