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Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis, and the Dreamsof Julius Caesar Scaliger*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Kristine Louise Haugen
Kristine Louise Haugen*
Affiliation:
California Institute Of Technology
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Abstract

Notoriously Aristotelian in his poetic theory, linguistics, and natural philosophy, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) also reimagined the lost love poetry that Aristotle himself was said to have written. Scaliger's New Epigrams of 1533 combine a distinctively humanist view of Aristotle as an elegant polymath with a sustained experiment in refashioning the Petrarchan love lyric. Most visibly in poems about dreams and dreaming, Scaliger educes his speaker's erotic despair from philosophical problems in contemporary Aristotelian accounts of the soul, knowledge, and personal identity. The strange but compelling texts that result form a crossroads for Scaliger's own identities as physician, philosopher, and poet.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , Fall 2007 , pp. 819 - 851
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This essay was written during a Frances Yates Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London, where the erudite staff and magnificent library made it an immense pleasure to spend three years. Many friends have been kind enough to discuss Scaliger with me, but I am especially grateful for the saving interventions of Jill Kraye, G. W. Pigman III, and an anonymous reader for Renaissance Quarterly.

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