Working from transcriptions generated through the T-PEN program at St. Louis University, the collaborators of the project "Petrarch’s Early Manuscripts and Incunabula in the Oregon Petrarch Open Book" are presently digitizing and encoding in TEI P5 2 key interpretative copies of Petrarch’s Rvf: the late 14th-century manuscript copy from the Queriniana Library in Brescia, D II 21, the Queriniana Library’s copy of the first printed edition of the Rvf edited by Cristoforo [Berardi?] and published by Vindelin de Speier in Venice (...) in 1470. The first part of the article traces a brief history of the Oregon Petrarch Open Book, the last section introduces a future project, “Texts, Images and Interpretation in the OPOB”. (shrink)

I : PETRARCH'S BRITAIN 1: Piero Boitani: Petrarch and the barbari Britanni II: PETRARCH AND THE SELF 2: Jennifer Petrie: Petrarch solitarius 3: Zygmunt G. Baranski: The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch's Epicurus and Averroes and the Structures of the De Sui Ipsius et Aliorum Ignorantia 4: Jonathan Usher: Petrarch's Second Death III: PETRARCH IN DIALOGUE 5: Francesca Galligan: Poets and Heroes in Petrarch's Africa: Classical and Medieval Sources 6: Enrico Santangelo: Petrarch reading Dante: the Ascent of Mont Ventoux 7: John (...) Took: Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia: A Moment in the Pre-history of the Canzoniere IV: PETRARCHISM AND ANTIPETRARCHISM IN ITALY 8: Abigail Brundin: Petrarch and the Italian Reformation 9: Hilary Gatti: Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno 10: Diego Zancani: Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch 11: Letizia Panizza: Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Italy V: PETRARCHISM: ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH CONNECTIONS 12: Michael Wyatt: Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England 13: Stephen Clucas: Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism 14: John Roe: The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 15: Syrithe Pugh: Sidney, Spenser and Political Petrarchism 16: R. D. S. Jack: Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet VI: PETRARCH AND THE MODERNS: ITALY AND BRITAIN 17: Pamela Williams: Leopardi and Petrarch 18: Ela Tandello: Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli's Petrarch 19: Martin McLaughlin: Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch 20: Peter Hainsworth: Translating Petrarch. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 401-423 [Access article in PDF] Petrarch and the Genealogy of Asceticism W. Scott Blanchard The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached. --Theodor Adorno Perhaps no author within or outside of the canon of Western literature wrote as extensively on the topic of solitude as did Francesco Petrarch. While many of our modern associations with (...) the term may find some of their origins traceable as far back as Petrarch's career, the term "solitude" carried with it much different associations in his century than it does for us today, influenced as we are by the Romantic tradition and especially by Wordsworth's absorption with the idea of solitude as an ideal state for self-conscious reflection on the individual's personal history and its meaning. No less than three of Petrarch's major prose works--the De otio religioso, the De vita solitaria, and the Secretum--confront the topic of solitude directly, and we can also point to many letters, poems, and portions of his treatises that either directly or indirectly reflect Petrarch's virtual obsession with solitude. In Petrarch we are confronted with an author who was at once the most politically connected intellectual of his century--we are even tempted to call him a "public intellectual"--and yet who constantly invoked his desire for solitude, for an escape from the many distractions and seductions that the cities and courts of his society offered. For Petrarch these were invariably places where desire lurked and power held sway, so that the life of solitude was often invoked as an alternative--a counter-cultural locus, perhaps--where freedom from temptation and subjection was imagined as an escape from the negotium of worldly life. There is much in Petrarch's writings on the solitary life that is wishful and that we might characterize as merely compensatory in a life that was otherwise quite active and engaged, but there is also a [End Page 401] strain of thought in these works that indicates a certain intransigence beneath Petrarch's overdetermined attachment to the idea, if not the practice, of withdrawal and detachment. An inquiry into Petrarch's idealization of the solitary life may even yield a somewhat reactionary aspect of his complex mind, a conservative strain in an author who was in almost every other way the literary herald of a humanism that was at the center of the cultural avant-garde of the Trecento. Is the Petrarch that in so many accounts of his character is construed as the "first modern man" actually something else, a reluctant ascetic holdover from the Middle Ages? How did Petrarch use his unique understanding of the life of solitude, of ascesis, as a pose from which to construct his sense of himself as an author and intellectual? Or are we simply confronted in the figure of a worldly and an ascetic Petrarch with yet another set of contradictions so appropriate to the "immensely complex" author whose poetic signature was the oxymoron? 1"Asceticism" and "solitude" are of course not synonymous terms, but any examination of a number of Petrarch's works as they fall within what might be called a genealogy of asceticism must recognize from the start that Petrarch's brand of asceticism was somewhat unique, especially insofar as it was deeply influenced by ancient Stoicism as well as by his reading in authors from the early Christian era. The most useful expression for our purposes may be the medieval concept of the "contemplative life," since much of the analysis in what follows will focus on how Petrarch often used his self-proclaimed pose of detachment and withdrawal as a technique for carrying on what were otherwise quite engaged dialogues with those worldly formations of power and authority that are normally conceived of as belonging to the "active" sphere of human existence. 2 For despite Petrarch's participation in or association with a number of political and civic ventures during his long and productive career, he likely never would have freely chosen... (shrink)

