In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self.

Rereading the Renaissance - a study of Petrarch's uses of Augustine - uses methods drawn from history and literary criticism to establish a framework for exploring Petrarch's humanism. Carol Everhart Quillen argues that the essential role of Augustine's words and authority in the expression of Petrarch's humanism is best grasped through a study of the complex textual practices exemplified in the writings of both men. She also maintains that Petrarch's appropriation of Augustine's words is only intelligible in light of his struggle to legitimate his cultural ideals in the face of compelling opposition. Finally, Quillen shows how Petrarch's uses of Augustine can simultaneously uphold his humanist ideals and challenge the legitimacy of the assumptions on which those ideals were founded.

Petrarch was the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive literary Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and Greco-Roman culture in general. My Secret Book reveals a remarkable self-awareness as he probes and evaluates the springs of his own morally dubious addictions to fame and love.

Special Issue: The Care of the Self in Early Modern Philosophy and Science

This revisionist account of the economic, literary and social history of Florence in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death connects warfare with the plague narrative. Organised around Petrarch's 'war' against the Ubaldini clan of 1349–1350, which formed the prelude to his meeting and friendship with Boccaccio, William Caferro's work examines the institutional and economic effects of the war, alongside literary and historical patterns. Caferro pays close attention to the meaning of wages in context, including those of soldiers, thereby revising our understanding of wage data in the distant past and highlighting the consequences of a constricted workforce that resulted in the use of cooks and servants on important embassies. Drawing on rigorous archival research, this book will stimulate discussion among academics and offers a new contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Florence. It stresses the importance of short-termism and contradiction as subjects of historical inquiry.

"Rocco Rubini studies the motives and literary forms in the making of a "tradition," not understood narrowly, as the conservative, stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions, but rather more generously and etymologically interpreted: as the deliberate effort on the part of writers to transmit a reformulated past across generations. Leveraging Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Gramsci, with stops at the most prominent humanists in between (including Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Benedetto Croce), Rubini gives us an innovative lens through which to view an Italian intellectual tradition that is at once premodern and modern, a legacy that does not depend on a date or a single masterpiece, but instead requires the reader to parse an entire career of writings to uncover deeper, transhistorical continuities that span 600 years. Whether reading forward to the 1930s, or backward to the 14th century, Rubini elucidates the interplay of creation and reception underlying the enactment of tradition, the practice of retrieving and conserving, and the revivification of shared themes and intentions linking these thinkers across time"--

This timely volume takes stock of the discipline of comparative literature and its theory and practice from a Canadian perspective. It engages with the most pressing critical issues at the intersection of comparative literature and other areas of inquiry in the context of scholarship, pedagogy and academic publishing: bilingualism and multilingualism, Indigeneity, multiple canons (literary and other), the relationship between print culture and other media, the development of information studies, concerted efforts in digitization, and the future of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The authors offer an analysis of the current state of Canadian comparative literature, with a dual focus on the issues of multilingualism in Canada’s sociopolitical and cultural context and Canada’s geographical location within the Americas. It also discusses ways in which contemporary technology is influencing the way that Canadian literature is taught, produced, and disseminated, and how this affects its readings.