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Jansenism has disappeared, Pascal’s work in defense
of the sect caused him to devise some of the most
important theological arguments of the 17th cen-
tury. Furthermore, the ideas contained in the Pensees
influence religious thought to the present day.
English Versions of Works by Blaise Pascal
Contradictions, Oppositions and Denials in the Life of
the Mind. Albuquerque, N.M.: American Classical
College Press, 1987.
Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent.
Edited by James M. Houston.Vancouver, B.C.: Re-
gent College Publishing, 2003.
Pensées. Translated by W. F. Trotter. Mineola, N.Y.:
Dover, 2003.
Provincial Letters. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Pub-
lishers, 1997.
The Gospel of the Gospels. Torino, Italy: Allemandi,
Umberto & Company, 2000.
Works about Blaise Pascal
Davidson, Hugh M. Blaise Pascal. Boston: Twayne,
1983.
Ludwin, Dawn M. Blaise Pascal’s Quest for the Ineffa-
ble. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
O’Connell, Marvin R., et al. Blaise Pascal: Reasons of
the Heart. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerd-
mans, 1997.
Shea, William R. Designing Experiments and Games
of Chance: The Unconventional Science of Blaise
Pascal. Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Watson Publish-
ing, 2003.
pastoral (200s B.C.–A.D. 1800s)
Named after the Latin word pastor, meaning “shep-
herd,” pastorals are poems that idealize rustic,
country life and feature shepherds and other rural
persons. Typically, the shepherds of these poems
speak in elevated language and dress in a manner
above their status. The first pastorals were penned
by Theocritus (ca. 310–ca. 250 B.C.) in his Idylls.
Pastorals are organized according to three main
groups: monologues, eclogues, and laments. Pas-
toral monologues are poems praising or complain-
ing about a particular person; eclogues are those
poems involving the notion of a singing contest;
and laments mourn a dead loved one.
The pastoral style has contributed to the cre-
ation of other literary forms, including the pastoral
drama, pastoral romance, and pastoral elegy. Pas-
toral dramas developed in
RENAISSANCE Italy and
emerged thereafter in England. Aminta by the Ital-
ian Torquato TASSO, is an example of the form, as
is William SHAKESPEARE’s play As You Like It.
Pastoral romances are stories written in prose
that involve characters with pastoral names, such as
Cuddie, Colin, and Meliboeus, and feature compli-
cated plotlines interspersed with songs. Examples
of pastoral romances include the Italian romance
Ameto by Giovanni BOCCACCIO, Arcadia by Sir
Philip SIDNEY of England, and Diana enamorada by
the Spanish writer Jorge de Montemayor.
Pastoral elegies evolved from Virgil’s models of
traditional pastorals, as seen in his Eclogues. In a
pastoral elegy, the speaker of the poem, usually a
shepherd-poet, asks a muse for inspiration,
mourns the loss of a fellow shepherd-poet, criti-
cizes the dead shepherd’s guardians (usually
nymphs) for their neglect, introduces a procession
of fellow mourners, questions divine providence,
and offers a closing consolation. This formula is
referred to as Conventions and can best be seen in
John
MILTON’s “Lycidas.”
See also Christopher MARLOWE.
English Versions of Pastorals
Pope, Alexander. Pastoral Poetry and an Essay on Criti-
cism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961.
Theocritus. Idylls. Translated by Richard Hunter and
Anthony Verity. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003.
Virgil. The Eclogues of Virgil. Translated by David
Ferry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Works about Pastorals
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1935.
pastoral 217
Greg,W.W.Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A
Literary Inquiry. New York: Russell and Russell,
1959.
Metzger, Lore. One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in
Romantic Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1986.
Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. Green Cabinet: Theocritus
and European Pastoral Poetry. London: Bristol
Classic Press, 2003.
Pearl poet (1300s) poet
The identity of the Pearl poet remains unknown,
but he is attributed with the writing of four Mid-
dle English poems: Pearl, Patience, Purity (or
Cleanness), and SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT,
all composed in the latter half of the 14th cen-
tury and written down around 1400. The poet’s
work suggests that he was well read, perhaps
trained as a clerk, and he was acquainted with life
in the higher social classes. Though he lived at the
same time as CHAUCER and LANGLAND, he seems
not to have been influenced by them. The Pearl
poet was more at home in the countryside and
traditions of northern and western Britain and
had little to do with the fashionable circles of
London.
The Pearl poet was part of the Alliterative Re-
vival, which involved a resurgence of interest in
earlier English heroic themes and the style of allit-
erative verse, which uses frequent repetition of
sound for musical effect. His use of scripture
proves the poet knew the Latin Bible, and the motif
of the allegorical dream-vision along with the
stanza formats and rhyme schemes are inherited
from French tradition.
The plot of Pearl is simple: The narrator, sor-
rowing over the grave of his two-year-old daugh-
ter, has a vision in which she appears to him. His
address to her conveys his sorrow:
“O Pearl!” said I, “in pearls arrayed,
Are you my pearl whose loss I mourn?
Lament alone by night I made. . . .”
As the poem proceeds, the young girl converses
with the narrator about the joys of heaven and the
errors of human grief. She grants him a glimpse of
Paradise, which so excites him that, when he tries
to join her, he is rudely awakened.
Composed in an intricate rhyme pattern, the
poem uses the image of the pearl on multiple lev-
els to represent the young girl, the delights of par-
adise, and the wisdom of Christian understanding.
The poem is at once an elegy for the daughter, a
consolation for loss, and an illumination of Chris-
tian doctrine, rendered in an artistic unity that
makes it a work of singular beauty in the canon of
Middle English literature.
Works by the Pearl Poet
The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Translated by
Casey Finch and edited by Malcolm Andrew and
C. Peterson. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993.
The Pearl Poem in Middle and Modern English. Edited
by William Vantuono. New York: University Press
of America, 1987.
Works about the Pearl Poet
Moorman, Charles. The Pearl-Poet. New York:
Twayne, 1968.
Rhodes, James Francis. Poetry Does Theology:
Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet. Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703) diarist
Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) was born in
1633, the fifth of 11 children of a tailor, John Pepys.
He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, on a
scholarship, receiving his bachelor’s degree in
1654. He secured a job as secretary to his relative
Sir Edward Montagu, and the following year mar-
ried 15-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel.
In 1660 Pepys began his Diary. He wrote in
code, solely for his own enjoyment. He begins with
the adventure of going to sea with his employer, Sir
Edward Montagu, to escort Charles Stuart from
218 Pearl poet
Holland for his coronation as King Charles II
(since the execution of Charles I in 1649 England
had been without a king). On the return journey
from Holland, Pepys heard the king’s stories of his
flight from the army that destroyed his father:
It made me ready to weep to hear the stories
that he told....As his traveling four days and
three nights on foot, every step up to the knees
in dirt...with nothing but a green coat and a
pair of country breeches on and a pair of coun-
try shoes, that made him so sore all over his
feet that he could scarce stir.
Soon after the royal party’s arrival in London,
Pepys was appointed to an administrative job in
the Royal Navy Dockyards; he served the navy for
the rest of his working life.
In 1661 Pepys observed the coronation of
Charles II. Pepys’s description of this day is so de-
tailed that he even includes the memory of desper-
ately needing an outhouse and of sneaking into the
banquet hall to get a bit of food from the tables.
Pepys admits to drinking too much that night, and
vomiting as a result.
Pepys’s journal is full of accounts of parties
where the wine flows freely. He is something of a
womanizer, and writes of his adventures with
women quite freely, yet his affairs do not alienate the
reader; rather, they allow Pepys to be seen as a be-
lievable, real person. His tender regard for his wife is
convincing too, as well as his pride in her beauty.
Pepys loved the theater, and the diary is an im-
portant source of information about the theatrical
scene in Restoration London. He was intellectu-
ally curious and was friends with many of the im-
portant thinkers of his day, whose conversations
can be reconstructed through his records.
His career was another focus of the Diary. Pepys
advanced through the ranks of the navy by being a
sharp observer, both of the people he worked with
and what needed to be done. Pepys’s meticulous
journal-keeping may have given him skills that
helped him do well professionally.
In 1665 he recorded London’s terrible epidemic
of bubonic plague:
This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-
lane, see two or three houses marked with a red
cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy
upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to
me....It put me into an ill conception ofmy-
self and my smell, so that I was forced to buy
some roll-tobacco to smell and to chaw, which
took away the apprehension.
One-fourth of the population of London was
killed by the plague.
The next year another tragedy struck London: the
Great Fire. Strong easterly winds and a summer
drought culminated in the worst destruction the city
would see until the Blitz of 1940. Pepys’s birthplace
was destroyed, but his home and office were spared.
