SOURCE: Peter Hainsworth, in an introduction to Petrarch the Poet: An Introduction to the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, Routledge, 1988, pp. 1-29.

[In the following essay, Hainsworth focuses on Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which is commonly known as the Canzoniere or Rime sparse. Hainsworth discusses the context in the which the poems were written and examines Petrarch's concern with humanism and the meaning of poetry.]

Two languages

Italian literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is composed in the shadow of Latin. The shadow may seem sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, but it is inevitably there, evoking an alternately benign and threatening presence whose roots stretch back into antiquity and whose branches extend across Europe. Latin asserts repeatedly that it has the exclusive right to knowledge and excellence, and continually demands that its authors and authority should be attended to. When it seems most displaced, it infiltrates the less prestigious, less stable language with its words, its turns of phrase, its rhetoric and its standards. If there is such a thing as popular literature, the index of popularity is the distance from Latin. Literature which makes implicit or explicit claims to refinement, let alone to greatness, does so in virtue of its power to assimilate what Latin has to offer and to become like it. Only in the sixteenth century does literary culture in Italy make a general commitment to Italian, and even then the result is symbiosis with Latin rather than its eviction. For earlier writers the two languages are mostly in tension. Even Dante, who declared Italian the nobler language in the De vulgari eloquentia and gave an overwhelming demonstration of its power in the Divina commedia, was the victor in a battle, not the war.

There were many reasons, some stemming from the Commedia itself, others from the linguistic and cultural pressures at work in fourteenth-century Italy, why Dante's example could not be wholeheartedly embraced by the generation that followed him. But one of the prime factors was the emergence of a humanist movement which was intent on the recovery and renewal of Latinity, with, at its centre, the figure who dominated the literary culture of his time. Petrarch wrote with equal seriousness in both Latin and Italian and redrew the lines of demarcation between the two languages. In one way the result was a return to orthodoxy, in another it was a radical revision with implications for both literatures. The effects were immediate, deep, widely felt, and, in the longer term, asymmetrically bi-focal in a way that reflected the actual constitution of Petrarch's work. For a century and more after his death humanism evolved within the perspective defined in his Latin writings, whilst Italian retreated to the literary margins. Then in the sixteenth century his Italian poems, which had always been influential within vernacular literature, were pronounced the supreme examples of modern poetry. They were the paradigms of language, style, and, to a lesser degree, of love, and were to exert a profound influence upon poetry inside and outside Italy. By then the Latin works were already fading from view: henceforth it would be the Italian poems which spoke for Petrarch and defined him. Only since the later nineteenth century has the eclipse been slowly rectified. Gradually it has become evident that the whole of Petrarch is not contained within what he wrote in either language considered in isolation, though it has become equally clear that any composite picture has to take as much account of contrasts and contradictions as of similarities or underlying consistencies.

In themselves neither his bilingualism nor his humanism is surprising. His father, Ser Petracco, was a notary who lived and worked in Florence, though his family was from Incisa, a small town not far from Arezzo. In 1302, a few months after Dante, he too was exiled. He first returned to Incisa and Arezzo, where Petrarch was born in 1304. But in 1312 he moved with his family to Provence, where, like other White Guelphs exiled from Florence, he found work and refuge in the ambit of the Papal Court at Avignon. From now until his definitive departure for Northern Italy in 1353, Provence would be Petrarch's base, though a base which he would frequently leave, more often than not, for lengthy visits to Italy. There were also Italian friends, some of whom at least had an interest in vernacular literature, notably the poet Sennuccio del Bene. But Papal Provence was primarily international and its culture was enthusiastically Latinate, particularly amongst its Italian members. Petrarch's father directed him as a boy towards Virgil and Cicero, and, in the light of his ability in the language and his enthusiasm for classical antiquity, brought him to the notice of the Colonna family, whose centre was Rome but whose members were currently important figures in the Church in Southern France. The Colonna were to be Petrarch's patrons and friends until his support for the revolutionary attempts of Cola di Rienzo to recreate the Roman republic led to a cooling of relations during his last years in Provence. With their own humanist interests, their contacts in both France and Italy, and their sheer political and financial power, they provided a springboard for Petrarch's studies and writings. They also provided material support: Petrarch took minor orders and was granted a canonry at Lombez, where Giacomo Colonna was bishop. Like other livings which he acquired later, the canonry made minimal demands. Petrarch always insisted that his means were modest, though they were sufficient for him to acquire, sometime in the early 1330s, the famous villa at Vaucluse which became his country retreat. With Colonna help and careful manipulation of his own myth, the culminating point of which was his coronation as poet laureate in Rome in 1341, he made himself famous and respected. From his thirties onwards, kings, princes, emperors and popes would correspond with him, or at least receive his letters, would welcome him as the greatest adornment of learning in contemporary Europe, would use him as an ambassador or seek his advice. When he moved to Italy in 1353, he had no difficulty in finding support, first from the Visconti in Milan, then from the Venetian republic, and finally from Francescoda Carrara of Padua, who provided him with the land in Arquà in the Euganean hills where he built the house in which he was to die in 1374.

Petrarch's life was a remarkable achievement in itself, and one accomplished in virtue of his work in Latin, not Italian. It marked the emergence of a new kind of writer. Petrarch was not a member of any university or any other institution, and was not directly in the service of any of his patrons, not even the Colonna, or of any state organisation. Though he was continually negotiating his position and continually threatened by the powers amongst which he moved, he created an independence for himself and for his work which no other intellectual had enjoyed since antiquity. With him high literature established a distance between itself and the vocationalism and institutionalism to which it had been subjected throughout the Middle Ages. Its arbiter was the author, a figure who created himself in and through his writing and who was dignified in his own eyes and those of society for his literary excellence and for no other reason.

At the base of Petrarch's work was textual mastery. As a young man he brought together the surviving decades of Livy, which had been separated from each other throughout the medieval period, and emended the text of accretions and corruptions in a way that presupposed a respect both for classical Latin and for the wishes of the author. He went on to emend, copy and make available other texts, including some which had been lost to the intellectual life of Europe for centuries. One of his early discoveries was Cicero's Pro Archia; another, still more important, was the collection of Cicero's letters to Atticus, which he found in the cathedral library of Verona in 1345. These and other texts became part of the largest private library that had existed in Europe since ancient times. Though Petrarch's readings in medieval literature were much more extensive than he cared to admit, the texts he chooses to edit and, even more, those which he values, signal a reaction against literary and intellectual concerns that were dominant in the preceding century. He has no truck with scholastic or Aristotelian thought. In place of speculative metaphysical systems, of scientific, especially medical, investigation, of legal codification, he puts grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy. Virgil and the other classical poets, Cicero, Seneca, Livy are his authors, not Aristotle, Aquinas, Averroes, let alone the jurists and the decretalists. When he turns to Christian philosophy, it is above all to Augustine, with whose position vis-à-vis pagan thought he felt bound at times to identify. In all this there is evident a desire to recover what had been lost in the Middle Ages (though the term, like the term 'humanism', was still to be invented) and to present a historically accurate version of it to the present, or, given the decadence of the present—which episodes such as that of Cola, and lasting sores such as the exile of the Papacy from Rome, made seem all too apparent—to a future that was yet to take shape.

