Love Animal: Animal Motifs in Croatian Early Renaissance Love Poetry

Abstract

Animal motifs were very popular in medieval bestiaries and love poetry, especially in Provençal and Petrarchan poetry. Afterwards they spread throughout European Renaissance love poetry and they are found in love poems by Šiško Menčetić (1457–1527) and Džore Držić (1461–1501), the very first Croatian Renaissance poets. This paper examines some of the animal motifs present in their poems, in order to establish whether they could provide a better understanding of the luralism of Croatian Renaissance love poetry, which cannot be reduced to Petrarchism alone, and of the extraliterary context to which certain animal motifs are related. Our research shows that e.g. motifs of snakes and birds are linked to various types of love discourse; animal motifs related to the topos of love hunt are also analysed. It is shown that animal motifs are potentially polysemous and that their usage follows conventions of the genre and norms of a particular type of love discourse with which they are associated, while their meaning is more precisely defined
in the context of the poem.