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Grieving over the death of Charles IX and longing for his Hélène, Ronsard concludes that "l'Amour et la Mort n'est qu'une mesme chose."If this selection of papers from the 1990 Renaissance Society of America conference in Toronto relates Eros to Thanatos less boldly, most of the essays treat love and death in similarly provocative ways.The editors make no effort to present an overview or even, alas, to edit, but their collection offers many insights into specific texts.Since I cannot deduce any larger themes, though, and at the risk of seeming as arbitrary as love and as relentless as death, I will describe the articles as the editors present them: alphabetically by author.According to Ellen Anderson, Cervantes' s El ruflan dichoso revises the Symposium's notion that we all seek our lost other halves.In Rufian, love gives the self to another, sharing a larger self and taking on the other's sin.Distinguishing this love from that praised in The Courtier, a text she reads without irony, Anderson seems to linkBembo's ladder of love to Plato's Aristophane' s fancy of once undivided globular humanoids, not to his Diotima' s language ofascent.Yet if oversimplifying neoplatonism, she is eloquent on love that does not demand beauty or virtue.Next, Linda Austern's "Love, Death and Ideas of Music in the English Renaissance" correlates attitudes to music with more moralistic Renaissance views and shows how sexual doubts sus- tained an ambivalence toward music's power.André Dulaurens's Des maladies mélancholiques, says Donald Beecher, "was arguably the most clearly reasoned and cogent statement" on erotic melancholy.He shows Dulaurens forsaking scholastic thought, applying Galenic humoral theory, and assuming a "somatopsychic" etiology.Sufferers, we hear, should try exercise, social distraction, purges to eliminate bile, moisturizers, and narcotics.William Bowen's Ficino might find the implied materialism depressing: the Florentine's belief thatGod's creative love works through harmony "explains the beauty of music" and gives
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