Eros in Early Modern German Literature

Summary

Until French Began to Displace Neo-Latin as the chief instrument of literary culture around the middle of the seventeenth century, the use of Latin in early modern Europe ensured both the continuity of ancient intellectual traditions as well as the coherence of humanistic endeavors within the republic of letters, or respublica litteraria. This international use of a common language served to challenge Italy’s cultural claim to primacy in the renewal of language and literature on modern soil. On the other hand, it also meant that scholars and poets outside Italy had to cope with multiple traditions — classical, Italian, and contemporary foreign practices — in striving to understand, translate, or rework their sources, a reality that delayed the arrival in northern Europe of aesthetic equality with Italian humanism. Once that had happened, however, the works of the modern erudite poets — poetae docti et eruditi — whether written in Neo-Latin or in the vernacular, were produced within a unified literary world. Not surprisingly, the modern reader faces complicated lines of transmission. Early modern love poetry, which Hans-Gert Roloff has recognized to be the essential domain of Neo-Latin poetry, is a case in point. Johannes Secundus’s formulation, “Mollia Romulidum uerba loquetur Amor” (Love speaks the gentle words of the Romans), despite its elegance, is misleading; for Renaissance love, eros, was multifaceted, both in theory and in practice. This is true not only with respect to the origins, reception, and adaptation of the Renaissance concept of love but to the erotic raison d’être in the lives of many early modern poets as well, in Germany as elsewhere.

The Italian Revival of Ancient Eroticism

Fourteenth-century Italian scholars rediscovered in pre-Christian Greece and Rome a model for leading life in keeping with natural reason. With this classical ideal before them they gradually liberated themselves from the hold of religious doctrine and worked out an aesthetic approach to the arts that accounted for the presence of divine forces in both nature and man. In doing so they revived the entire spectrum of ancient love literature from Sappho and Plato to the Roman poets Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid; while these various traditions were understood as a distinct heritage, in the course of adaptation they often were integrated with specific Renaissance varieties.