Petrarch
Petrarch

Author: Christopher S. Celenza

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2022-08-22

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1780238770

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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.

Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature
Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature

Author: Martin Eisner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-09-12

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1107513081

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Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.

Petrarch
Petrarch

Author: Francesco Petrarca

Publisher: Poetica (Anvil Press)

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780856464386

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Daring interpretations of landmark works by the most important Italian early Renaissance poet, presented in a bilingual edition.

Petrarch's Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism
Petrarch's Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism

Author: Demetrio S. Yocum

Publisher: Brepols Pub

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 9782503544199

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Of the long line of renowned and anti-scholastic intellectuals who were attracted to Carthusian circles, Petrarch was undoubtedly the first. By revealing the Carthusian imprint on Petrarch's thought as well as elements of Carthusian spirituality present in his texts, this book argues that Carthusianism was an essential component of Petrarch's Christian humanism and hermeneutics of the self.

Possibilities of Lyric
Possibilities of Lyric

Author: Manuele Gragnolati

Publisher: ICI Berlin Press

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3965580140

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Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.