Petrarch was one of the founding fathers of Renaissance humanism, yet the nature and significance of his ideas are still widely debated. In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in ...Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self. Zak argues that both are defined by Petrarch's idea of care for the self. Overcome by a strong sense of fragmentation, Petrarch turned to the ancient idea that philosophy can bring harmony and wholeness to the soul through the use of spiritual exercises in the form of writing. Examining his vernacular poetry and his Latin works from both literary and historical perspectives, Zak explores Petrarch's attempts to use writing as a spiritual exercise, how his spiritual techniques absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that arose from his efforts to care for the self through writing.
Petrarch and Dante Baranski, Zygmunt G; Cachey, Jr., Theodore J
2009, 2009-08-15
eBook
Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch and his predecessor Dante Alighieri has remained an open and endlessly fascinating ...question of both literary and cultural history. In this volume nine leading scholars of Italian medieval literature and culture address this question involving the two foundational figures of Italian literature. The authors examine Petrarch's contentious and dismissive attitude toward the literary authority of his illustrious predecessor; the dramatic shift in theological and philosophical context that occurs from Dante to Petrarch; and their respective contributions as initiators of modern literary traditions in the vernacular. Petrarch's substantive ideological dissent from Dante clearly emerges, a dissent that casts in high relief the poets' radically divergent views of the relation between the human and the divine and of humans' capacity to bridge that gap. Contributors: Albert Russell Ascoli, Zygmunt G. Baranski, Teodolinda Barolini, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., Ronald L. Martinez, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Christian Moevs, Justin Steinberg, and Sara Sturm-Maddox.
This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a ...confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism's capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry's work in the world. These poets' works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric's utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.
Durante mucho tiempo, la carta de Ascensu Montis Ventosi de Petrarca ha sido considerada como el documento fundacional del "humanismo renacentista". Desde el comienzo de los estudios renacentistas a ...mediados del siglo XIX, esta carta se ha convertido en una suerte de talismán utilizado para invocar el espíritu nuevo y secular del humanismo, un espíritu que, se suele decir, llegó a Italia espontáneamente durante el siglo XIV, logró penetrar los corazones y mentes de los europeos del siglo XV y condujo a cambios supuestamente catastróficos en la cultura, la religión y la política durante los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII. Esta interpretación, todavía bastante extendida entre quienes no son especialistas, particularmente en el mundo anglosajón, es extremadamente simplista y desconoce la profunda deuda que Petrarca tiene con la tradición clásica y cristiana, ocultando el carácter fundamentalmente religioso de la carta. El presente artículo examina cómo esta carta adquirió tanta importancia en el mundo académico e intelectual, y ofrece una interpretación que enfatiza la continuidad de Petrarca con la tradición, poniendo de relieve el deseo del autor italiano de revitalizar, en lugar de reinventar, las tradiciones de la erudición y contemplación cristianas. Palabras clave: Petrarca--Monte Ventoux--recepción de textos literarios--modernidad--humanismo Petrarch's letter de Ascensu Montis Ventosi has long served as the founding document of "renaissance humanism". Since the beginning of renaissance studies in the mid-nineteenth century, the letter has become almost a talisman for summoning the new, secular spirit of humanism that spontaneously arrived in Italy in the fourteenth century, took hold of the hearts and minds of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and led to cataclysmic cultural, religious, and political changes in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This reading, still common among non-specialists, especially in the English-speaking world, is overly simplistic and ignores Petrarch's profound debt to classical and Christian tradition, obscuring the fundamentally religious character of the letter. This article examines how scholars came to assign the letter so much importance and offers an interpretation that stresses Petrarch's continuity with tradition and his desire to revitalize rather than reinvent the traditions of Christian scholarship and contemplation. Keywords: Petrarch--Mt. Ventoux--Textual Reception Modernity--Humanism
Writing Beloveds considers the way in which a poetic convention, the 'beloved' to whom Renaissance amatory poetry was addressed, becomes influential political rhetoric, an instrument that both men ...and women used to shape and justify their claims to power.