There was little dissociation of sensibility in Petrarch. Knowing was doing. Though the next generation of humanists would easily surpass him, his Latin was more classical than that of any of his contemporaries or medieval predecessors, and made its classical connections evident through a web of allusions, citations, and reformulations or phrases taken from great and not so great authors. At the same time Petrarch insisted on his individuality. None of his works are totally subservient to ancient models, in some cases perhaps inadvertently. His unfinished epic poem, the Africa, unreleased in his lifetime apart from one short passage and the greatest literary flop when it eventually emerged after his death, was less epic than it was discursive and personal. The large collections of letters, principally the Familiares and the Seniles, which were apparently inspired by his Ciceronian discoveries, were less anecdotal and occasional than measured moral discourses, miniature treatises, self-analyses and self-portraits. But these are only part of a literary production which is amazing in its diversity and abundance. It includes allegorical eclogues, verse epistles, biographies, treatises, polemical defences of humanistic studies and of Petrarch's own position within them, a self-analysis in the form of a dialogue with St Augustine (Secretum), and moral dialogues (De remediis utriusque fortune), as well as relatively minor pieces such as the oration he delivered on his coronation (Collatio laureationis) or the letter addressed to posterity Posteritati).

In that letter, as throughout his writings, Petrarch is primarily concerned with himself, or rather with formulating some version of himself which caters for his continual shifts of perspective on himself and on his work, and for the doubts and contradictions which he never fully resolves. He continually debates the nature of his studies and his writing, exploring their relationship to a truth which his disavowal of metaphysics prevents him from even beginning to express, but which impinges as an absence, or as a matter of faith. In the course of his career he entertains every possibility: he normally dismisses simple restoration of classical glories as something which he foolishly entertained in his youth, but he moves between a humanism which is also Christian, a Christianity which has a humanist colouring, and a Christianity which has nothing to do with the folly of writing. Though he liked to present himself as evolving from a more or less Christian but distinctly humanist poet into a distinctly Christian moral philosopher, the phases blur together. Almost everything we have of Petrarch belongs to his maturity. Although the passage of time and the changes it brings is one of his constant themes, there is a sense in which all his surviving writings are an encyclopaedia which includes as many kinds of writing and as many attitudes to the nature and function of writing as they possibly can, all united not by any reference to some external truth but by a self which is present in all of them, though complete in none, and whose boundaries are determined by the totality of the authorised oeuvre.

Much of Petrarch is incomplete or composed of short units in different states of elaboration. Most betokens a state of unease or even of crisis. But the assurance is also striking. However much rewritten, however much they might have been further revised, the fragments and incomplete works are formally and stylistically accomplished. What is more important, the fundamental decisions are unhesitatingly held to. From the beginning there is a rejection of the conceptual and literary practices of the previous generation of Italian writers (especially those of Dante) and a conviction that all matters of intellectual and moral importance should find expression in a renovated form of Latin. What is left to Italian is poetry, and poetry of a particular kind.

Petrarch's work in Italian falls into three parts. Most important are the 366 lyric poems which make up the collection often called the Canzoniere, sometimes the Rime sparse (from the first line of the first poem), but which Petrarch himself entitled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, literally 'Fragments of vernacular matters': I shall follow Petrarch, at least to some degree, by using the acronym RVF. Then there are some poems excluded from the major collection: at least twenty-nine of these Rime disperse (RD), as they are conventionally called, are genuine, though there may well be others amongst the vast body of poems attributed to Petrarch between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. Lastly there are the Triumphi (Triumphs), a sequence of six visionary poems which was never quite completed. It is a substantial body of work: the RVF alone is larger than the total surviving production of any earlier lyric poet, except perhaps Guittone d'Arezzo, and at least as large as the production of some of his prolific contemporaries. But it is dwarfed by the Latin writings. In the Basle edition of 1554, which is still the only comprehensive, if not quite complete, edition of his works, the Italian poems are crammed into some 78 pages: the Latin writings fill nearly 1,400.

The contrast is not solely of scale. In Latin Petrarch looks to the ancient world, in Italian to the lyric tradition of Tuscany and Provence, and to the love-poetry that had always been at its centre. Though the poems are much more than the expression of passion and at least some turn explicitly away from love, the great majority centre on Petrarch's love for the woman he called Laura, whom he claims to have first seen in 1327 and to have loved from then until long after her death in 1348. Love is largely absent from the Latin works. There are love-poems for Laura amongst the verse epistles (Epistole metrice): she is allegorised as the laurel in some of the eclogues (Bucolicum carmen)' but she becomes a major issue only in the dialogue with Augustine in the Secretum, which debates some of the dangers of love in a comparable way to some of the poems. In the self-portrait given in the letter to posterity there is only a cursory dismissal of a passion which, to judge by the Italian poems, obsessed their author from the ages of twenty-three until at least his sixties.

Laura may or may not have existed as an individual. But poetically the obsession was certainly real and long-lasting. Some of the poems in the RVF were written in the 1330s or perhaps even earlier, though Petrarch probably began work on making a collection in the 1340s at the earliest. But it was in his later years that he did most of the work on the composition of the whole, and, in all probability, wrote a considerable number of the individual poems. He gave the arrangement of the collection its final form something less than a year before his death.