The early modern and modern cultural world in the West would be unthinkable without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Despite this fact, there is still no scholarly contribution entirely devoted to analysing their intellectual revolution. Internationally renowned scholars are invited to discuss and rethink the historical, intellectual, and literary roles of Petrarch and Boccaccio between the great model of Dante’s encyclopedia and the ideas of a double or multifaceted culture in the era of Italian Renaissance Humanism. In his lyrical poems and Latin (...) treatises, Petrarch created a cultural pattern that was both Christian and Classical, exercising immense influence on the Western World in the centuries to come. Boccaccio translated this pattern into his own vernacular narratives and erudite works, ultimately claiming as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his contemporary age. The volume reconsiders Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s heritages from different perspectives, and investigates how these heritages shaped the cultural transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era, as well as European identity. (shrink)

This article investigates the history of a reliquary containing objects associated with Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) and his legendary lover Laura. Originally part of the collection of Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1745–1831) in her Puławy residence in Poland, the reliquary now belongs to the National Museum in Cracow. In the first section, I reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the journey of a splinter of Petrarch’s cupboard and Laura’s finger bone to Puławy, from Arquà in 1818 and Avignon in 1820 respectively. The bulk of (...) the article is dedicated to analysing Izabela Czartoryska’s endeavours to elevate the status of these physically inconspicuous objects into historical relics. I argue that their semantic potential was revealed and manifested through the sophisticated container in which they were placed, the exhibition in which they were incorporated and the narrative that Czartoryska crafted around the fabled lovers. The example of the Puławy relic illustrates the mechanisms used during the era of sentimentalism to provide an object with the status of a historical relic, which was the only chance for such artefacts to survive—or at least to survive as meaningful entities. (shrink)

Rocco Rubini’s latest book Posterity: Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci represents a greatly welcome addition to the recently reinvigorated field of Italian intellectual history. It foll...

Dans le présent article est proposée une édition complète des gloses de Pétrarque conservées dans le ms. Paris, BnF, lat. 2103. Ce manuscrit contient une anthologie d’ouvrages d’Augustine dont la plupart porte sur la grâce et le libre arbitre. Une courte description de la typologie des gloses accompagne l’édition.

