Abstract
In the previous chapter, I offered a reading of Virgil’s Aeneid as a fundamentally Stoic poem shot through with a disruptive affective intensity associated early on with a maternal body driven by both grief and rage. Virgil’s depiction of the feminine ululatus as a version of the mythic song of the nightingale establishes a powerful literary and philosophical touchstone for later works, even in the absence of direct imitation.
Francesco Petrarca, My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 175.
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Wells, M.A. (2023). “Though Me Were Looth”: Translating Affect and the Maternal Body in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale”. In: Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27721-4_5
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