At the center of Petrarch's vision, announcing a new way of seeing the world, was the individual, a sense of the self that would one day become the center of modernity as well. This self, however, seemed to be fragmented in Petrarch's work, divided among the worlds of philosophy, faith, and love of the classics, politics, art, and religion, of Italy, France, Greece, and Rome. In recent decades scholars have explored each of these worlds in depth. In this work, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows for the first time how all these fragmentary explorations relate to each other, how these separate worlds are part of a common vision. Written in a clear and passionate style, The Worlds of Petrarch takes us into the politics of culture, the poetic imagination, into history and ethics, art and music, rhetoric and theology. With this encyclopedic strategy, Mazzotta is able to demonstrate that the self for Petrarch is not a unified whole but a unity of parts, and, at the same time, that culture emerges not from a consensus but from a conflict of ideas produced by opposition and dark passion. These conflicts, intrinsic to Petrarch's style of thought, lead Mazzotta to a powerful rethinking of the concepts of "fragments" and "unity" and, finally, to a new understanding of the relationship between them.

Franceso Petrarch (1304-1374), creator of the sonnet form, remained for more than three hundred years the most influential poet in Europe, his works more widely read than even those of Dante. This collection contains English language versions of his poems from across six centuries, in a wide variety of translations and reinterpretations. Spanning the Trionfi series and the Canzoniere - Petrarch's empassioned sonnet-sequence concerning his beloved Laura - it also includes great English poems influenced by Petrarch. From Chaucer's early adaptation of a Petrarchan sonnet in Troilus and Criseyde to the sixteenth century translations by the Earl of Surrey, Byron's mocking consideration of the Canzoniere in Don Juan and Ezra Pound's parody Silet, all provide a unique insight into the significance of the founder of the European lyric tradition.

An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet. Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private. In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.

Die Buchreihe Mimesis präsentiert unter ihrem neuen Untertitel Romanische Literaturen der Welt ein innovatives und integrales Verständnis der Romania wie der Romanistik aus literaturwissenschaftlicher und kulturtheoretischer Perspektive. Sie trägt der Tatsache Rechnung, dass die faszinierende Entwicklung der romanischen Literaturen und Kulturen in Europa wie außerhalb Europas neue weltweite Dynamiken in Gang gesetzt hat, welche die großen Traditionen der Romania fortschreiben und auf neue Horizonte hin öffnen. In Mimesis kommt ein transareales, die europäische und die außereuropäische Welt romanischer Literaturen und Kulturen zusammendenkendes Verständnis der Romanistik zur Geltung, das über nationale wie disziplinäre Grenzziehungen hinweg die oft übersehenen Wechselwirkungen zwischen unterschiedlichen Traditions- und Entwicklungslinien in Europa und den Amerikas, in Afrika und Asien entfaltet. Im Archipel der Romanistik zeigt Mimesis auf, wie die dargestellte Wirklichkeit in den romanischen Literaturen der Welt die Tür zu einem vielsprachigen Kosmos verschiedenartiger Logiken öffnet.

Petrarch fashioned so many different versions of himself for posterity that it is an exacting task to establish where one might start to explore. . . . Hainsworth's study meets this problem through examples of what Petrarch wrote, and does so decisively and succinctly. . . . [A] careful and unpretentious book, penetrating in its organization and treatment of its subject, gentle in its guidance of the reader, nimble and dexterous in its scholarly infrastructure—and no less profound for those qualities of lightness. The translations themselves are a delight, and are clearly the result of profound meditation and extensive experiment. . . . The Introduction and the notes to each work form a clear plexus of support for the reader, with a host of deft cross-references. --Richard Mackenny, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) is best known today for cementing the sonnet’s place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator, and one of the foremost classical scholars of his age. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works is the only comprehensive, single-volume source to which anyone—scholar, student, or general reader—can turn for information on each of Petrarch’s works, its place in the poet’s oeuvre, and a critical exposition of its defining features. A sophisticated but accessible handbook that illuminates Petrarch’s love of classical culture, his devout Christianity, his public celebrity, and his struggle for inner peace, this encyclopedic volume covers both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings and the various genres in which he excelled: poem, tract, dialogue, oration, and letter. A biographical introduction and chronology anchor the book, making Petrarch an invaluable resource for specialists in Italian, comparative literature, history, classics, religious studies, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

This monograph demonstrates why humanism began in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century. It considers Petrarch a third generation humanist, who christianized a secular movement. The analysis traces the beginning of humanism in poetry and its gradual penetration of other Latin literary genres, and, through stylistic analyses of texts, the extent to which imitation of the ancients produced changes in cognition and visual perception. The volume traces the link between vernacular translations and the emergence of Florence as the leader of Latin humanism by 1400 and why, limited to an elite in the fourteenth century, humanism became a major educational movement in the first decades of the fifteenth. It revises our conception of the relationship of Italian humanism to French twelfth-century humanism and of the character of early Italian humanism itself. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.