Scholarly Article
Love Animal: Animal Motifs in Croatian Early Renaissance Love Poetry
Bogdan, Tomislav, Husić, Snježana, Treska, Borna
2021-11-27 · Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne · Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan
Abstract
Animal motifs were very popular in medieval bestiaries and love poetry, especially in Provençal and Petrarchan poetry. Afterwards they spread throughout European Renaissance love poetry and they are found in love poems by Šiško Menčetić (1457-1527) and Džore Držić (1461-1501), the very first Croatian Renaissance poets. This paper examines some of the animal motifs present in their poems, in order to establish whether they could provide a better understanding of the luralism of Croatian Renaissance love poetry, which cannot be reduced to Petrarchism alone, and of the extraliterary context to which certain animal motifs are related. Our research shows that e.g. motifs of snakes and birds are linked to various types of love discourse; animal motifs related to the topos of love hunt are also analysed. It is shown that animal motifs are potentially polysemous and that their usage follows conventions of the genre and norms of a particular type of love discourse with which they are associated, while their meaning is more precisely definedin the context of the poem.
Keywords
animal motif, Croatian Early Renaissance love poetry, Šiško Menčetić, Džore Držić
Citation Details
Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne, pp. 99-112