Front cover image for The myth of Sisyphus : renaissance theories of human perfectibility

The myth of Sisyphus : renaissance theories of human perfectibility

Print Book, English, ©2007
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, ©2007
614 p. ; 25 cm
9780838641163, 0838641164
190796282
Acknowledgments9(4)
Introduction: Myth and the Quest for Human Excellence13(14)
Sisyphus: from Myth to Archetype
27(23)
1>The myth of Sisyphus and the archetypal idealization of process over achievement
The Stoic Sisyphus
50(17)
The Sisyphean archetype and quest for moral perfectibility in Stoic philosophy from Zeno, Chrysippus, Epictetus, and Seneca to Cicero and Marcus Aurelius
The Patristic Sisyphus
67(19)
The spiritual quest for faith and redemption in the works of Origen, Arnobius, Clement of Alexandria, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine
Sisyphus in Medieval and Renaissance Mythography
86(24)
Moral and allegorical versions and interpretations of the myth of Sisyphus in the works of Lactantius Fulgentius, Isidore of Seville, John Ridewall, Giovanni Boccaccio, Thomas Cooper, Giglio Giraldi, Natale Conti, Vicenzo Cartari, Abraham Fraunce, Henry Peacham, Stephen Bateman, and Alexander Ross
Sisyphus as Astral Magician
110(26)
The quest for human and material perfectibility through astrology, alchemy, and astral magic in the works of Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Johannes Reuchlin, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and John Dee
Sisyphus as Humanist
136(57)
Humanism and the dignity of man in the works of Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Bartolomeo Facio, Platina, Lorenzo Valla, Nicholas Cusanus, Giannozzo Manetti, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Pietro Pomponazzi
Humanism and eugenic education in the works of Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Elyot, and Roger Ascham
Humanism and utopianism in Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, and Johan Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis
Sisyphus as Lover
193(120)
Philo Judaeus, Plato, Plotinus, and Nicholas Cusanus: on divine love
Plato and Marsilio Ficino on Platonic love in the Symposium and the Commentary on Plato's Symposium
The Renaissance love dialogues of Leone Ebreo's (Judah Abravanel) Dialoghi d'Amore [The Philosophy of Love] and Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani
Giordano Bruno, De gli eroici furori [Of heroic frenzies] of the Sisyphean lover
Francesco Petrarch's erotic and spiritual lover in Il Canzoniere
Pierre de Ronsard's perfectibility of sensual love in Les Amours de Cassandre and Sonets pour Helene
Sir Philip Sidney and the aspirations and follies of the unrequited lover in Astrophil and Stella
Sisyphus as Hero
313(114)
Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance conceptions of the hero and heroic action
The Sisyphean hero in medieval romance: Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur
The indeterminate perfectibility of the courtier hero: Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano [The Book of the Courtier]
Edmund Spenser's Sisyphean heroes in The Faerie Queene: Prince Arthur
The Red Crosse Knight and the mysteries of holiness
Sir Guyon's paradoxical discipline of Stoic temperance
Britomart's quest for human perfectibility through the mythical transformations of chaste love
Sir Artegall's ascending and descending forms of justice
Sir Calidore: the endless labor of human perfectibility through courtesy in life and in art
Notes427(117)
Bibliography544(53)
Index597