Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>An important characteristic of Italian minne-poetry in the late Middle Ages is the negotiation of the Sacred and the Profane. Nonetheless, Dante and Petrarch, the most important representatives of Italian minne-poetry, enter this negotiation in very different ways. Dante proposes to align mundane minne-poetry - as a form of minne-theology - with sacralization; with that, Dante seems to be in perfect harmony with his epoch, commonly referred to as Christian or theocentric Middle Ages. But looking more closely, Dante’s sacralization of courtly love reveals itself to be an outrageous provocation of Christian orthodoxy: Dante’s minne-poetry presents itself as a supplement to the Gospel’s promise of Salvation, and thus obviously competes with the institutionalized religion. Petrarch, very much concerned to be perceived as the one to overcome the ‘Dark Ages’ represented by Dante and from there as the founding authority of what we call Renaissance, quotes Dante’s sacralization of the courtly love in order to cancel demonstratively its claim to ontological substance. Different to Dante, Petrarch avoids all heretic appearance by presenting the divinization of the minne-lady as a mere phantasm which is finally recognized as the result of a morally erroneous conception of love. Therefore with Petrarch, Christian orthodoxy is not overtly contested. This paradoxically clears the way for a genuine worldly poetry in which art itself gains the aura of the sacred: thus with Petrarch, the will to balance religion and love becomes a driving force of secularization.</jats:p>