Afterlives of the Saints : Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature / Julia Reinhard Lupton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lupton, Julia Reinhard, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 p.) : illus

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book examines the ways in which the literary genre of hagiography and the hermeneutical paradigm of Biblical typology together entered into the construction of “the Renaissance” as a canon and period. It is not about saints’ lives in themselves, as either literary or historical phenomena, but instead addresses the structural effects of hagiography in the secular literature of the Renaissance. The central texts analyzed—Boccaccio’s Decameron, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—all manifest key moments and aspects in the creation of a Renaissance canon for the post-Renaissance world. The epochal significance of these works, saturated in religious allusions as well as scenes of profane life and classical art, is shown to rest in neither the normative piety nor the subversive heresy of any of these writers, but rather in their crafting of myths of modernity precisely out of the religious material that formed such an important part of their daily vocabularies.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

A Note on Texts

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: TYPOLOGY AND HAGIOGRAPHY

1. Typologies of the Renaissance: Burckhardt, Warburg, and Benjamin

2. The Denouement of Martyrdom: The Symptom in Psychoanalysis and Hagiography

PART II: THE NOVELLA AND ITS RENEWALS

3. The Gleaner's Prologue: Chaucer's Legend of Ruth

4. New Wine in Old Skins: The Decameron and Secular Literature

5. Saints on Trial: The Genre of Measure for Measure

PART III: ICONOGRAPHIES OF SECULAR LITERATURE

6. Typological Designs: Creation, Iconoclasm, and Nature in Vasari's Lives of the Artists

7. 'The Winter's Tale' and the Gods: Iconographies of Idolatry

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-1606-1

OCLC:

1294425661