Sacred Dedicatees, Sacred Poetics? Tensions and Tendencies in Epic for Urban VIII and Louis XIII

• In Event: Poetics of the Sacred in Early Modern Italy II

Abstract

This paper maps the trends and variants in poetics concerning epic poetry dedicated to Pope Urban VIII and the “Re Cristianissimo” Louis XIII. Epics dedicated to these figures show how the “poetics of conversion” (V. Cox) were implemented not only on a metapoetic level, for instance in ecphrastic Jesuit poems produced in Roman circles imitating Ovid’s Fasti, but also on a narrative level, especially in epics on contemporary events. New directions taken by the authors are expressed in paratexts, treatises or in reactions to poems, as well as in the poems themselves. From these texts we can deduce particular tensions in epic that have to do with the ‘sacred’ status of their dedicatees. The two leading questions of the analysis will thus be to what extent the poetics are adapted to the dedicatees and how issues addressed in these texts are related to topics discussed in earlier (Cinquecento) poetics.

Author

• Emma Grootveld, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven