Lozinskaya Evgeniya Valentinovna – Senior Researcher at the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences
This article examines some aspects of the disputes about poetry in the fifteenth century, which have received less attention from scholars than the treatises of the Cinquecento period or, on the contrary, the earlier conceptions of Mussato, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Poetologists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries honed their arguments in defence (or defamation) of poetry within the medieval poetological topics, but in doing so they prepared the moment when its dignity would no longer be questioned and the theory could move on to questions of poetic mastery. On the material of several works little known in domestic scholarship, as well as a few betterstudied treatises by Salutati, Bruni, and the Florentine Neoplatonists, several thematic complexes around which fifteenth-century poetological thought was centred will be characterised. These include: arguments for and against the divine origin of poetry and its place in relation to other intellectual activities; allegory in poetry and in Scripture; the problem of the idolatry of ancient poets and the theory of their secret monotheism; the influence of poetry on the mores of readers; and the nature of poetic creativity.
Coluccio Salutati; Giovanni Dominici; Francesco Fiano; Girolamo Savonarola; Ermolao Barbaro; Cristoforo Landino; Neoplatonism; furore poetico; allegory