He admits he was “much terrified in the nights . . .,
with dreams of fire and falling down of houses.”
In 1669 Pepys discontinued his diary because he
feared that his eyesight was failing. His wife died of
a fever the next year, but Pepys lived for another 34
years, achieving considerable rank in the navy and
winning an enviable sociable position. In 1684 he
was made president of the Royal Society. His friend
John Evelyn described him as “universally beloved,
hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled
in music, a very great treasurer of learned men.”
Pepys bequeathed his diary to his alma mater,
Magdalene College, but it was not deciphered until
the 19th century; an edited version was published
in 1825, and the full diary of almost 4,000 pages in
1893. One of Pepys’s most famous admirers was
the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94),
who notes Pepys’s sincerity:
He was not unconscious of his errors—far
from it; he was often startled into shame, often
reformed, often made and broke his vows of
change. But whether he did ill or well, he was
still his own unequalled self; still that entranc-
ing ego ofwhom alone he cared to write....He
Pepys, Samuel 219
shows himself throughout a sterling human-
ist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle
vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is
the best equipped of all to love his neighbors.
Works by Samuel Pepys
Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys
and John Evelyn. Edited by Guy de la Bedoyere.
Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 1997.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Abridged). Edited by
Richard Le Gallienne. New York: Random House,
2003.
Works about Samuel Pepys
Coote, Stephen. Samuel Pepys. New York: Palgrave,
2001.
Taylor, Ivan E. Samuel Pepys. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Tomalin, Claire. Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.
New York: Vintage, 2003.
Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de (1664–1743)
poet, dramatist, scholar
The Peruvian scholar Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo
produced more than 80 works covering a diverse
range of subjects, including history, religion, medi-
cine, literature, astronomy, and military engineering.
Born in Lima, Peralta was a Criollo or Creole,
the name given to persons of Spanish origin born
in the colonies. After studying law at the University
of San Marcos, he became professor of mathemat-
ics and later rector of that institution.
From 1718 to 1743 Peralta held the office of
cosmographer, completing Conocimientos de los
Tiempos, begun in 1680 by his predecessor, Juan
Ramón Koenig. Peralta also served as chief engi-
neer of Peru and comptroller of the audiencia, or
tribunal, of Lima. When the ancient wall of Callao
was destroyed by the earthquake of 1687, it was
Peralta who devised plans for its reconstruction.
Among his literary works for the stage are a
number of plays in the baroque style. They include
comedies such as Triunfo de amor y muerte (The
Triumph of Love and Death, 1710) and Afectos ven-
cen finezas (Affections Conquer Finenesses, 1720).
His tragedy La Rodoguna (1710) shows the influ-
ence of the French playwright
CORNEILLE.
Fluent in six languages, Peralta could write po-
etry in each of them. Perhaps the best known of his
poetic works is the epic Lima fundada o conquista
del Peru (The Founding of Lima or Conquest of
Peru, 1732), which deals with the life of Pizarro.
His other major work of poetry was Pasión y tri-
unfo de Cristo (Passion and Triumph of Christ,
1737).
Until 1730, when he published Historia de Es-
paña vindicada, Peralta’s work reflected a Euro-
pean worldview. With Lima fundada, however, he
began to target a Criollo readership. Like many
Criollos, Peralta was dissatisfied with the political
and cultural censorship exercised by Spain over its
colonies.
In Diálogo de los muertos: la causa académica
(Dialogue of the Dead: The Academic Case), mod-
eled on the Roman satirist Lucian, Peralta
ridiculed the institutions with which he had been
associated as an official. While he did not break
completely with traditional Spanish culture, he
nonetheless began to articulate a Criollo viewpoint
from which later radical intellectuals would de-
velop a distinct Latin American identity.
English Versions of Works by Pedro de
Peralta Barnuevo
Censorship and Art in Pre-Enlightenment Lima: Pedro
de Peralta Barnuevo’s Dialogo de Las Muertos: La
Causa Academica. Translated by Jerry M. Williams.
Madrid, Spain: Scripta Humanistica, 1994.
Peralta Barnuevo and the Discourse of Loyalty: A Crit-
ical Edition of Four Selected Texts. Translated by
Jerry M. Williams. Phoenix: Arizona State Uni-
versity, Center for Latin American Studies, 1997.
