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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... omnipotence , Athena's visit to Telemachus as the prompting of the Holy Spirit.7 The Renais- sance Aeneid was printed in densely annotated editions featuring the allegorical commentaries of both ancient and modern expositors . Virgil's ...
... omnipotent God of Christianity . Moira and fatum are supplanted by the more theologi- cally precise concept of divine providence , and so there is no available notion of destiny as a force extrinsic to God's will . It is not easy for a ...
... Omnipotent . Where God is represented as favoring one mortal army over another , this partisanship is usually not explained but assumed on the grounds that the divinely favored side , unlike its adversaries , fights in God's name . The ...
... omnipotent God presents another narrative disadvantage for the Christian poet. Renaissance attempts to imitate the ... omnipotence, nor of a divine creation of the universe, except in philosophical 'theology,' nor any consistent belief ...
... omnipotent, God is good— and equally uncontested attributes of the epic genre as inherited from the ancients—epic is long, epic features intervening deities, epic tells of violence and hu- man suffering. They boil down to very general ...
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 |