The history of the miscellany is complicated, in part, by a confusion about the object of study. Not only is the term "miscellany" anachronistic, but also it is used to denote two related but ...distinct sorts of texts. Most of the print and manuscript collections labeled miscellanies are what we might call process miscellanies; that is, miscellaneous because of the processes of compilation. Comparatively neglected, however, are confected miscellanies, in which the apparent disorder is a deliberate effect created by the compiler. Brown's essay looks at the common tactics of three such confected miscellanies—George Gascoigne's A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573), Francis Davison's A Poetical Rapsodie (1602), and Jonson's The Forest (1616)—and their descent from three different classical forms, the anthology, the rhapsody, and the silva. In this context, Brown asks how this conceptual difference can help us understand the purpose and aesthetic value of miscellanies for early modern authors, compilers, and readers.
This volume addresses a far-reaching aspects of Petrarch research and interpretation: the essential interplay between Petrarch's texts and their material preparation and reception. To read and ...interpret Petrarch we must come to grips with the fundamentals of Petrarchan philology.
In his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Francesco Petrarch introduced a new poetic strategy of deliberate and beneficial failure as a central requirement of literary love and a means of unifying a newly ...complex and fragmented literary subjectivity. In his rendering of Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt carries this celebration of necessary failure into the sixteenth century. By making Petrarchan failure central to his own concerns, Wyatt changes its fundamental nature. This is more than simply transferring the same narrative strategies into a new historical context. In lifting poetic love out of the realm of the spiritual, and rooting it firmly in the context of a purely secular striving, Wyatt effectively raises the stakes and alters the meaning of the poetic dynamic he embraces. What was, in Petrarch, a narrative strategy—an important part of the fictional construct—becomes for Wyatt, and the English Petrarchists who followed him, a structural element of the lyric form and a new basis for the construction of the literary self—I fail, therefore I am.
The history of the English reception of Petrarch’s works is one that has been told without reference to the reign of Queen Mary. This is despite the fact that a history of Marian literary culture ...cannot be told without reference to Petrarch. Indeed, the English Petrarch had a distinctively Marian phase that manifested itself in three works, two in print and one in manuscript. These are: Tottel’s Miscellany, Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes, and William Forrest’s The Seconde Grisilde. All three appearing during Queen Mary’s short reign, and as products of a particular moment, these works point to a specific idea of Marian literary culture that sought to deliver Petrarch from a less worthy Henrician age. Henry VIII’s sexual and political excesses were sharply criticised at this time, and the moralizing and philosophising Petrarch assumed fresh importance as a model for this critique. Petrarch’s example was therefore also central to a broader cultural renaissance that was both Marian and Catholic, and that helped to establish in poetry what the Marian return to Rome established in politics and religion: a rapprochement of cultures. O.W.
This article demonstrates a systematic connection between the novelty of Petrarch’s authorship and his self-definition as an exile. Petrarch employs the unusual term exilium/esilio to substantiate ...his unprecedented claim that literature is a legally valid officium (civic role). Following Dante, Petrarch grounds his exilic authorship in the Christian discourse of peregrinatio: life as pilgrimage through exile. But Petrarch’s new officium allows him a measure of control over literary creation that no prior Italian writer had enjoyed. This is especially true of the “Canzoniere,” Petrarch’s compilation of his vernacular lyrics, whose singularity functions as a proxy for its author’s selfhood.
Francesco Petrarch is, among all other things, a poet of failure: the unofficial patron saint of unrequited love. This has, of course, not gone unnoticed. It is almost impossible to read Petrarchan ...criticism without coming across the word. There are failures of knowledge, of imitation, resolution, progress, power, communication, fictive experience, and more. But if critics have gestured toward these various ideas in passing, they have never to my knowledge given failure the weight it deserves. It is an idea so widely and passingly noted that it stands in danger of not being seen. Failure has been viewed as an occasional symptom of poetic perspective, a facet of inscribed character, a passing phenomenon. Perhaps the time has come to consider it a strategy. In pursuing these explorations I will be embedding this study in some of the many frameworks of new formalist criticism that have reflourished in the last fifteen years.
Petrarch's Civilized Barbarians Godman, Peter
The Journal of medieval and early modern studies,
05/2021, Letnik:
51, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article focuses on the significance of two letters in Petrarch's Rerum familiarum libri which were probably composed in or around 1351, arguably but not demonstrably on the basis of previous ...versions, and addressed to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, who had passed away during the plague of 1348. Petrarch's letters enable us to perceive how he shaped his early experiences in the mold of his later misfortunes. Imperialism, cultural and political, provided Petrarch in 1351 with rhetorical materials to refashion setbacks endured during the previous decade, which had turned his attention back to Germany and a Roman empire that no longer existed. That is why Familiares 1.4 and 1.5 single out, among several other places in Northern Europe which he reports having visited, two German towns, Aachen and Cologne. The letters offer testimony of Petrarch's attitude toward “barbarians,” seen in the light of his cultural politics.
Summary Petrarch’s metalinguistic observations are scattered throughout his work, rare and for the most part elliptical. The present article closely examines Petrarch’s statements about language to ...arrive at an alternative interpretation to that of previous scholarship. We analyse the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that inform Petrarch’s conception of the difference between Latin and the vernacular languages. The first section provides a critique of the now prevailing view on Petrarch’s metalinguistic thinking. Mirko Tavoni and Silvia Rizzo hypothesize that Petrarch ‘was not conscious of being bilingual’, since he considered Latin and vernaculars as different stylistic varieties of one and the same language. In the remaining two sections we propose an alternative account. Comparing statements made by contemporaries of Petrarch and investigating their origin and rationale, we suggest that Petrarch’s conception and practice cannot be accounted for within a modern perspective of national language and are better captured by the notion of diglossia, in which two linguistic varieties are delimited by the contexts of their use.
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