The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric examines the poetics of meditation in the French love lyric at the height of the Lyonnais Renaissance as illustrated by one of the country's most prominent writers. Maurice Sc?ve's D?lie is the first French sequence of poems devoted to a single woman in the manner of Petrarch's Rime. It is also the first Renaissance work to use emblems in a sustained work on love.

At their core, most amatory lyrics involve a triple relation among lover, beloved, and the meaning of love. Whether the poet-lover is a...