Jeffrey N. Peters and Katharina N. Piechocki, eds., "Early Modern Clouds I." Romance Quarterly 68, 2 (2021) and "Early Modern Clouds II." Romance Quarterly 68, 3 (2021).
The essays in these two special issues reflect upon the multiform relations that hold between clouds and artistic production in early modern Europe. To what degree, we ask, do clouds embody a mode of depiction bound up with the expression of the ineffable? How do the constitutive tensions governing the evanescent shape of the clouds – e.g., they are at once absolutely devoid of being and fundamentally capable, as Aristophanes put it, of turning into anything at all – echo, derive from, and give form to the multiplicities of the poetic? More specifically, how do clouds acquire new meaning and generate new art forms when set to music or designed as operatic stage machines? How do the structuring qualities of clouds described by tradition as both masculine and feminine speak to and for the gendering of the poetic enterprise? How do the important developments in natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inform early modern understandings of clouds as an instance of physical and conceptual knowledge often derided as uncertain and speculative, and what effect did that derision have, if any, on the ways artists approached and learned from what we call the “poetics of meteorology”?
Table of contents
Early Modern Clouds I
1. Jeffrey N. Peters and Katharina N. Piechocki, "Early Modern Clouds and the Poetics of Meteorology: An Introduction" (pp. 65-78)
2. Juliette Cherbuliez, "Jacques Callot's Billows, Puffs, and Plumes" (pp. 79-101)
3. Eugenio Refini, "Clouds as Synesthetic Metaphors Across Baroque Poetry and Music" (pp. 102-113)
4. Alison Calhoun, "What Cloud Machines Tell Us About Early Modern Emotions" (pp. 114-126)
Early Modern Clouds II
5. Vincent Barletta, "Clouds As Chaos Machines" (pp. 130-143)
6. Jeffrey N. Peters, "Clouds, Style, and Poetic Generation in Descartes's Météores (1637) (pp. 144-159)
7. Katharina N. Piechocki, "Clouds, Nuptials, Nubifications: At the Origins of Operatic Poetics" (pp. 160-176)
8. Mark Rosen, "Cartography and the Other Side of the Clouds" (pp. 177-195)
Early Modern Clouds I & II, available here (freely accessible for download from Taylor & Francis for the next several months:
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vroq20/68/2?nav=tocList
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vroq20/68/3?nav=tocList