Editors of Cicero'sPro Archiahave assumed that Petrarch's lost transcription of the equally lost Liège manuscript that he discovered in 1333 survives in an almost unaltered version in a single Florentine manuscript, while the remaining 265Italireflect another stage of the text, when conjectural corrections by its learned discoverer were introduced into the text. This article proposes a reassessment of that dichotomy, based on a first comprehensive study of the whole transmission.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nobel Rhetoric; or, Petrarch's PendulumPhilippe-Joseph SalazarVery many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death. It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa.1The ceremony of [Petrarch's] coronation was performed on the Capitol, by his friend and patron the supreme magistrate of the (...) republic... and thrice repeating his vows for the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, "This is the reward of merit."(Gibbon 1952, 2:573)§1.I would like to address a simple question: what is a Nobel laureate's speech?2 With a corollary: how does it provide an opportunity to perform as a public intellectual, a "philosopher" of sorts? And a further corollary: what does it say about intellectual compliance or resistance? There is a play on words in the title of this essay, made to draw attention to the rhetorical construction of a commonplace, mass media-induced belief: that Nobel laureates are, in essence, "noble minds."3 For brevity's sake this essay focuses mainly on the literature prizes and, to a lesser extent, the peace prizes. [End Page 373]§2.At face value, a Nobel Prize is a rhetorical event (from the time the winner is announced to the moment of the Nobel address): over the recent years, rituals attached to the Nordic apotheosis have attracted growing media interest—they belong to "breaking news"—lending laureates a public exposure that, in turn, has led them to perform a public role or to publicly decline this performance, literally to "dispose of " it—"disposure" as the antistrophe of exposure. The public is usually aware of the announcement of the name of the winner, who instantly becomes a global "brand." Publicity and news programs follow suit, and if a recipient's ethical qualities resonate with the ethical preoccupations of the day (gender is one) the better the news value. Arguments are built on the announcement and often recur when, in early December, recipients deliver their Nobel addresses.This rhetorical event may indeed take the shape of a "rhetorical situation" if national pride or state concerns impose an exigency onto laureates—it is interesting to note that the media are complicit in stressing the national value of an award. The exigency resembles the one applied by them to sport performances. However, while the practices of public reward and public performance no longer allow a sportsperson to decline a medal or to express personal views on a podium to the public strains of a national hymn,4 they do still allow Nobel laureates to absent themselves, as André Gide did in 1947 (this strategy gave him the opportunity, in a terse banquet speech read on his behalf, to express his view that Paul Valéry had been overlooked by the Nobel, thus turning the award into a muted invective; see Gide 1947), to say they don't care, that their country of origin did little for them, and even, although rarely, to decline or to express amusement at the award.5 In short, beside "disposure," they can perform "exposure" through acceptance or dismissiveness, thus drawing a merciful line between reward (in sport) and award (the Nobel).A rhetorical situation is indeed created when a Nobel winner is seen as betraying state or nation by accepting the prize. In one reverse case, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was berated for not accepting it (in 1964), in spite of the fact that, at that time, his philosophy and political engagement made clear to the French state and the French public that he abhorred them both. In 2003, South Africans learned at their expense how reward and award are borderline and therefore not on the same side: they failed to thank J. M. Coetzee for his temperance, when, having resettled in Australia at the time of his award, he waited for a while before taking Australian citizenship.6 The Nobel Foundation's rightful insistence on disregarding [End Page 374] nationality does not mean nationality... (shrink)

In this work, I will begin by briefly describing the codices that belonged to Petrarch’s library and contain his glosses to the Enarrationes in Psalmos of Augustine: Paris, BnF, Latin 1994 and Paris, BnF, Latin 19891 - 19892. I will then describe the type of marginal markings found in it, and I will lastly offer a complete edition of the glosses.

Studie over het werk van de Italiaanse dichter (1304-1374).

The nature of the Florentine economy during the era of plague and the so-called crisi del trecento has been the subject of a great deal of study and debate. The nuanced and sophisticated discourse has proceeded, however, without proper consideration of warfare, which coincided with the other crises, but has been relegated in the Anglophone scholarship to the lonely subfield of military history. Recent studies have helped improve the status quo and blur rigid disciplinary lines. But there remains a stubborn (...) tendency among scholars to separate Italian war from its societal milieu, to follow the lead of Machiavelli in treating armed conflict in moral terms, focusing on the use by states of mercenary soldiers, who were emblematic of a lack of native martial spirit and of bad warfare. The tendency is particularly marked for the middle years of the trecento, the era of the “companies of adventure,” when states relied on foreign soldiers from outside the peninsula arrayed in large bands. This was, as a recent scholar has asserted, “the lowest point” in the history of Italian military organization, a statement that renders warfare still less appealing as a topic of serious inquiry. (shrink)

