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Elizabeth J. Bellamy here casts new theoretical light on the Renaissance genre of the dynastic epic. Drawing upon Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to illuminate the emergence of an epic \"subjecthood,\" she focuses on Virgil'sAeneid, Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Spenser'sFaerie Queene in an attempt to demonstrate how the operations of the unconscious may be interpreted within narrative history. Bellamy first evaluates the psychoanalytic approach to epic as a possible alternative to the new historicism. Turning to theAeneid, she discusses Freud's'neurotic'relation to Rome as a founding image for a historical unconscious. She then interweaves a genealogy of epic subjecthood with the motif of the translatio imperii, likening the'translations of power'that constitute the translatio imperii to extended meditations on the fate of Troy throughout literary history. According to Bellamy, the epic genre manifests a repeated displacement and repression of its Trojan origins, and the doomed city of Troy represents the locus of epic's own narrative narcissism. Offering provocative analyses of epic temporality and of the function of the death drive in epic narrative, she concludes that dynastic epic may be seen as a structure of narcissistic desire which undermines the capacity of the epic to embody a fully articulated historical subject. Translations of Power will enliven current debates among scholars and students of Renaissance culture, literary theory, gender studies, and psychoanalytic criticism.

By illustrating how early modern English writers created their works in the context of a longstanding cultural inheritance from antiquity, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy offers a new approach to the history of early modern cartography and its influences on literature.

Bellamy examines and constrasts key representations of chastity in English literary history in the continuum from Spenser to Milton.

As the rex quondam rexque futurus whose moment of self-recognition within Tudor prophetic destiny is cut short by an “vntimely breach,” Arthur underscores the highly ambivalent relationship between epic history and time—an ambivalence that necessarily situates every dynastic epic on the obscure threshold not only between history and psyche, but also between time and psyche. After all, the practice of psychoanalysis itself is intimately and ambivalently bound up with temporality. We can consider, for example, Lacan’s controversial “variable length” encounters during which he often chose to conclude the “fifty-minute” session prematurely and arbitrarily as a means of disrupting the

In Canto VIII of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, a Danish warrior informs the Christian leader Goffredo of the death of Sweno, who was ambushed by the Arabs. He tells Goffredo that he has received supernatural orders to deliver Sweno’s sword to Rinaldo, who is destined to avenge the Dane’s death. In an earlier version of the Liberata, the episode of Sweno’s sword incites far greater hostility, for Rinaldo competes with his own leader Goffredo for possession of the sword, which, in this version, assumes greater mythic proportions.¹ But in the final version, Tasso eliminated the habendi libido of competitive rivalry altogether.

When Freud quotes from Jacob Burckhardt in his essay “The Moses of Michelangelo”¹ the act invites us to ponder the larger question: what would constitute a meaningful convergence of psychoanalysis and the Renaissance (or a “psychoanalyssance,” to coin a neologism)? Freud’s fascination with the Renaissance is, of course, also revealed in his by now virtually canonical discussions of Shakespeare, but I propose that we turn brief attention to some of the specific implications of Freud’s use of Burckhardt.² Certainly what is most intriguing is its embodiment of a symbolic convergence of two powerful epistemic moments in the history of ideas:

This study of dynastic epic began with a consideration of the significance of the city not seen, key cities of antiquity that have served as crucial sites of mediation between psyche and history. If the historical and narrative space of the Aeneid traces a path between Troy and Rome as the cities not seen by Aeneas, and if Tasso inadvertently “remembers” an unseen Troy, even as he celebrates Jerusalem as a city finally seen and recaptured by the Crusaders, then Spenser’s Faerie Queene succeeds in providing a vision of the heavenly city itself. In perhaps the most expansively visionary moment

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud explores the possibility of a pathology of cultural communities. If the development (or decline) of civilizations is analogous to the psychic history of the individual, then, Freud argues, “may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations … have become ‘neurotic’?”¹ Freud’s diagnosis of civilizations as “neurotic” is not as tendentious as it may seem. In his specific conception of neurosis, symptoms arise as a result of psychic conflicts whose origins lie in the subject’s childhood history. Thus neurosis may be viewed temporally as the

The Carthaginian Dido’s suicide by means of a Trojan weapon at this point prompts a consideration of the relationship between weapons and epic history. Romance, as we shall see, treats (displaced) weapons very differently from Virgilian epic; and the weapons of romance, rather than carrying us further along the signifying chain of empire, double back with a vengeance on Troy as the memory-trace of epic. In Book VIII of the Aeneid, Aeneas’s mother Venus presents to her son the gift of a suit of armor forged by Vulcan. The shield, clearly modeled on the shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles