"Petrarch's Canzoniere is a body of 366 poems, mostly sonnets but including forms such as madrigals and canzoni. These wonderful poems marked the intellectual and cultural divide between the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Cook's translation, a splendid poetic work in its own right, ""elegantly combining grace and accuracy... ranks among the best."" (K.V. Gouwens, UC-Santa Barbara). The translation, says Konrad Eisenbichler, ""captures the moods, tones, and variety of Petrarch's own verse. A truly remarkable feat."" Cook addresses the deceptive simplicity of Petrarch's vocabulary, the work's cultural context rendered here as broadly modern rather than facilely archaic, and the elegance of his poetic diction. The Italian text (ed. Gianfranco Contini) is printed on facing pages."

Ineffable sweetness, bold, uncanny sweetness that came to my eyes from her lovely face; from that day on I'd willingly have closed them, never to gaze again at lesser beauties. --from Sonnet 116 Petrarch was born in Tuscany and grew up in the south of France. He lived his life in the service of the church, traveled widely, and during his lifetime was a revered, model man of letters. Petrarch's greatest gift to posterity was his Rime in vita e morta di Madonna Laura, the cycle of poems popularly known as his songbook. By turns full of wit, languor, and fawning, endlessly inventive, in a tightly composed yet ornate form they record their speaker's unrequited obsession with the woman named Laura. In the centuries after it was designed, the "Petrarchan sonnet," as it would be known, inspired the greatest love poets of the English language--from the times of Spenser and Shakespeare to our own. David Young's fresh, idiomatic version of Petrarch's poetry is the most readable and approachable that we have. In his skillful hands, Petrarch almost sounds like a poet out of our own tradition bringing the wheel of influence full circle.

The medieval songbook as emergent genre -- Paradigms: the Carmina Burana and the Libro de Buen Amor -- Producing opaque coherence: lyric presence and names in songbooks -- Shifting mediality: visualizing lyric texts in songbooks -- Cancioneros and the art of the songbook -- Conclusion: songbook medievalisms.

Daring interpretations of landmark works by the most important Italian early Renaissance poet, presented in a bilingual edition.

"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."--

Durling's edition of Petrarch's poems has become the standard. Readers have praised the translation of the authoritative text as graceful and accurate, conveying a real understanding of what this difficult poet is saying. The literalness of the prose translation makes this book especially useful to students who lack a full command of Italian.

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.