Resumen de A renaissance imitator of the "De pulice"
This article examines a pair of episodes in the Renaissance afterlife of the medieval pseudo-Ovidian poem De pulice (“The Flea”). I first consider the poem’s presence in La puce de Madame Des Roches (1582), focusing on the Pulex of Barnabé Brisson and the Amatoris et pulicis colloquutio of Jean Binet before suggesting a possible connection with the poem of Catherine Des Roches herself that opens the collection. These Puce poets see in the De pulice a model for poetry that would grant otherwise impossible access to a female body. Having thus laid out the central concerns of the pseudo-Ovidian De pulice and examined some relatively straightforward cases of its reception, I turn in the second part of the article to my main subject, the earlier elegy De bello pulicum of Nello Rainaldi. After briefly introducing this little-known author, I edit the poem on the basis of three fifteenth-century manuscripts and explicate its logic and its relationship to the De pulice.
