The idea of pastoral poetry as therapy against love-melancholy is well rehearsed throughout the Renaissance. Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1589) and Monteverdi Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605) represent two effective responses to the therapeutic urgencies of the pastoral. Guarini’s famous pastoral ushers in a new form of dramatic poetry: tragicomedy, that is, with its tragic-in-the-comic purging formula and its advocacy for music as a necessary catalyst for the purging effect of poetry. Monteverdi’s Book V co-opts to a great extent Guarini’s pastoral in order to issue a program for a new tragic-in-the-comic aesthetics of musical grieving with an obvious cathartic purpose. Both efforts, then, are symptomatic signs of a culture that is not only particularly keen on the therapeutic function of the pastoral; it also pursues that therapeutic function by means of a profound reflection on aesthetics that shows a striking continuity across disciplinary lines.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Schneider, F., (2025), "Pastoral Therapies for the Heartbroken in Guarini's Pastor Fido and Monteverdi's Book V", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Schneider, Federico. "Pastoral Therapies for the Heartbroken in Guarini's Pastor Fido and Monteverdi's Book V." Quaderni d'italianistica 29 (1): 2009. 73-103. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v29i1.8494. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.