A Work about Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo
Hill, Ruth Ann. Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains:
Four Humanists and the New Philosophy. Liver-
pool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
220 Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de
Perrault, Charles (1628–1703) poet, fiction
writer
The son of Pierre Perrault, a magistrate in the Paris
Parlement, Charles Perrault received a law degree
in 1651. In 1662 he became a member of the Petite
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and in
that capacity designed and wrote inscriptions for
the palaces of the Louvre and Versailles. In 1672
he married Marie Guichon and had three children.
In 1671 Perrault was elected to the
ACADÉMIE
FRANÇAISE
. He resigned his government post in
1682, however, to dedicate his life to writing. He
described his public life in his Mémoires, which re-
mained unpublished until the 19th century. His
other works include Parallèle des Anciens et des
Modernes (1688–97), in which he claimed that
modern writers were superior to ancient classical
authors, and the poem “Le Siècle de Louis le
Grand” (1687), in which he claimed the age of
Louis XIV should have a Christian culture distinct
from that of the ancient world.
Perrault also authored numerous fairy tales, in-
cluding “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Puss
in Boots.” He originally titled his collection Contes
de ma Mère l’oye, or Tales of Mother Goose (1697),
a traditional French expression for folktales. They
became immensely popular in France and first ap-
peared in English in 1729.
Perrault based many of his tales on earlier sto-
ries, including works by Italian writers Basile and
Straparola, contributing his own elegant and witty
style to each.“Little Red Riding Hood,” however, is
said to be a Perrault original.
The settings of the tales are contemporary, and
each comes with a stated or implied moral. The
setting, for instance, in “Sleeping Beauty” is a
palace with a hall of mirrors resembling the one at
Versailles. And, according to Perrault, the moral of
the story is that, while it is a fine thing to wait 100
years for the right husband,“we can no longer find
a girl who would sleep so tranquilly.”
Perrault said that he wrote the Contes as moral
tales for children, but he also intended them to be
modern works that could be appreciated by a so-
phisticated, adult audience. As Jeanne Morgan
Zarucchi notes, Perrault wrote “one of the handful
of works whose message is accessible to later gen-
erations, and whose readership crosses barriers of
time and nationality.”
An English Version of Works by
Charles Perrault
Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Other Favorite Tales as
told by Charles Perrault. Translated by A. E. John-
son. New York: Abrams, 2000.
A Work about Charles Perrault
Zarucchi, Morgan, Jeanne. Perrault’s Morals for Mod-
erns. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.
Petrarch (Francesco Petracco)
(1304–1374) poet
Petrarch was born at Arezzo, in Tuscany. The
young poet who later signed his works “Petrarca”
grew up in Marseilles, France, studying Latin
grammar and rhetoric. In 1316 his father sent him
to the University of Montpellier to study law, but
Francesco was more interested in reading Latin
classics. When his father attempted to burn the
books he felt were wasting his son’s time, young
Francesco protested so loudly that his father
reached into the fire to rescue his two favorites:
Virgil and the Rhetorics of Cicero.
After his father’s death in 1326, Petrarch aban-
doned the legal profession and returned home to
write. A pivotal moment of his life took place on
April 6, 1327, when he saw and instantly fell in love
with a young woman whom he called Laura. Al-
though the two never married, the poems he wrote
for her completely transformed the genre of lyrical
poetry, ensuring Petrarch’s fame.
Petrarch moved to Vaucluse to devote himself
to a solitary life of study, correspondence with
close companions, and the writing of both Latin
and Italian poetry and prose. In 1341 he was
crowned poet laureate at Rome, a coveted honor.
He began to study the Greek language and found
Petrarch 221
inspiration in the Greek ideals of philosophy and
literature. In 1348 the Black Plague swept Italy,
claiming the lives of thousands, including his
beloved Laura, which lent a deep melancholy to
Petrarch’s poetry. In 1350 he received a letter from
an admirer named Giovanni
BOCCACCIO, and a life-
long friendship began.
A restless spirit all his life, beginning works and
then putting them aside or finishing them and not
sending them to their intended recipients, Petrarch
traveled frequently throughout his life. He lived
successively in Milan, Padua, and Verona, Italy, and
in his later years turned to revising, editing, and
collecting his finished works. He died at Arqua at
age 70.