His Latin work offers a different picture. By the 1350s he was presenting himself as having abandoned poetry altogether, and, so far as poetry in Latin was concerned, this was true. As for the work on his Italian poetry, he declares that he is merely collecting together youthful trifles: he is now ashamed of them, but they are in demand from friends whom he cannot refuse: he also wishes to protect them from abuse and distortion. But the disparities are comprehensible. Italian poetry, as he conceived and wrote it, was not to be reconciled with humanism in any intellectually coherent fashion, even if humanists and their patrons enjoyed writing and reading it. There could be no justification for indulgence in sexual love, however refined, nor for love-poetry. It was available to the vulgar at large, and, what was perhaps worse, available to women. It had to be judged frivolous, immoral, and, as literature, inferior in every way to what might be written in Latin. Such a poetry might perhaps have been justified if it were allegorical—if, that is, Laura were indeed the laurel, the symbol of glory and poetry, which she became in the Bucolicum carmen. But that was a step whose ambiguous possibilities Petrarch explored in the RVF without totally committing himself. Instead he risked the absurdity and ridicule of being a man in his fifties and sixties who wrote love-poetry. Contemporaries seem to have been indifferent to this contradiction of the equation between love and youth which goes back to antiquity and which had been particularly strong in Provençal poetry. Petrarch himself was not. For him there had to be some degree of shame in such a display, as the poems themselves indicate. In spite of public appreciation and the protracted work of composition, it was unthinkable that the results could be called poetry: had that been done, they would have entered the same category as the Aeneid or the Africa, with implications for the possible status of the vernacular generally which Petrarch the humanist was anxious to avoid.

Clearly he was also anxious to orient writing in the two languages in two separate, even opposed directions. That does not mean that what he writes in the one is radically different from what he writes in the other. The very professions of shame, the slighting dismissals as trifles of works on which he spent years, are applied to his Latin writings as well as to the Italian. And the more we look, the more the points of contact proliferate, ranging from turns of phrase, favoured images, direct cross-references to fundamental concerns. If Petrarch writes in Italian of despair, confusion, frustration, that is only a reformulation in the terms of the lyric of much that appears in his Latin works. If he puts at the centre of his Latin works a self who is continually reshaped and re-examined, it is a similar fluctuating and uncertain self which is created and explored in Italian. If he voices and investigates in Latin various contradictory positions vis-à-vis the purposes and nature of writing, so in Italian he articulates and examines a series of poetic possibilities, embracing all and settling for none. As in Latin, writing is less a way of making statements about the world or reality than an area in which multiple pathways alternately diverge and cross each other, their contradictions being reconciled (though not annulled) in the writing itself rather than in any point of arrival or final judgment. The difference is one of quality; for Italian, in Petrarch's hands, has the advantage: in a way that he could not quite achieve in Latin, he is able, in the inferior language, to create a style which is consistent whilst constantly varied, which can absorb literature of the past whilst retaining its own identity, which is always beautiful in a convincing, if sometimes bewildering way. There is no disparity of aspiration or literary attention between the Latin and the Italian Petrarch: but the latter presupposes the former in a way that is not true if we invert the terms. As Petrarch's Latin title suggests, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta are the vernacular poems of a humanist.

The Italian context

Though there are important difference of perspective between them, Dante and Petrarch both make historical interpretations of Italian poetry which, taken together, suggest the idea of a poetic tradition running fairly smoothly from the Sicilians, or perhaps even from Provence, through to Petrarch. But in many ways the tradition was, and is, a retrospective construction. In reality continuity was neither automatic nor linear. At any point—and at some more than others—connections with the past had to be affirmed or denied, interferences had to be assimilated or rejected, and the past itself reassessed. There were always risks of rupture or dispersal. In the first half of the fourteenth century they were particularly intense. For Petrarch and his contemporaries, writing poetry in Italian was a quite different enterprise from what it had been in thirteenth-century Tuscany. At the same time the later poetry came into being largely in the shadow of the earlier. Petrarch was able to reshape the past in the light of the contradictory exigencies at work in himself and in fourteenth-century culture generally. His contemporaries often had similar aspirations, but were repeatedly thrown into confusion or confined to epigonal roles.

The tradition was no more than a hundred years old when Petrarch wrote the earliest poems which he included in the RVF. It had been initiated, quite abruptly it seems, by a loose-knit group of administrators, lawyers and notaries connected with the court of the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily and Southern Italy. Perhaps the Emperor himself encouraged, or ordered, the production in an Italian language of a poetry similar in kind and quality to that produced by the minnesinger and troubadours whom he patronised. At all events the Sicilians (as they have been called since at least the time of Petrarch, though not all of them were from Sicily) produced a quite sophisticated love-poetry which owed a great deal to Provençal fin' amors. They made the Sicilian language in which they wrote acceptable by giving it a Provençal and, to a lesser extent, a Latin flavour, as well as by importing idioms, images and conventions from the troubadours. So Italian poetry began on the elevated level which it was to maintain up to and beyond Petrarch. It also acquired its fundamental poetic forms—the major form, the canzone, deriving from the Provençal canso; the minor one, the sonnet, being an invention of the Sicilians, and probably of the dominant figure amongst them, the notary Giacomo da Lentini.

Sicilian poetry came to an abrupt end when the German power on which it depended was shattered by the French at the battles of Benevento (1265) and Tagliacozzo (1267). But by then it had long penetrated Central Italy. Bologna and the cities of Tuscany were to be the centres in which it developed and to which it was confined until almost exactly the end of the thirteenth century. Broadly speaking, the first phase was one of expansion. It was centred around Guittone d'Arezzo (c. 1230-94), who produced the first sizeable body of work in Italian lyric poetry and who was considerably more ambitious than the Sicilians had been, drawing on some of the techniques of the Provencal trobar clus and also on the refinements of the Ars dictaminis. Guittone also wrote political and moral poetry, eventually denouncing love as carnal and adulterous when he became one of the new lay order of Frati gaudenti in the early 1260s. Nor was the expansion simply internal. Canzoni and sonnets in the Sicilian and Guittonian mode proliferated amongst notaries, merchants, bankers in the various Tuscan towns. There may even have been a woman poet, the socalled 'Compiuta Donzella'.

This too was sophisticated poetry, aware of its own conventions and aware of European ideas of literary hierarchy. Overall the Tuscans aimed to be elevated, whether celebrating or denouncing love. But they also made moves in the direction of a more colloquial register in political and occasional verse, whilst in Florence, probably in the 1270s, the antithesis of high poetry suddenly appeared in some of the poems of Rustico Filippi. Vulgar, idiomatic, morally perverse, what is now called poesia giocosa was less a questioning of high poetry than its parasitical inversion, written in complete accordance with the accepted rules for low-style poetry.

But the limitations were evident, at least by contemporary standards. The early Tuscans were the voices of a provincial culture which had emerged quite suddenly into literacy as a result of rapid commercial expansion. Their points of reference were principally Sicilian and Provençal poetry and contemporary Latin rhetoric. Though the debates about the nature of love echo scholastic procedures of argument and suggest some acquaintance with contemporary medical and psychological thought, intellectual vitality is largely limited to the manipulation of commonplaces. The practitioners, whether we call them poets or not, were in contemporary parlance rimatori, dettatori, trovatori, not poeti or auctores whose names were to be respected and whose texts were to be commented on or glossed. In a sense their poetry was public property. Though it was certainly literate and, to judge from the evidence, it differed from Provençal poetry in not being directly associated with music, it quickly passed outside its authors' control into anthologies where it was at the mercy of scribal whim and regional variation.

This last problem would continue into Petrarch's time. But in the later years of the century there were major revisions of Tuscan poetic habits. What is now generally called the dolce stil novo (though Dante's phrase may well have a different emphasis in its original context in Purg. 24. 57) began in Bologna with Guido Guinizzelli (?1230-?1276), whose slender surviving oeuvre includes poems in the Guittonian style, but also some others which are conspicuously both more harmonious and more complex intellectually. What Bonagiunta da Lucca, one of his contemporary critics from the old school, considered an excess of Bolognese learning (Poeti 2. 481) is especially strong in the famous canzone on the nature of love, Al cor gentil rempaira sempre Amore. But it was in Florence in the work of Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1259-1300) that the new style really developed both its characteristic 'sweetness' and its conceptual scope, the latter being formidably displayed in Cavalcanti's philosophical canzone Donna me prega, the former being more apparent in his other poems. The new poetry was aimed at a circle of initiates, presupposing an intellectual and literary sophistication far exceeding that demanded by the run of previous poets. In other words with Cavalcanti the modes of high literature began to be reproduced in the vernacular.

It was Dante (1265-1321) who made the claims of the vernacular explicit. In the Vita nuova (c. 1294) he gathered together a selection of his youthful poetry and, with the help of a prose commentary, made its coherence evident. Love, reason and vernacular poetry were, he argued, complementary. At this stage he thought poetry in Italian should restrict itself thematically to love, but, since there was as much sense and order in the best vernacular poetry as traditional theory held there to be in the Latin masters, it followed that there was no difference in kind between the rimatori and the poeti (VN 25).

The rest of Dante's work is, amongst other things, a demonstration of the truth of this radical proposition. He had already gone beyond Cavalcanti in the Vita nuova. Over the next decade or so he wrote a series of poems which were conceptually more substantial and technically stricter than anything so far written in Italian. Concurrently he supported practice with theory, moving from the relatively restricted claims of his first book to the eventual proclamation of the De vulgari eloquentia (1. 1. 4) that 'nobilior est vulgaris' (the vernacular is the nobler language), and that meant that it could deal with the noblest of themes—moral and spiritual well-being, political and military struggle, as well as love.

For all his theoretical pronouncements, all the poetry which Dante had written was just about containable within the confines of the tradition and within traditional ways of seeing the relationship between Latin and the vernacular. The Divina commedia was not. It was finished not long before Dante died in Ravenna in 1321. Within ten years it was well known and widely read in Northern and Central Italy. Though one or two dissenters were to be heard, it was quickly recognised that here was a work in Italian which rivalled any work of ancient poetry. It satisfied all criteria for poetic excellence. It showed a complete mastery of rhetoric: it was immensely learned in philosophy, science and theology: and it was rich in moral lessons for its readers' improvement. If it quickly became popular with the people at large, it was also clear that its appealing surface concealed difficult, even arcane truths. Learned commentaries began to appear almost at once. By 1333 there were at least four in existence which have survived (Jacopo di Dante, Graziolo Bambaglioli, il Lana and l'Ottimo), indicating a de facto recognition that the text required the same depth of exegesis as, say, the Aeneid. The theoretical recognition was voiced most forcefully by Boccaccio. Dante, he proclaimed in his celebratory biography, is a great and glorious poeta: his work has the sweetness and beauty which appeals to everyone, including women and young people, but it also has a wealth of deep meaning which first puzzles and then 'refreshes and nourishes serious minds' ('ricrea e pasce gli solenni intelletti': Opere 384).

Boccaccio may have been right, but the Commedia posed enormous problems for any subsequent poet. Apart from its assault upon linguistic certainties which had been presumed valid for centuries, there was the question of how Italian poetry was to deal with a literary father who seemed simultaneously to have created the poetic language and to have exhausted all its resources. Indeed, if the implications of his poem are taken seriously, he had said everything worth saying. One response was to attempt encyclopaedical poems on the Dantesque model, but with different matter; another, already evident in Dante's friend, the canon lawyer Cino da Pistoia (c. 1270-1336/7), was to incorporate phrases, words, images from the Commedia into lyric poems of a familiar kind, in Cino's case a generally more subdued dolce stil novo.

Both responses are signs that Dante's great synthesis could only collapse. Perhaps it was in any case a more fragile, idiosyncratic creation than it pretended: the attempt to demonstrate the truth of the assumption that everything which existed did somehow cohere could perhaps only convince within the terms of the poem. Outside there were too many disruptive forces. Dante's universalist politics were already outmoded when he was writing. The exile of the Papacy to Avignon, the weakness of successive emperors, the increasing importance of national monarchs, the rise of the new signorie in Northern Italy—all these political realities made one of the major struts of his work outmoded except as literature. The republican city-states of Central Italy which had obsessed him were reduced in numbers in the course of the fourteenth century, and the strongest of them, Florence, developed in precisely the direction he wished it not to take. The commercialism which Dante detested was absorbed into a culture which found its image in the human world of the Decameron. Philosophically, too, the unity was broken. Dante made a unique fusion of Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic thinking: in the fourteenth century the two divided again, with humanists of the Petrarchan stamp rejecting out of hand all the speculative thought that was fundamental to the Commedia. If its commentators are anything to go by, even the poem itself could only be read as a series of episodes or of difficulties whose place in the whole was not to be considered.

Cultural and political fragmentation was linked with geographic dispersal. In the early years of the century lyric poetry spread out of Tuscany to the North, partly, it seems, as a result of the banishment of the White Guelphs from Florence in 1302. According to Boccaccio's biography (Opere 338), Dante himself made converts to the cause of poetry in general and vernacular poetry in particular during his last years in Ravenna. Already between 1325 and 1335 Niccolò de' Rossi, a notary in Treviso, assembled an anthology of poems that ran back through Dante and Cavalcanti all the way to goliardic Latin. Niccolò also wrote a great deal of largely old-fashioned lyric verse of his own. His manuscript of his poems, completed probably before 1330, is the earliest example we have of an Italian poet making an 'edition' of his own work (see Brugnolo ed.).

