The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative - Dorothy (University of Arkansas) Stephens - Bog

Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the Petrarchan tradition while flirting with a very different kind of feminine image, creating an alternative form of eroticism to which later writers responded.