Reference
- CanzoniereAlthough Petrarch assumed that his great lasting fame would come from his works in Latin, in particular his epic Africa on the exploits of his favorite hero, Scipio Africanus, his reputation today rests chiefly on his lyric poetry in the vernacular, a collection of short poems he referred to as “trifles” in a letter two years before his death. Petrarch never gave this collection of 366 Italian lyrics a proper title, referring to them as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of things in the vernacular), but they have become known to modern readers by the name Rime sparse (Scattered verse), or more often by the title Canzoniere (Song book). The chief theme of the collection is Petrarch's love for the beautiful Laura, though the real subject of the poems is Petrarch's own psyche: his emotions and aspirations as revealed in his expressions of love—in particular the inner conflict between his desire for worldly greatness and fame and his desire for heavenly reward...
- PetrarchPetrarch is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest Italian writers, and is generally recognized as the founder of the movement that came to be known as humanism—a movement that aimed to revive the study of the Greek and Roman classics, and that promoted an attitude about human beings that extolled achievement in this world, rather than considering this world a mere pilgrimage to the next, as medieval Christianity often advised. Petrarch was one of the most famous writers of his time, and significantly influenced his contemporaries (particularly Boccaccio). Even more, Petrarch influenced his successors, not, as he would have desired, through his voluminous writings in Latin, but chiefly through his lyric poetry in the vernacular, which popularized the sonnet form and the language and conventions of the “Petrarchan” love that pervaded the Renaissance...
- PetrarchFrancesco Petrarca (1304-1374); the most celebrated and influential man of letters of the Trecento. He was born in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, where his father had settled after being exiled from his native Florence in 1302. His father, Ser Petracco, was a notary and soon found employment in the papal Curia, which had recently been transferred from Rome to Avignon; the young Francesco grew up in nearby Carpentras. At his father's urging, he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna and then took minor orders. But his main ambitions were literary, and he sought fame as a poet. Over the course of his lifetime he carefully assembled the Italian love poems of his youth into what would become known as the Songbook (Canzoniere), and later he undertook a series of historical and allegorical poems written in Italian terzine (tercets) and called Triumphs (Triumphi)...
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Online Resources
- Canzoniere: BritannicaThe theme of his Canzoniere (as the poems are usually known) therefore goes beyond the apparent subject matter, his love for Laura. For the first time in the history of the new poetry, lyrics are held together in a marvelous new tapestry, possessing its own unity...
- Petrarch: BritannicaPetrarch, Italian in full Francesco Petrarca, (born July 20, 1304, Arezzo, Tuscany [Italy]—died July 18/19, 1374, Arquà, near Padua, Carrara), Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of Classical authors led him to travel, visiting men of learning and searching monastic libraries for Classical manuscripts. He was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age...
- Petrarch: Poetry FoundationFrancesco Petrarch was born in 1304 in Arezzo, Italy, though he spent most of his childhood living around Florence, Tuscany, and Avignon. After briefly studying law in Bologna in 1320, Petrarch decided to abandon the field, against his father’s wishes, to begin studying the classics and begin a religious life. In 1326 he took minor ecclesiastical orders and began serving under Cardinal Colonna, which allowed him to travel and write freely. His interest in Latin literature and poetry grew significantly during this time period, and he was later able to share his love for the humanities with Giovanni Boccaccio, a fellow poet and humanist...
FRANCESCO PETRARCH - Meet "The Father Of Humanism"
Perspectives
Petrarch: a Critical Guide to the Complete Works
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. "
Petrarch
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.
The Worlds of Petrarch
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.