As in the previous century, many poets were notaries, like Niccolò, or merchants. But they were not dominant voices as their Tuscan equivalents had been. There is an immense profusion of fourteenth-century poetry, in which many conflicting tendencies are visible. A major one is the rise of court-poetry, which to all intents and purposes did not exist in thirteenth-century Tuscany. The rule of absolute signori meant a return to the situation of the troubadours or even of their jongleurs, at least for some of the most important Northern poets. Dante himself had become a dependant of princes, though protected by his prestige against the worst indignities of such a position, in spite of his gloomy comments in Paradiso (17. 58-60). Some of his successors, such as Antonio da Ferrara (1315-71/ 4) and Francesco di Vannozzo (c. 1340-90?), were less fortunate. Of poor birth, with relatively little education and no material resources, they found themselves continually moving from court to court, looking for support and patronage, and often producing poems at their patrons' requests. As Francesco di Vannozzo put it in one of his poems, 'vo cantando fole / su per 1e tole altrui / con questo e con colui / per un bicchier di vino' ('I go singing fables / at others' tables / with this fellow and that / for a glass of wine': ed. Medin, p. 248).

In this kind of poetry, and in much written by sober notaries and merchants, the sense of poetry as a means of investigating and articulating serious and complex issues has all but evaporated. So too has the linguistic and stylistic homogeneity of Tuscan poetry, with its strict distinction between styles and its careful cultivation of the high style as the supreme form of poetic expression. Antonio da Tempo, a Paduan who wrote a pedantic treatise on vernacular lyric forms, datable to 1332, said that the Tuscan language was more appropriate to literature ('ad literam sive literaturam') than other idioms, because it was 'magis communis et intelligibilis', that is, because it had more features that were general and hence was more widely understood, though he also allowed that other idioms could be used too (ed. Andrews, p. 99). Other Northern poets would probably have agreed with Antonio, although they did not have the means to act on even this uncertain programme. There was no grammar detailing the rules and forms of Tuscan. In practice Northerners were limited to reworking Tuscan poems and to embedding words and phrases from Dante and the other poets in a language based on their own usage, with ad libitum admixtures from Latin. Much is written in a more or less conversational vein, with overtly autobiographical or occasional content (such as the lines from Vannozzo given above). Much too is written expressly to be set to music, especially madrigali, which were probably not cultivated by the earlier Tuscan poets, if they existed at all.

Though these developments suggest a resurgence of orality, poetry was also becoming more distinctly literate, as the example of Niccolò de' Rossi shows. Manuscript collections, both of earlier and contemporary poetry proliferate in the course of the century. There were also clear aspirations towards higher styles of writing. Dante, the new learning of humanism and, from at least the middle of the century and perhaps before, Petrarch's own Italian poetry, all had their effects. But the results often flaunt classical learning, or else become heterogeneous mixtures which, by Petrarchan standards, are medieval rather than humanist. Brizio Visconti (d. 1357), the bastard son of Luchino, wrote a canzone on the beauty of his donna, Mal d'Amor parla chi d'amor non sente ('He who has no feeling of love speaks ill of love': Rimatori 184). Each stanza ends with a comparison to a famous figure: viz. Ovid's Actaeon, St Paul, Apuleius' Psyche, Absalom, the Polyxena of Daretes Phrygius, Virgil's Lavinia, Solomon, Isolde, Aristotle, Polycletus (the sculptor), and St Augustine. Brizio has mixed together the classical, the vernacular, the biblical, in a sequence that has no rationale which I can discover. But he does give his poem more of a structure than this. He described the lady in accordance with the rules for female description laid down in textbooks of poetics: he begins with her hair and works downwards feature by feature until the limits of decency are reached. There is nothing comparable in thirteenth-century poetry, nor will there be in Petrarch, but such curious combinations of haphazard learning and rigid structuring are quite frequent amongst other fourteenth-century poets.

To a large extent it is the context of Northern poetry which is relevant to Petrarch. He composed the RVF largely in Northern Italy and it was for Northern signori that he made various intermediate versions of the collection. His contacts with contemporary Tuscan poets, other than Boccaccio, belong principally to the earlier phases of his career. The most important of these was probably with Sennuccio del Bene (see section 4 below), though he certainly knew the work of Cino da Pistoia, and may even have known him personally. In any case, whilst Florentines and Tuscans were protected against linguistic heterogeneity to some degree, their poetry shows many of the same tendencies as that of the Northerners. Cino, Sennuccio and others continued to write in the manner of the stil novo, though in less exalted vein than their predecessors. There were also Dantesque imitations, classicising poetry of various kinds, and, increasingly as the century went on, homely occasional verse, speaking good sense in colloquial language. The most important Tuscan writer is of course Boccaccio (1313-75), who was a personal friend of Petrarch from 1351 until the end of his life. Before he largely abandoned the vernacular, Boccaccio continually opened up new avenues in prose and verse, principally in the area of narrative, exploiting his large, unsystematic readings in medieval and classical literature to produce a series of works which combined the two in unprecedented amalgamations. Within the terms of the mercantile culture in which he worked, he, like Petrarch, found a series of solutions, some perhaps more successful than others, to the problem of reconciling different cultural pressures and energies in complex wholes. His surviving lyric poetry is largely occasional, sometimes classicising, sometimes popularising, even casual from a technical point of view.

The story that Boccaccio burnt his poems after seeing Petrarch's may or may not be true, but the letter by Petrarch (Sen. 5.2) consoling him for his sense of literary inferiority affirms what will become the dominant perspective on Italian literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In whatever order of precedence they are to be arranged, the three authors are Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. For the rest there is silence. The historical reality was of course much less clear cut. In the last section of this chapter I shall look briefly at what can be deduced of Petrarch's involvement in the common situation of the poets of his time and at his relations with other poets.

The Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

The RVF was a major poetic enterprise beyond the powers of any of Petrarch's contemporaries, none of whom had a comparable experience of literature, or an equivalent critical and historical awareness. It is conditioned throughout by Petrarch's humanism. Though the poems do not flaunt classicism, it is in the light of his work in Latin that he carries through a reassessment of the possibilities of poetry in Italian. Alone of fourteenth-century poets, Petrarch rethinks and remakes the tradition, finding solutions to some of the major problems which poetry faced in his own time, whilst recognising that some of the fundamental ones were, unhappily, intractable, except, perhaps, in the contradictions of which poetry itself is made. At the same time he absorbs into his work the main tendencies evident in his contemporaries, even, when it suited him (or his poetry), drawing directly on their work. For, in spite of his sheer egocentricity and the effacement which he inflicted on them, Petrarch spoke for, not against, other Italian poets of his time.

