ABSTRACT
Both Petrarchism and Neoplatonic love philosophy exhibited a distinct ambiguity towards the natural world. Did the lover’s impulse towards an idea of perfection require the rejection and transcendence of nature, or was it possible that it could itself be redeemed? In spite of the dualistic attitudes which had shaped these systems, they both articulated some hope of the transformation of man’s earthly environment. In terms which paralleled biblical descriptions of the Wisdom figure, the love discourses represented the female object of a chaste desire as a vital point of intersection between a fallen and mutable material world and a transcendent and unchanging realm, equivalent to the Platonic World of Ideas. Petrarch’s Laura was represented within an earthly paradise (like Dante’s Beatrice when he first encountered her in the Purgatorio); the Neoplatonist Giordano Bruno described Elizabeth I as engirdling the new world of the Americas. Thus paradoxically, while the fear of sexuality which was central to these systems (especially the sexuality of woman) involved a rejection of the materiality of the body, the female beloved also emblematized in her person the possibility of a golden age in which spirit would once more be immanent in matter.