Petrarch's fragmenta Peterson, Thomas E
Petrarch's fragmenta,
2016, 20160613, 2016, 2016-01-01, 2016-06-16
eBook
"Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity and biblical intertextuality, this study argues that Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is an ...ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures. The author begins with the premise that the multiple voices of the Petrarchan figure (or subject) call for a reading informed by historical and autobiographical considerations. Within such a reading, the internal chronology of the work coincides with a temporal framework provided by Petrarch's Latin prose and poetry. Drawing on this material, he argues that Petrarch's derivations from early poets in the Italian vernacular, his Augustineanism and his humanism are manifest in the Fragmenta and contribute to its narrative and theological unity."--
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, viral contagions, such as the Black Death of 1348, disrupted many social, political, and economic parts of life, situating the idea and the reality of ...Death in mass numbers at the forefront of late medieval and early Renaissance minds. Responding to the anxieties experienced by the thousands, literary and visual texts from this period emphasized the personification of Death as an imposing figure and common threat. This paper traces the visual evolution of the figure of Death which, I argue, developed according to intertextual and intervisual dialogues among Francesco Petrarca’s Triumphus Mortis, Giovanni Boccaccio’s L’Amorosa visione, and the fresco known as the Triumph of Death by Buonamico Buffalmacco in the Pisa Camposanto. While early visual portrayals of Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis attest to the renewed interest in the “Triumph of Death” in the decades immediately following the 1358 plague, most artists depict a chariot atop which Death rides during a “triumphal” procession, painted elements that are not explicitly recounted in Petrarch’s text. I investigate the reasons for this cross-contamination between word and image around the “Triumph of Death,” demonstrating further how Boccaccio’s engagement with funerary rituals informed his Amorosa visione, as well as his viewing of the Pisa Camposanto. The fusion of live-action pageantry with the visual “Triumph of Death” provided Petrarch with an intermedial model for his Triumphus Mortis, to which later artists turned for inspiration in depicting figures within and beyond the poet’s Trionfi. Such intermedial dialogues across art and poetry resonated with audiences striving to overcome the indiscriminate nature of Death and the fear of disease during a most unsettling historical moment.
WithVida u Obra de Petrarca, Dr. Francisco Rico questions whether the traditional biography of Petrarch is a product of the real life of the author, or from the critical understanding of his work. In ...this volume, he analyzes the environment and periodization of theSecretum, relocating its date of publication. It has long been assumed that theSecretum--composed of three dialogues in which "Augustine," in the presence of "Truth" tries to persuade "Francis" to seek spiritual perfection--reflects a spiritual crisis on the part of the author. This is the supposition that Dr. Rico calls into question. This comprehensive, Spanish-language study opens the way for a more realistic interpretation of both the works and motivations of Petrarch.
Drawing upon poststructuralist theories of nationalism and national identity developed by such writers as Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Levinas, Julia Kristeva, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Zizek, noted ...Renaissance scholar William J. Kennedy argues that the Petrarchan sonnet serves as a site for early modern expressions of national sentiment in Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany. Kennedy pursues this argument through historical research into Renaissance commentaries on Petrarch's poetry and critical studies of such poets as Lorenzo de' Medici, Joachim du Bellay and the Pléiade brigade, Philip and Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth.
Kennedy begins with a survey of Petrarch's poetry and its citation in Italy, explaining how major commentators tried to present Petrarch as a spokesperson for competing versions of national identity. He then shows how Petrarch's model helped define social class, political power, and national identity in mid-sixteenth-century France, particularly in the nationalistic sonnet cycles of Joachim Du Bellay. Finally, Kennedy discusses how Philip Sidney and his sister Mary and niece Mary Wroth reworked Petrarch's model to secure their family's involvement in forging a national policy under Elizabeth I and James I .
Treating the subject of early modern national expression from a broad comparative perspective, The Site of Petrarchism will be of interest to scholars of late medieval and early modern literature in Europe, historians of culture, and critical theorists.
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