The foundation of the work was the making of a text. Whilst at least one partly autograph collection (by Niccolò de' Rossi) predates the RVF, it is Petrarch's text which is historically significant. Here we have a major author expressly recognising the destruction that his poems were exposed to at the hands of performers to whom he released them (Fam. 21. 15 and Sen. 5. 3.) In the manuscript which he made in the last years of his life Petrarch created a defence against the absorption of his poetry into an oral culture, and also made a humanist resolution of the textual problems of contemporary and preceding poetry generally. He takes control as author of his production, making the same provisions as he makes with any of his Latin works to resist the forces of dispersal and corruption, and presuming implicitly that the poems have the same status as his works in Latin. It is on this act of control and preservation that everything about his poetry depends, from the finest and most subtle of musical effects, to the complexities of the relations between poems. In the fullest sense these are literary poems.

Within the collection the poems are autonomous. Petrarch excludes poems by others and refuses to specify any of the occasions which gave rise to poems, whether these are tenzoni with other poets, incidents in his life, or the ups and downs, true or invented, of a peculiarly protracted love-affair. At the same time the autobiographical and occasional character of poetry after Dante is not denied. The RVF tells a story, but it does so indirectly in the full recognition that poetic narrative, especially that of lyric poetry, is subject to other pressures, some of which run counter to narrative demands. As well as the partial autobiography which a collection of lyric poems might easily furnish, Petrarch creates a complex interplay between poems, in which narrative possibilities, formal and thematic patterning, and variety (or disorder) compete with each other. On the whole the poems are abstracted from history. When they do display a sense of poetry having an active role to play, it is primarily with reference to some moment in the future which they themselves can only anticipate.…

Like his contemporaries Petrarch looks to the past. Unlike them, he makes a serious and lucid recuperation of the central features of the tradition. Although he admits political poems and poems of other kinds, he gives overwhelming priority to love-poetry, almost as if he were following Dante's dictates in the Vita nuova, and certainly in accordance with the general practice of thirteenth-century poets. And with the choice of the canonical theme he makes a choice of language and poetic forms which also looks back to the earlier Tuscan lyric. The hybridism and outrageous classicism of his contemporaries, their liking for extended or irregular forms, their conversational tone are all discarded. So too are they; the references, the echoes, the different varieties of metrical organisation are all cast primarily as reassessments of the past, not the present.

All the same there are fundamental modifications. In Italian, as in Latin, Petrarch rejects the scholastic and speculative tendency which had been the strength of later thirteenth-century poetry, and re-forms the style or styles of his predecessors in the light of his own criteria of selfhood, recasting the figure of the donna and creating a psychological complexity in poetry for which there were no precedents. He also finds a solution to the problem of Dante. Beatrice is remade as Laura and questions of transcendental love and transcendental poetry are re-formed in a poetry which is far more sceptical, although unhappily so. The Commedia itself is ousted. It becomes the prodigy which it had to be, something quite distinct from lyric poetry, not its point of arrival. In its place there is a reaffirmation of order: the progress of the lyric in Italian ran (as we still tend to think it does) from the Sicilians through the lyric Dante to Petrarch, who in his turn became its culmination. The RVF is a representation of the poet's self, but the self represented is also poetic. The changes and fluctuations which the collection represents make up a selective encyclopaedia of Italian poetry, which absorbs and reinterprets the practices of earlier poets, simultaneously casting them as having no greater role than that of being its precursors.

All is accomplished by accepting even more than his contemporaries the cultural dispersal in which they and Petrarch wrote. Earlier poetry in Provencal and Italian reappears in the RVF in fragmentory, even pulverised form. So too do fragments from the full range of Petrarch's vast reading. The difference lies in the reconstitution: in the RVF there is no literary pastiche, no embedding of literary jewels in drab or uncertain language. Everything is re-formed as an aspect of the self, which is constantly changing but constantly the same, and which finds poetic identity in all the forms it takes, however uncertain it may be about their meaning or status.

The combination of order and disorder, of resolution and indecision, is one of the most disquieting and deep-rooted attractions of the RVF. Thematically the poems raise questions about the meaning and scope of poetry which had been voiced by earlier poets (though not, it seems, by other poets of the fourteenth century) and by Petrarch himself in Latin. Simultaneously, they reshape those questions and answer them in some measure, only to discard the answers as provisional, or as only the material of a poetry which can never find a single formulation to embrace its multiple ambiguities.… The very stylistic and formal brilliance of the poetry, so evidently not present in the work of his contemporaries, is itself dependent on conflicts and unresolved contrasts, on elements of language which are never rid of their irrational and ambiguous overtones, as much as it is dependent on the creation of lucidly balanced structures. In the course of the Renaissance the RVF will become a paradigm of aesthetic achievement in poetry. As we look at the collection now, it betrays constant unease as well as pleasure in the artefacts of which it is made. In some sense it recognises and includes its own negativity, never excluding the aura of death and vanity which surrounds all of Petrarch's work. A combination of the uncombinable, in what may or may not be an integrated whole, is achieved in each poem of the RVF and in the totality of the collection, with resonances which extend far beyond the specific personal and cultural crises from which the work historically evolved.

Petrarch's career as an Italian poet

Whilst it is possible to outline the general context from which the RVF emerged, the specifics largely elude us. It is hard to speak with any confidence about Petrarch's evolution as a vernacular poet or his personal and literary relations with contemporaries who wrote in Italian. The main collection of poems is at best an ambiguous guide, and other evidence—principally the Rime disperse(RD)—is fragmentary and insubstantial. All the same, it is possible to map out a little of the itinerary which Petrarch must have traced, and to explore one or two points of contact with a poetic culture from which he was clearly not so divorced as the RVF as a whole seems to suggest.

We do not know when Petrarch began to write Italian poems. His earliest surviving poem is a Latin elegy on the death of his mother written when he was eighteen (Ep. met. 1.7), though a letter to his brother Gherardo probably written in 1348 (Fam. 10.3) talks disparagingly of love-poems which they wrote during their student days. None of these have survived, if indeed they ever existed. The earliest poems we can identify belong to a group of twenty-five which Petrarch copied out into his rough manuscript in the years 1336-8, forming what Wilkins called a 'reference collection' on the grounds that the poems seem to have been transcribed in no significant order for personal use (1951: 81-92). Eighteen of the poems would eventually enter the RVF as 23, 34-6, 41-6, 49, 58, 60, 64, 69, 77, 78, 179. According to a later note, RVF 23 (Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade) was one of the earliest poems which Petrarch wrote (Romanò 1955: 169…). The discarded poems comprise five by Petrarch himself (RD 1-5), and two poems by a certain Geri dei Gianfigliazzi and the equally obscure figure of Ser Pietro Dietisalvi, to which two of his own poems were originally replies. In all probability two other excluded poems (RD 17 and 18), addressed to Sennuccio del Bene, which were not amongst those transcribed in 1336-8, are also very early.

