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.
The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch's legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch's vast ...literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and self-representation developed during the Renaissance. His two sonnets on Laura's portrait by Simone Martini and his ambivalent fascination with the illusionary power of portraiture in his Latin texts - such as the Secretum, the Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune - constituted the theoretical reference for artists and writers alike. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and literature (ut pictura poësis) and by the paragone debate, the interplay between Petrarch's oeuvre, Petrarchism and portraiture shaped the discourse on the relationship between the sitters' physical image and their inner life. The volume brings together diverse interdisciplinary contributions that explore the subject through a rich body of literary and visual sources.
Recensione di: Marco Praloran, La canzone di Petrarca. Orchestrazione formale e percorsi argomentativi, Roma-Padova, Editrice Antenore (Collana ‘Studi sul Petrarca’), 2013, XIV + 182 p.,ISBN: ...9788884556790, € 22,00.
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."--
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.