For Petrarch, his contentment with the quiet
serenity of solitary life vied constantly with his de-
sire to travel and be of use to others. A peaceful
soul, he lived in a century characterized by famine,
plague, and the advent of the Hundred Years’ War.
Poets tended to see it as a century of moral decline
and looked with nostalgia to the Golden Age of
classical times. Though he loved the voices from
the past and addressed letters to some of his fa-
vorites, including Seneca and Horace, Petrarch de-
lighted in the artists of his own time, including
Dante and Boccaccio. Standing between the Mid-
dle Ages and the RENAISSANCE, and at the forefront
of Italian HUMANISM, Petrarch reaches us as the
voice of one man feeling the greatness within and
around him and captivated by the simplest mo-
ments of life.
While most famous as the plaintive lover of the
Canzoniere (the Lyric Poems, also called the
Rhymes), Petrarch tried his hand at a variety of
works, including a scholarly edition of Livy’s
Decades. In 1337 he began On Illustrious Men, a se-
ries of biographies he later extended to include Old
Testament and Christian heroes as well as those of
classical antiquity. He also wrote a series of Tri-
umphs, designed as allegorical contemplations on
Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity.
In 1343 Petrarch began the Secretum (Secret
Book), modeled on a work he adored, the Confessions
of Augustine. In these soul-searchings composed
as a dialogue between two characters named Pe-
trarch and Augustine, the distressed poet analyzes
his sins and imagines himself bound by two golden
chains: his love for Laura and his desire for glory.
His other works included On the Life of Solitude
(1346), addressed to his friend Philippe; On Reli-
gious Leisure (1356), addressed to his brother
Gherardo; and Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul
(1354). In 1367 he wrote On His Own Ignorance
and That of Many Others partly to dispel rumors
that he was excessively wealthy. In 1370 he com-
posed his last will and testament.
Throughout his life, Petrarch wrote letters in
verse, collected in Metrical Letters, sometimes sep-
arated as the Letters on Familiar Affairs and Let-
ters of Riper Years. One of his most read letters is
his epistle addressed to Posterity. Creating work
that would survive him was one of Petrarch’s life-
long concerns. He could not have foreseen that his
collection of Canzoniere would become one of the
most influential books of Western literature, that
the forms he used would be named after him (the
Petrarchan SONNET), or that his style would so in-
spire future generations that later writers would
not dare to call themselves poets unless they had
thoroughly read and studied Petrarch’s work.
Critical Analysis
The poems collected in the Canzoniere show an
impressive range of forms: There are 317 sonnets,
29 canzoni, nine sestinas, seven ballads, and four
madrigals. The metaphors and conceits that Pe-
trarch used to create a poetic language of love have
been so often imitated as to be extremely familiar
to contemporary readers, but in Petrarch’s time
these images were refreshingly new, such as his de-
scription of love at first sight in poem 61:
Oh blessed be the day, the month, the year,
the season and the time, the hour, the instant,
the gracious countryside, the place where I
was struck by those two lovely eyes that
bound me.
222 Petrarch
He goes on to describe himself as a prisoner held
in bondage by the force of love, calling Laura’s eyes
and Laura’s presence the bows and arrows of love
that have wounded his heart.
In his collection of poetry, Petrarch shows an
impressive depth of knowledge about the Latin
tradition of poetry (he had long studied authors
such as Ovid and Catullus), but he also takes ad-
vantage of the new respect for Italian writing won
by his predecessor, Dante. Petrarch opposes the
medieval tradition of writing solely to provide
moral instruction and instead, in the poetic intro-
duction to his works, points out that they are full
of literary, moral, and other defects. The author
seems to write out of a sense of deep shame and
awareness of his self-absorption and vanity. Even
so, he vows that the extent of his passion presses
him to write, and he goes on to do so with such
innovative expressions of beauty that, despite the
errors, he raises the experience of heartbreak to a
sublime transformation.
Throughout the Canzoniere, Petrarch explores
his inner feelings in great detail, exposing the peaks
of emotional ecstasy and the depths of human sin-
cerity, looking first at the vastness of creation and
then tenderly observing a single moment of won-
der. The poems contain a subtle irony, revealing
an author adept at describing natural works as well
as accurately portraying human nature. Some crit-
ics accused Petrarch of worshiping Laura to the
point of idolatry, but some felt his ability to un-
derstand and render the intricacies of human ex-
perience inspired in others a new respect for
individuality and potential, a foundation of hu-
manistic thought.
