Renaissance Eros

Catalog description

This course explores eroticism in literature and visual culture in the Italian and English Renaissance(s), a time period from the late fourteenth century to the early seventeenth century. Topics of study include desire, sexual love, and beauty, the philosophy of friendship, the legacy of Petrarchanism, the pervasiveness of same-sex desire, cross-class relationships, and female sovereignty. The course offers a variety of interpretive models to analyze the complex role of eros in the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Plato, Shakespeare, Lyly, Marlow, and Montaigne.