Sappho in Renaissance Literature

Abstract

Sappho in Renaissance Literature argues that Sappho’s poetry and sexuality were far more influential on early modern literature than critics have acknowledged. In spite of the centrality of classical literature to Renaissance culture, scholars have long suggested that the Renaissance obsession with antiquity did not extend to Sappho (7th c. BCE). Queer historians and literary critics alike have argued that Renaissance homophobia and sexism accelerated the censorship that they allege had already left Sappho’s poetry in fragments by the mid 16th century. To the contrary, my original transcription, translation, and analysis of previously unexamined works by early modern scholars reveal that Renaissance readers possessed a substantial and detailed knowledge of Sappho’s poetry and sexuality. The scholarly focus on Sappho’s suppression and fragmentation has caused scholars to neglect the large cache of 15th century commentaries, poems, and editions of Sappho that, far from eliding Sappho’s sexuality, preserve, explore, and theorize the “sapphism” that would come to define our contemporary queer culture. My dissertation presents some of these Latin and Greek works in English for the first time. By including these texts in the narrative of Sappho’s early modern afterlife, my dissertation arranges the scattered examples of Renaissance Sapphic imitation in a continuous tradition while surfacing new readings of Sappho’s influence. In chapters on the early modern reception of Horace, Catullus, and Ovid, the Renaissance commentaries of Domizio Calderini and Angelo Poliziano, the early editions of Sappho’s poetry by Henri Estienne and Fulvio Orsini, and the Sapphic imitations of Philip Sidney and John Donne, I argue that the early moderns continually imagined the missing pieces of Sappho’s literary corpus in their own works. Not only did poets like Sidney and Donne imitate Sappho’s poems, they conjured Sappho as a literary character—fusing the many accounts of her gender, sexuality, and poetry into a figure that challenged early modern notions of authorship, femininity, and desirability. My dissertation centers Sappho in the Renaissance project of sexual and gendered invention and presents her as a queer, female alternative to male-dominated systems of transmission. I argue that Sappho’s simultaneous status as the canonical founder of lyric poetry and a queer challenger of literary norms makes her essential both to our understanding of the queer past and our imagination of the queer future.