“Dolcissima morte”: The death of the woman in the birth of the male poet

This study investigates representations of women, death, and mourning in lyric poetry written by men of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in an effort to explain why several of the most influential poets of this period portrayed the death of a beloved woman as a key to a new and better life for a man. My analyses define a chain of intertextuality that grew out of Dante's words about the dead Beatrice. In tracing connections between the works of Dante, Petrarch, Alain Chartier, Charles d'Orléans, and Pierre de Ronsard, I discuss how the voices of Dante and Petrarch became authoritative voices of mourning and show how they and their French successors played on cultural associations of the living woman with death to create a consolatory tradition that associates the dead woman with renewed life. I use psychoanalytic and feminist theories to interpret the male anxieties toward women and death reflected in the mental images of these authors and to elucidate the content, context, and implications of their creations. My examination demonstrates that the selected writers take advantage of male fears of women and death—phenomena that leave the men here powerless—to empower their writing subjects, by turning the tragic loss of a lady into a great psychological and literary benefit. Ultimately, this study shows that, in many senses, the birth of the early modern male poet revolves around the death of the beautiful young woman.