Taken as a group, these poems are less distinct from much other poetry of their time than are the RVF as a whole. Although the poems admitted into the collection are fully integrated, they make a more open display of classical mythology than most of the RVF. In the rejected poems myth seems to be used relatively or uncertainly. Quando talor, da giusta ira commosso (RD 1) uneasily fits the myth of Hercules into a generally Cavalcantian poem: from its first line Se Febo al primo amor non è bugiardo (RD 5) introduces the myth of Apollo, which is fundamental to much of the RVF, in an emphatic conversational register which the later Petrarch avoids: Sí come il padre del folle Fetonte (RD 17) strings together one Ovidian myth after another, with an explicit mention of the name Daphne, which is to be excluded from the RVF.… This poem is also exceptional in apparently making a pun between Laura's name and 'l'ora' (time), and, like one or two other excluded poems (and many poems by other fourteenth-century poets) in being an extended sonnet.

At this stage, or at least in the poems he rejected, Petrarch has not completely established the voice which he will have in the RVF. He is also and quite so autonomous. He is willing to write poems on request: RD 3 and 4, which are love-poems of a sort, have notes saying that they were written to order, the second note making it plain that the unknown commissioner also told him what matter ('materiam') to put into the poem. At least two other poems were written, if not to order, with the express purpose of furthering his patrons' interests. The sonnet Vinse Hanibàl (RVF 103), urging Stefano Colonna to press on and destroy the Orsini after his victory over them in 1333, is almost certainly the short piece ('breve quiddam') which, according to a letter on the same theme (Fam. 4.3), was composed in the vernacular so that his feelings would be known to the soldiers in Stefano's army. The canzone Quel c'ha nostra natura in sé piú degno (RD 29), written after the bloody recovery of Parma by Azzo da Correggio and his brothers in 1341, makes it plain in its congedo that it is intended to celebrate their achievement and to make it known particularly in Tuscany. But perhaps these are exceptional. Taken together, poems to patrons included in the RVF suggest a picture, perhaps somewhat idealised, of relations between a great humanist and the powerful. Those to the Colonna, Agapito (58), Stefano (10, 103) and Giovanni (266, 269, 322), like those to Orso dell'Anguillara (38) and Pandolfo Malatesta (104), suggest a shared interest in Roman virtue and in ancient poetry. Here there are no requests for gifts, no indignities, but instead a friendship not so distant in tone from that of Ennius and Scipio in the Africa.

The poems from the 1330s also include poetic exchanges (tenzoni). It appears that Petrarch was willing to continue taking part in these until well into the 1340s. Two are with friends in humanist circles or on its edges, whose poems (often printed at the end of the RVF in Renaissance editions) show that they too can turn a reasonable sonnet. One friend was the schoolmaster Stramazzo da Perugia, mentioned in Fam. 14.12 as one of the few men in Italy to know Greek, the other Giovanni Dondi, the Paduan mathematician and astronomer; RVF 24 was originally a reply to the first, 244 to the second. But Petrarch's principal poetic correspondents are Sennuccio del Bene and Antonio da Ferrara, two figures who represent quite different trends in fourteenth-century poetry and whose relations with Petrarch are of rather different kinds.

Sennuccio (c. 1275-1349) wrote in the somewhat toned-down version of the stil novo which had become common amongst Tuscans in the early part of the fourteenth century, although it is significant, in the light of Petrarch's development, that amongst the small number of his surviving poems are two on the theme of the elderly lover (Canz. 9 and 10). He is probably Petrarch's main direct link with poetry of the previous century. The two became friends when Petrarch was quite young. The older poet was exiled from Florence as a result of his involvement with other Whites in Henry VII's siege of the city in 1312. From 1316 to 1326 he was in Avignon, where he too entered humanist circles and was also a protégé of the Colonna. He also made at least one further visit after being allowed to return to Florence. Petrarch addressed seven poems to him which have survived, five of them (the last on his death) being included in the RVF (108, 112, 113, 114, 287 …), the two classicising poems already mentioned being excluded (RD 17 and 18). The poems on both sides have a tone of relaxed intimacy that does not appear elsewhere in the RVF, though one of the poems by Sennuccio is written in the name of Giovanni Colonna as a reply to Petrarch's poem to the latter, Signor mio caro (RVF 266). Petrarch thought enough of his work to mention him, with another friend and minor poet, Franceschino degli Albizzi (who died of the plague in 1348), at the end of his selective survey of Italian poets in the Triumphus Cupidinis (4. 37-8), though admittedly in words that suggest personal rather than poetic excellence: 'Senneccio e Franceschin, che fur sí umani, / come ogni uom vide' ('Sennuccio and Franceschino, who were so human, / as every man saw). As always on poetic matters, Petrarch was ruthless but right.

Petrarch's exchanges with Antonio da Ferrara belong to a time when his position as an eminent writer was assured. To a large extent they reflect the differences in prestige and education between the two, but they also show Petrarch stepping outside his familiar persona. Antonio (1315-71/74) was the son of a butcher, an autodidact, and, throughout his life, a second- or third-grade courtier, dependent on the various Northern signori for whom he wrote. The acquaintance with Petrarch began in 1343 when a report spread that he had died of an illness in Sicily. Antonio wrote a fullsome canzone of lament and celebration, I' ho già letto el pianto d'i Troiani ('I have read in the past the lament of the Trjoans': Rime 67a), the first line of which gives a hint of the display of text-book erudition which is to follow, though the canzone ends with a characteristically forthright and modest admonition to the poem to say that it is by 'Antonio Beccar, un da Ferrara, / che poco sa ma volenter impara' ('Antonio Beccari, one from Ferrara, / who knows little, but learns willingly'). Antonio eventually received a sonnet in return (to become RVF 120), in which Petrarch assured him that he was still alive though he had been ill, and disclaimed his worthiness to receive such a tribute. Sooner or later there followed other tenzoni (texts in Antonio, Rime, 78-82). In the first two Petrarch is surprisingly willing to debate—playfully, no doubt—worn commonplaces about love and hope, and the difference between honourable love and carnal passion, though the authenticity of the second poem (Rime 79b) has been doubted, in part because it ends with the statement that he has been in love himself more than twenty-two times. Another tenzone is initiated by Petrarch: in a poem beginning 'Antonio cos' ha fatto 1a tua terra?' (RD 15: Antonio, Rime 80a) Petrarch says that he has fallen passionately in love with a Ferrarese girl and asks Antonio who she is. In his reply (Rime 80b) Antonio regrets that Petrarch has become so enamoured that he has forgotten their friendship, but hopes that the outcome will be that he will stay in Ferrara, so that he can enjoy his company once again. Obviously enough we are a long way here from the serious, complex figure of the RVF, though it may just be that the Ferrarese girl is the new love who appears in RVF 270 and 271, from which Petrarch is glad to say he is quickly liberated, once again by death.

