Laura and Petrarch: An Intriguing Case of Cyclical Love Dynamics

Three ordinary differential equations are proposed to model the dynamics of love between Petrarch, a celebrated Italian poet of the 14th century, and Laura, a beautiful but married lady. The equations are nonlinear but can be studied through the singular perturbation approach if the inspiration of the poet is assumed to have very slow dynamics. In such a case, explicit conditions are found in the appeals of Laura and Petrarch and in their behavioural parameters that guarantee the existence of a globally stable slow-fast limit cycle. These conditions are consistent with the relatively clear portrait of the two personalities one gets while reading the poems addressed to Laura. On the basis of the sparse and only qualitative information available, the calibration of the parameters is also performed; the result is that the calibrated model shows that the poet's emotions have been following for about 20 years a quite regular cyclical pattern ranging from the extremes of ecstasy to despair. All these findings agree with the recent results of Frederic Jones who, through a detailed stylistic and linguistic analysis of the poems inspired by Laura, has discovered Petrarch's emotional cycle in a fully independent way

Small discoveries can have great consequences in love affairs: the case of "Beauty and the Beast"

A mathematical model is proposed for interpreting the love story portrayed by Walt Disney in the film 'Beauty and The Beast'. The analysis shows that the story is characterized by a sudden explosion of sentimental involvements, revealed by the existence of a saddle-node bifurcation in the model. The paper is interesting not only because it deals for the first time with catastrophic bifurcations in specific romantic relationships, but also because it enriches the list of examples in which love stories are satisfactorily described through Ordinary Differential Equations

University Authors, 2015

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/univ-authors/1002/thumbnail.jp

Complex Dynamics in Romantic Relationships

Minimal models composed of two ordinary differential equations are considered in this paper to mimic the dynamics of the feelings between two persons. In accordance with attachment theory, individuals are divided into secure and non-secure individuals, and in synergic and non-synergic individuals, for a total of four different classes. Then, it is shown that couples composed of secure individuals, as well as couples composed of nonsynergic individuals can only have stationary modes of behavior. By contrast, couples composed of a secure and synergic individual and a non-secure and non-synergic individual can experience cyclic dynamics. In other words, the coexistence of insecurity and synergism in the couple is the minimum ingredient for complex love dynamics. The result is obtained through a detailed local and global bifurcation analysis of the model. Supercitical Hopf, fold and homoclinic bifurcation curves are numerically detected around a Bogdanov-Takens codimension-2 bifurcation point. The existence of a codimension-2 homoclinic bifurcation is also ascertained. The bifurcation structure allows one to identify the role played by individual synergism and reactiveness to partner's love and appeal. It also explains why aging has a stabilizing effect on the dynamics of the feelings. All results are in agreement with common wisdom on the argument. Possible extensions are briefly discussed at the end of the paper

Possibilities of Lyric:Reading Petrarch in Dialogue

Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.A ​“Miscellaneous Enterprise” | 1–15The Shape of Desire: Metamorphosis and Hybridity in Rvf 23 and Rvf 70 | 17–44Openness and Intensity: Petrarch’s Becoming Laurel in Rvf 23 and Rvf 228 | 45–63​“Lust in Action” : Control and Abandon in Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare | 65–84Declensions of ​“Now” : Lyric Epiphanies in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch | 85–108Extension: Reaching the Beloved in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch | 111–33Body: Dante’s and Petrarch’s Lyric Eschatologies | 135–62Radure / Clearings | ANTONELLA ANEDDA ANGIOY | 163–84Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue. With an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy, Cultural Inquiry, 18 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-18

Petrarch and Boccaccio

The early modern and modern cultural world in the West would be unthinkable without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Despite this fact, there is still no scholarly contribution entirely devoted to analysing their intellectual revolution. Internationally renowned scholars are invited to discuss and rethink the historical, intellectual, and literary roles of Petrarch and Boccaccio between the great model of Dante’s encyclopedia and the ideas of a double or multifaceted culture in the era of Italian Renaissance Humanism. In his lyrical poems and Latin treatises, Petrarch created a cultural pattern that was both Christian and Classical, exercising immense influence on the Western World in the centuries to come. Boccaccio translated this pattern into his own vernacular narratives and erudite works, ultimately claiming as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his contemporary age. The volume reconsiders Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s heritages from different perspectives (philosophy, theology, history, philology, paleography, literature, theory), and investigates how these heritages shaped the cultural transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era, as well as European identity

Author Index

Author Index: CIT Vol. 16 (2008), No 1–

Ties that Bind: Women and Friendship in Early Modern Italy

This dissertation is a comparative study of literary texts authored by sixteenth-century Italian women that treat female friendship across the genres of epistolary writing, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry. The primary works under consideration include the correspondence between Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471–1526) and Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), the lyric poems authored by women in Lodovico Domenichi’s anthology Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (1559), and Margherita Sarrocchi’s heroic poem the Scanderbeide (1623). In addition to the long-standing classical and Christian notions of friendship that held strong in Renaissance Italy, the genres of epistolary writing, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry each had a distinct and mostly male literary tradition of friendship. The literary works in this study reveal the various ways early modern Italian women contributed to their respective genres, and moreover, to larger cultural discourses on friendship by inserting the female perspective and experience. Their writings not only illuminate their understandings and interpretations of female bonds but also demonstrate their use of writing to initiate and maintain friendships with other women. Chapter 1 looks at women’s epistolary prose through the correspondence between two princesses who were sisters-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess of Urbino, and Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua. Focusing primarily on letters exchanged during the beginning years of their friendship, I show how the two noblewomen relied on letter writing to express and reciprocate sentiments of intimacy. Chapter 2 on the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, the first all-female lyric anthology edited by Lodovico Domenichi, analyzes the friendship poems—sonnet exchanges between women to celebrate and form literary friendships and single-authored lyric that depict women’s bonds—present in the collection. Looking at these two types of lyric in tandem, I argue that Petrarchism authorized women’s expressions and representations of female friendship. Chapter 3 focuses on the heroic poem of Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617). Drawing from her classical and Renaissance predecessors who in their heroic poems depict and highlight friendships between male warriors, Sarrocchi revises the tradition by portraying and celebrating the bond that develops between two of the poem’s female protagonists, Rosmonda and Silveria.While much has been explored with respect to male friendship in Italian Renaissance literature, the topic of female friendship has remained mostly untouched. With this study, I therefore address this need to uncover women’s discourses on friendship by providing alternative perspectives and new insights on a subject that was traditionally understood in male terms

UA35/11 Student Honors Bulletin

Student research papers chosen by each college as best of the academic year. Bolte, William. Use of Government Documents in Small and Medium-Sized Libraries and Future Utilization Prospects Brevit, Valery. Development of the Concepts of Infinity Cook, Ken. KIM-1 Calculator Interface Irwin, Tom. Status Preservation in Three Characteristic Radical Right Groups Logan, Ben. Jungian Psychoanalysis of the Petrarchan Lover Moore, James Jr. Communication Problems and the Families of Schizophrenics Nash, Jeffrey. St. Luke as Historian Porto, Eugenia. In Defense of Camus Roberson, Philip. The Religious Thought of Rabindranath Tagore Wood, Irene. The Them of Incest in Dickens\u27 Hard Time