Along with Dante and Boccaccio, the other two
crowns in the “three crowns of Italy,” Petrarch’s
writing left an enduring stamp on European writ-
ers to follow. Poets such as France’s Pierre de
RON-
SARD and England’s Geoffrey CHAUCER employed
and elaborated on Petrarch’s language of love, as did
authors of the medieval romances. Significantly, Pe-
trarch’s influence is due not to his ambitious works
of epic scope but to his studies of the complex and
bewildering human heart. Of Petrarch’s poetry,
translator Mark Musa says, “the pleasure of reading
the Canzoniere [comes] suddenly, from its many
small revelations ...inviting us to rage, weep, or
laugh.” In a modern gallery of illustrious men, Pe-
trarch would certainly claim a place.
English Versions of Works by Petrarch
My Secret Book. Translated by J. G. Nichols. London:
Hesperus Press, 2002.
Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works.
Translated by Mark Musa. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
Shearer, Susan, S., ed. Petrarch: On Religious Leisure.
New York: Italica Press, 2002.
Works about Petrarch
Hainsworth, Peter. Petrarch the Poet. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1988.
Petrie, Jennifer. Petrarch. Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 1983.
Reeve, Henry. Petrarch. La Vergne, Tenn.: University
Press of the Pacific, 2002.
Robinson, James H. Petrarch: The First Modern
Scholar and Man of Letters. La Vergne, Tenn.: Uni-
versity Press of the Pacific, 2003.
Pico della Mirandola, Count Giovanni
(1463–1494) poet, nonfiction writer
One of the greatest and most influential writers of
the Italian RENAISSANCE, Giovanni Pico della Mi-
randola is celebrated for his contributions to the
HUMANISM movement, which emphasized the im-
portance of humankind in the universe and sought
to reconcile or integrate the classical, pagan past
with the Christian present.
Pico was born in Mirandola, a territory near
Modena, Italy. He received a thorough education,
including training in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and
Arabic. As a result of his studies, Pico ardently be-
lieved that all philosophies and theologies contained
important insights and were deserving of study. A
humanist and defender of scholastic philosophy,
Pico della Mirandola, Count Giovanni 223
Pico wrote several works, including Apologia, a de-
fense of his Oration; Heptaplus, an interpretation of
the Creation story in Genesis; De Ente et Uno (On
Being and Unity), a philosophical work that at-
tempts to reconcile Aristotelianism and Platonism;
as well as poems in Italian and Latin.
Oration on the Dignity of Man is his most cele-
brated work. In it, Pico elaborates upon Marcilio
Ficino’s belief in humankind’s universality and ar-
gues further that humans possess the freedom to
choose to live however they desire. In the following
passage, for example, God tells Adam:
Thou...art the molder and maker of thyself;
thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape
thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward
into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou
canst again grow upward from thy soul’s rea-
son into the higher natures which are divine.
In this passage and in others, Pico present humans
not as entities who are forced to act within a fixed
hierarchy of order, but as agents free to become
whatever they choose.
In his later years, Pico became increasingly con-
cerned with conflicts between religion and philoso-
phy, but his interest in reconciling multiple
philosophies and cultural beliefs and in the impor-
tance of individual agency did not waver. His em-
bracing of multiple viewpoints from a variety of
cultures and his interest in the nature of humankind
made him a model scholar for fellow humanists and
for those future humanist thinkers who followed.
An English Version of a Work by Count
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Pico Della Mirandola: On the Dignity of Man, On Being
and the One, Heptaplus. Translated by Charles
Glenn Wallis. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940.
A Work about Count Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola
Craven, William G. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:
Symbol of His Age: Modern Interpretations. Geneva:
Libraire Droz, 1981.
Pisan, Christine de (Pizan) (ca. 1364–
ca. 1431) poet, scholar
Christine de Pisan is considered one of the first
professional female writers. Born in Venice to
Thomas of Pisan, a physician and astrologer, the
young Christine moved with her family to Paris in
1368. In 1379 she married Étienne de Castel, a royal
secretary. The ascension of Charles VI in 1380 and
the death of her father in 1385 caused difficulties in
the family’s fortunes, and then the death of her hus-
band left Christine with three small children to
support. Where most women would have remar-
ried or entered a convent, Christine, who had re-
ceived more than the usual education for women,
thanks to her father, began to write. She first com-
posed love poetry and devotional texts, and then
turned to longer prose works. In 1418 she fled a col-
lapsing political scene and lived in seclusion for 11
years. In 1429 she wrote a celebration of the life of
Joan of Arc and, perhaps fortunately, did not live
to see her hero betrayed and executed.