The tenzoni are not all there is to Petrarch's poetic relationship with Antonio. There are three sonnets, one by Antonio (Rime 11), one by Petrarch (RVF 102), and one attributed to Boccaccio (Rime 41) (though its authenticity has been doubted), which rework the same material in almost exactly the same order. The texts of all three are given at the end of this section. The first quattrain of each begins with the example of Caesar concealing his joy at receiving the head of Pompey; the second takes the opposite case of Hannibal concealing his grief when the head of his brother Hasdrubal was sent to him; in the sestet the poet applies the examples to himself, saying that he is obliged to present to the world the image of someone happier than he really is. It is quite possible that the original sonnet was by Antonio. An early biography of Petrarch by Lelio de'Lelii (quoted by Bellucci in her notes to Antonio, Rime 11) says that Antonio's sonnet came into his hands, and, feeling that the idea was a good one ('l'invenzione era buona') but that the sound of the verse was inadequate, he wrote another, much better sonnet which followed Antonio 'verse by verse with different and much more ornate words' ('verso per verso con diverse e molto piú ornate parole').

The interdependence of the three poems is not simply a matter of the use they make of classical history or the organisation of their material. They also seem to demonstrate a shared sense of what is poetically desirable. All three are based on antitheses of thought and expression which they attempt to integrate with flowing syntax and imagery to give an impression of ease and yet decorum. Antonio has grave difficulties: hampered by Northern forms ('fazzol', 'pianƷendo', 'soa' etc) which contrast uneasily with the Tuscan of the greater part of the poem, he is also semantically loose (eg 1.3), melodically awkward (eg in the rhyme between the two proper names in 11.6 and 7), uncertain in his Latinisms (eg 'intrinseche' in 1.14) and clumsy in some of his phrases ('la gran testa reverente' in 1.5). His main technique for enriching the texture of his verse is lexical repetition ('testa', 'allegrezza', 'canto', 'celar', etc), which gives the poem an air of old-fashioned rigidity, particularly since some of the repeated items appear at the same point in the line. The sonnet attributed to Boccaccio errs in the contrary direction, that is, towards becoming excessively conversational, even causal. In spite of elevated moments (especially 1.2), it is willing to be dully prosaic (above all 11.6-7), and, like some poems of Boccaccio which certainly are genuine, it can accept a quite imperfect rhyme (1.8). Petrarch alone maintains throughout his poem (certainly not one of his most important) an evenness of register and tone, which is at the same time subtly varied, creating a whole which is complex, musical and apparently effortless. As elsewhere, he appears not so much to depart from the aesthetic implicit in the work of his fellow-poets as to realise their aspirations more successfully.

There is a point in the RVF where we can trace the outlines of another victory over the poetically unfortunate Antonio, a victory which also betrays some of the basic dynamics of the collection. I said above that relations between the two poets began with Antonio's canzone of lament on Petrarch's reported death in 1343, in response to which Petrarch wrote the sonnet which was to become RVF 120. In the RVF there is no hint of the destinatee or of the occasion of the poem, but the issue is not forgotten. This sonnet of self-deprecation is placed immediately after the canzone in which Petrarch presents his coronation of 1341 in allegorical form. A donna, representing Glory, appears to Petrarch, and enters into a dialogue with him, in the course of which another donna representing Virtue also appears. The dialogue is measured, decorous, raising questions of moral and cultural decline and presenting Petrarch as a lonely and devoted aspirant who is eventually symbolically rewarded with the laurel crown. The contrasts with Antonio's poem are striking: for Antonio had simply packed in allegorical figures and authoritative names ranging from Priscian to the Muses, all of whom he represents as coming to pay tribute to the dead Petrarch. There may or may not be any connection so far as the actual composition of Petrarch's canzone is concerned. But it effectively corrects what Antonio had written, and demonstrates how a celebratory poem might be managed. When it is put together with the following sonnet, Antonio's effacement is complete: the issues of celebration and modest refusal of celebration are poetically counterposed within the collection. The link with another poet is reduced to an imprecise occasion preceding the second poem: the poems are now internally related and autonomous. Poetry outside the RVF has been absorbed and excluded.

It may be that some of Boccaccio's poetry underwent a similar fate. The friendship between the two writers was largely a humanist one, in which Petrarch played the senior role, and Boccaccio that of admiring disciple. In Italian, although there are broad analogies to be drawn between their treatment of the problem of variety and disorder, their paths mostly diverge. However, in some ways Petrarch was willing to be the learner. His principal model for the Triumphi is the Amorosa visione and he probably drew on other poems for one or two sonnets in the RVF. More importantly, Boccaccio's enthusiasm seems to have made him write directly about the issue of Dante in the late 1350s, which he had previously hoped to pass over in silence, and, more important still, to have confirmed the making of the RVF as a serious enterprise. So far as the RVF are concerned, Boccaccio's shadowy presence is not to be underestimated.

Notes

[Two languages] For P's reputation see Bonora (1954), Sozzi (1963), Dionisotti (1974). For general studies on P see Bosco (1961), Noferi (1962), Quaglio (1967), Foster (1984), Mann (1984), and specifically on P's humanism, De Nolhac (1907), Billanovich (1947 and 1965), Trinkaus (1979). For the development of P's thought see also Baron (1968). For P as scholar see also Reynolds and Wilson (1974: 113-17). On P's life see Wilkins (1961). For a survey of recent criticism see Turchi (1978).

[The Italian context] For the Sicilians see Folena (1973). For Guittone see Marguéron (1966). For poesia giocosa see Marti (1953). For the dolce stil novo see Marti (1973), Favati (1975). For the diffusion of the Divina commedia see the introduction to Petrocchi ed. (1966). For the general situation in fourteenth-century Italy see Larner (1980). For fourteenth-century poetry see Dionisotti (1967), Tartaro (1971), Balduino (1973), Lanza (1978), Russell (1982). For Niccolò de' Rossi see Brugnolo ed. (1974-7). For music and poetry see Roncaglia (1978).…

[Petrarch's career as an Italian poet] For Sennuccio see Altamura ed. (1950) and Billanovich (1965). For P and Sennuccio and see also Barber (1982). For Antonio da Ferrara and texts of tenzoni with P see Bellucci ed. (1972). For P and vernacular Boccaccio see Branca (1981: 300-32). For a discussion of Boccaccio's lyrics see Branca (1981: 250-76).