The Renaissance movement known as humanism eventually spread from Italy through all of western Europe, transforming early modern culture in ways that are still being felt and debated. Central to these debates—and to this book—is the question of whether the humanist movement contributed to the secularization of Western cultural traditions at the end of the Middle Ages. A preeminent scholar of Italian humanism, Riccardo Fubini approaches this question in a new way—by redefining the problem of secularization more carefully to show (...) how humanists can at once be secularizers and religious thinkers. The result is a provocative vision of the humanist movement. _Humanism and Secularization_ offers a nuanced account of humanists contesting medieval ideas about authority not in order to reject Christianity or even orthodoxy, but to claim for themselves the right to define what it meant to be a Christian. Fubini analyzes key texts by major humanists—isuch as Petrarch, Poggio, and Valla—from the first century of the movement. As he subtly works out these authors’ views on religion and the Church from both biographical and textual information, Fubini reveals in detail the new historical consciousness that animated the humanists in their reading of classical and patristic texts. His book as a whole shows convincingly just how radical the humanism of the first half of the fifteenth century was and how sharply it challenged well-entrenched ideas and institutions. Appearing here in English for the first time, his work provides a model set of readings of humanist texts and a critical perspective on Italian humanism that will alter and enrich discussion and understanding of the nature of the humanist movement. (shrink)

The Renaissance movement known as humanism eventually spread from Italy through all of western Europe, transforming early modern culture in ways that are still being felt and debated. Central to these debates—and to this book—is the question of whether the humanist movement contributed to the secularization of Western cultural traditions at the end of the Middle Ages. A preeminent scholar of Italian humanism, Riccardo Fubini approaches this question in a new way—by redefining the problem of secularization more carefully to show (...) how humanists can at once be secularizers and religious thinkers. The result is a provocative vision of the humanist movement. _Humanism and Secularization_ offers a nuanced account of humanists contesting medieval ideas about authority not in order to reject Christianity or even orthodoxy, but to claim for themselves the right to define what it meant to be a Christian. Fubini analyzes key texts by major humanists—isuch as Petrarch, Poggio, and Valla—from the first century of the movement. As he subtly works out these authors’ views on religion and the Church from both biographical and textual information, Fubini reveals in detail the new historical consciousness that animated the humanists in their reading of classical and patristic texts. His book as a whole shows convincingly just how radical the humanism of the first half of the fifteenth century was and how sharply it challenged well-entrenched ideas and institutions. Appearing here in English for the first time, his work provides a model set of readings of humanist texts and a critical perspective on Italian humanism that will alter and enrich discussion and understanding of the nature of the humanist movement. (shrink)

Explores the nature and significance of Petrarch’s indebtedness to Dante in the Rime sparse.

Manuscript Paris Bib. Nat. lat. 2923 contains, among other texts, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, with notes by Francesco Petrarca. Although these texts have been the object of study by many researchers, especially philologists, none has ever published the complete marginal notes or done a thorough exegesis of them. In general, with the exception of the work of Pierre de Nolhac and Peter Dronke, and certain paragraphs that Constant Mews devotes to the subject, descriptions and other references to these (...) notes are framed primarily in Abelardian studies. Therefore, in the hope of expanding the studies that will bring Abelard and Petrarch closer, we have decided to produce the first complete edition of all of Petrarch’s marginal notes, with a view to future hermeneutical analysis. It is, after all, much more than letters that Abelard and Petrarch have in common. This first part of the article contains the marginal notes, each with its corresponding codicological description and ratio edendi. (shrink)

Rocco Rubini’s far-ranging book proposes that an “intellectual tradition” (1) took shape in Italy beginning with the work of Francesco Petrarch (1404–1472) and found fruition in the writings of Ant...