Though she composed in French, Christine’s
writing shows a familiarity with Latin prose and
traditions. Her poetry and prose demonstrate her
versatility, technical mastery, and intellectual re-
finement. Born at court and practiced in courtesy,
she was subtle rather than revolutionary in her cri-
tiques of society, particularly its attitudes toward
women. She participated in the famous quarrel
over Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s The
Romance of the Rose, which she maintained was
immoral and unflattering in its representations of
women. In works such as the Book of Feats of Arms
and Chivalry (1410) and Book of the Three Virtues
(1405), the reader can see, cunningly concealed be-
hind her words, the outrage she felt over the way
women were treated in French society. This out-
rage achieved its best expression in her work in de-
fense of women most familiar to readers today, The
Book of the City of Ladies (1404–05).
In this book Christine uses a popular medieval
literary convention, the author’s conversation with a
series of allegorical figures, to celebrate the deeds of
valiant women of the past. This series of revelations
has the effect of highlighting the positive contribu-
224 Pisan, Christine de
tions women have made to history and challenging
current stereotypes of the nature and accepted social
status of women. In the City of Ladies the narrator,
who is female, converses with other female charac-
ters named Reason, Justice, and Rectitude, who offer
instruction to the reader in the ways of right-think-
ing and right action. This passage from the Book
shows Christine’s style, theme, and sly humor:
“After Lady Rectitude had told me all this, I an-
swered her, ‘Certainly, my lady, it seems to me
an outstanding honor to the feminine sex to
hear about so many excellent ladies. Everyone
should be extremely pleased that, in addition
to their other virtues, such great love could re-
side in a woman’s heart. . . . Let Mathéolus and
all the other prattlers who have spoken against
women with such envy and falsehood go to
sleep and stay quiet.’”
(II.19.1)
Scholar Maria Warner writes “The Book of the
City of Ladies represents a determined and clear-
headed woman’s attempt to take apart the structure
of her contemporaries’ prejudices.” Warner also ob-
serves, “Christine here is at her best as a storyteller
when she writes from personal truth and emotion,
and her rebukes rise from within the sting of lived
experience.” Though her advocating for education
for women was revolutionary for her time, Chris-
tine meant only to question, not overturn, social
order. Critic Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski states
Christine’s “dearest wishes were that women should
be recognized for their true worth and be treated
well,” and that “people should treasure learning.”
Christine used her pen as a tool in a larger struggle to
resist the social prejudices and pressures of her day,
and her work raises questions about violence toward
and treatment of women that have yet to be resolved.
English Versions of Works by
Christine de Pisan
Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan. Edited by Re-
nate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. New York: W.W. Nor-
ton, 1997.
The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Earl Jef-
freys Richards. New York: Persea Books, 1982.
Works about Christine de Pisan
Richard, Earl Jeffreys, ed. Christine de Pizan and Me-
dieval French Lyric. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2000.
Willard, Charity Cannon. Christine de Pizan: Her Life
and Works. New York: Persea Books, 1984.
Pléiade (1549–1589)
The Pléiade was a 16th-century group of poets and
critics who revolutionized French poetry. They
named themselves after a group of seven Hellenis-
tic tragic poets who flourished in Alexandria dur-
ing the third century
B.C. “Pleiad” is also the
astronomer’s name for a group of seven stars in the
constellation Taurus, as well as the term referring
to seven lovely mountain nymphs in Greek
mythology. It is an appropriate term for the seven
men who banded together to introduce classical
forms and clarity to French poetry during the
REN-
AISSANCE. The group consisted of its leader Pierre
de
RONSARD, and Joachim du BELLAY, Rémy Belleau,
Étienne Jodelle, Pontus de Tyard, Jean-Antoine
Baïf, and the humanist scholar Jean Daurat.
