This charming little volume contains a wealth of lovers' lore, touching on such subjects as the myth of Eros and Aphrodite; emblems of passion, seduction, and fidelity; and the romantic symbolism of the moon and stars. Includes 60 color illustrations and 40 color photos.

Introducted and annotated by the prize-winning translator Richard Sieburth, this bilingual selection from Scève's Délie are love poems for the intellectual.

Emblem books, which feature combinations of images and text with a moral lesson for the reader, grew out of the Renaissance and were most popular in the Netherlands. Enigmatic, erudite, and often pious, Dutch love emblems synthesized the traditions of European visual and literary arts--and in turn influenced architecture, painting, poetry, and interior design for centuries to come. Learned Love offers an introduction to this enthralling genre and celebrates the completion of Emblem Project Utrecht, an undertaking that digitized twenty-five of the most representative emblem books. This unprecedented volume explores the delicate network of visual motifs and textual mottos that characterize Dutch love emblems. Learned Love demonstrates how emblem books form a web of closely interrelated references, which the contributors liken to the Internet, and traces the cutting-edge digitization project from inception to finish. This book will interest anyone intrigued by the fruitful gray areas between image and text, scholarship and technology.

This edition of Maurice Scève's 1544 poetic cycle Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu was prepared specifically for English-speaking students.

In this book, visual and poetic emblems of God's love, created by Otto van Veen and Jeanne Guyon, symbolically represent spiritual meaning and, as such, offer a gift of revealed strength and purpose to the aware reader. In our age, when love seems almost forgotten, this emblem book uniting Guyon's poetry and D'Othon Vaenius's illustrations give us a faithful look into what might be. What if Divine love becomes part of the human endeavor and joins to human souls? Otto van Veen and Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon internalized this hope and here reveal to us their vision of the love of God bonding and becoming one with the human soul. Translated into English for the first time here, these emblems of divine love become available to postmodern readers.

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.