Love and history: The Renaissance Italian connection

Poetry was a capital means of communication in Italian Renaissance cities, thus its importance for historians. lit the ideal of a perfect love, amatory verse made a shadowy critique of the troubled social world, and its religious trappings endorsed the critique by pressing the poet-lover closer to the promise of salvation. Elevated in tone and employing a highly select diction, Renaissance love poetry had a variety of social uses. It sewed to define the upper-class male; it was a distillation of the language of compliment and lament at the princely courts, hence an idiom for clients when addressing patrons; it was a code of refinement for learned or socially-ambitious men, whether at the courts or in the republics; and with its noble stances, it was a ready means of finding temporary solace from distress and social frustration. But it was most at home in the narcissism of the princely courts, where all its adjectival and metaphorical referents found their vital ground, terminating in the self-love of the male lover The refined love poetry of the Renaissance had nothing to do with marriage or ''popular'' love, a more ''carnal'' and practical sentiment. Misogyny was and is the secret darkly hidden in that well-wrought verse.