The official manifesto of the Pléiade, La Def-
fence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (The De-
fense and Illustration of the French Language), was
written by du Bellay and appeared in 1549. This
work clearly demands a break from the medieval
poetic traditions and forms and embraces the Re-
naissance rediscovery of classical models. Du Bel-
lay demands that poets should find new themes of
inspiration and create new genres based upon
Greek and Latin writers. Like Dante Aligheri had
argued almost 300 years before, du Bellay urges
writers to use French, rather than Latin, for their
serious work. However, he admits that the French
language needs help in becoming as expressive as
Latin or Greek and suggests that writers borrow
from the two classical languages, as well as from
Old French, and collect unusual words from the spe-
cial vocabularies of hunting, falconry, and various
Pléiade 225
handicrafts. The Pléiades introduced such impor-
tant forms as the alexandrine, the sestina, and the
SONNET into French poetry.
Ronsard and du Bellay were the strongest poets
of the Pléiade. They not only mastered classical
forms and found inspiration in classical themes, but
they also used fresh, innovative language and images
to capture universal human feelings that transcend
cultures. Both men believed in the French lan-
guage’s potential for great poetic expression, and
both used their knowledge of classical languages to
enrich French without Latinizing it. Ronsard, espe-
cially, seemed aware of time’s passage and the fleet-
ing sweetness of love and life; this infuses his poetry
with an appealing wistfulness. Du Bellay wrote two
great sonnet sequences, L’ Olive and Antiquitez de
Rome; the former is heavily influenced by PE-
TRARCH’s love sonnets, but the latter is more per-
sonal and original as it charts du Bellay’s stay in
Rome and his reactions to the ruins of the great
classical past and their comparison to the present.
Even though they would be repudiated by later
critics and poets, the Pléiade’s acknowledgment
and embrace of classical forms and inspiration
helped spring French poetry into the Renaissance
and set it on its path as one of the most important
national literatures of Europe.
An English Version of Works by the Pléiade
Leitch,Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.
Works about the Pléiade
Bailey, John Cann. The Claims of French Poetry: Nine
Studies in the Greater French Poets. Freeport, N.Y.:
Books for Libraries Press, 1967.
Castor, Grahame. Pléiade Poetics: A Study in Six-
teenth-Century Thought and Terminology. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Clements, Robert J. Critical Theory and Practice of The
Pléiade. New York: Octagon Books, 1970.
Satterthwaite, Alfred W. Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bel-
lay: A Renaissance Comparison. Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Poliziano, Angelo Ambrogini (Politian)
(1454–1494) poet, humanist
Poliziano is considered by many to be the most
brilliant humanist of the RENAISSANCE. Born in Tus-
cany, he went to Florence at age 10 to further his
education. He was talented and precocious, and
began to translate Homer at age 16. Several of his
Greek and Latin epigrams attracted the attention
of the powerful Lorenzo de’
MEDICI, who later as-
signed Poliziano the task of tutoring his son.
Poliziano’s first major literary effort was his trans-
lation of books two through five of Homer’s Iliad
into Latin. Between 1473 and 1478, the years when
he was part of the Medici household and had access
to Lorenzo’s formidable library, Poliziano produced
a variety of verses that are now considered exemplars
of the poetics of HUMANISM. His epigrams, elegies,
and odes show the influence of the Latin and Italian
masters
PETRARCH, Ovid, and Dante Alighieri. In
style and form, Poliziano not only adopted and im-
proved upon the works of his predecessors but also
positioned himself within a great historical tradition
of Latinate poetry reaching back to the time of the
Roman Empire. Far from being trapped in the past,
however, Poliziano, like other Renaissance thinkers,
looked to
CLASSICISM as a way to renew and revitalize
ancient forms of poetry in order to reflect new ways
of thinking. He became something of a cultural
celebrity, socializing with the most renowned schol-
ars and artists of his time. Poliziano was a personal
friend of PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA and Marsilo Ficino,
and his poetry was said to have inspired the paint-
ings of Botticelli and
MICHELANGELO.
Poliziano’s poetic masterpiece is his Stanze,
written in Italian between 1475 and 1478. The
poem praises the victory of Lorenzo’s brother Giu-
liano de’ Medici at a Florentine tournament in
1475. These tournaments were organized regularly
by the Medici to provide a public spectacle and a
demonstration of Medici power. Poliziano’s poem
describes the passion between Giuliano (the
“Julio” of the poem) and Simonetta, the young and
beautiful wife of Mario Vespucci (cousin of
Amerigo
VESPUCCI).
226 Poliziano, Angelo Ambrogini