Volume 8, Number 4 · March 9, 1967
Petrarch Restored
By J.B. Trapp
Letters from Petrarch
selected and edited by Morris Bishop
Indiana, 306 pp., $9.50
Petrarch and His World
by Morris Bishop
Indiana, 399 pp., $7.50
If it is no longer easy to form a true idea of Petrarch and his work, the responsibility is more ours than his. He is more copious and explicit about his own nature, aims, and activities than any writer before him and most since his day. No one ever took more pains to present himself to posterity in the form by which he wished posterity to know him. But most of his works are in Latin, and English translations are few and not very accessible. Moreover, the last more or less complete edition of Petrarch's oeuvre was published in 1581 and some individual texts have not been reprinted since then. If petrarch is known at all it is not for the Latin works, by which he himself and his contemporaries set most store, but for the Canzoniere, the sequence of 366 Italian poems, mostly sonnets, to Laura, the object of his devotion in life and in death. These poems have been frequently reprinted and translated even in the last century, though they are nowadays less read than talked about. A hundred can identify a Petrarchan conceit for one who has looked through more than a page or two of the Canzoniere.
Review, 2773 words
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