Albert Russell Ascoli

A wide-ranging but still reasonably compact collection of essays by eighteen recognised experts, intended to give students a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge and opinion on Petrarch's life, works and critical reception as it stood in 2015. Nothing very radical, but quite useful stuff (from the introduction it sounds as though we should also be getting things like the Queer Petrarch and the Black Petrarch, but they don't seem to have got that far...).

The essays on Petrarch's show more life and books are a little too condensed to be much use without a more general biography, but obviously anyone likely to be using this book will have access to one of those. The focus is on pointing out areas where new information has come to light or old theories have been demolished, but there didn't seem to be very much that was really controversial. My main take-home point here was to realise how much Petrarch kept on tweaking his works and controlling the picture of himself he wanted to leave to posterity, right to the end of his life. And how the letters are probably the next thing to read, if I want to learn more about him after dipping into the vernacular lyric poems.

The essays dealing with Petrarch's influences from earlier vernacular poets — both Occitan and Italian — and with his influence on later generations were the ones that I found most interesting. Petrarch obviously had a very complicated relationship with Dante, whose primacy as an Italian poet he was determined to avoid acknowledging, but I hadn't realised quite how much he alludes to the Occitan troubadour heritage, especially to the work of Arnaut Daniel. Olivia Holmes's essay picks this out in detail. Stefano Jossa is also very interesting on Pietro Bembo, editor of the famous 1501 edition of Petrarch's vernacular works printed by Aldo Manuzio in Venice, the book which turned Petrarch into a mass phenomenon a century after his death. And I particularly enjoyed Ann Rosalind Jones's rediscovery of the 16th century women poets who took Petrarch's example as a license to write their own love poetry. show less