Biography

Wilkins, Ernest H. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: Phoenix Books/ University of Chicago Press, 1961, 276 p.

Standard biography of Petrarch.

Criticism

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. "Humanism and Monastic Spirituality in Petrarch." Stanford Literature Review 5, Nos. 1-2 (1988): 57-74.

Discusses Petrarch's ideas on asceticism, secular humanism, and spirituality, focusing on Petrarch's De vita solitaria and De otio religioso as well as his relationship with his brother Gherardo, who was a monk.

Prier, Raymond. "The Figurai Ontology of the Text: Petrarch." In Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives, edited by Antonio Toscano, pp. 1-8. Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 1991.

Compares the figural poetics of Dante and Petrarch. Prier concludes that "Petrarch experiences a figura within and expresses it in a multiplicity of language on a page that lies without."

Proctor, Robert E. "Petrarch and the Origins of the Humanities." In Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud, pp. 25-58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Examines Petrarch's ideas on values and the meaning of existence, focusing on his letters and his reading of the ancient Romans.

Shapiro, Marianne. Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980, 254 p.

A study of the sestina in the context of European and American poetry which also attempts to reconcile the languages of literary scholarship.

Strozier, Robert M. "Renaissance Humanist Theory: Petrarch and the Sixteenth Century." Rinascimento XXVI, second series (1986): 193-229.

Argues that a shift in theoretical focus among philosophers occurred between Petrarch's era and that of the humanists of the 1500s.

Waller, Marguerite R. Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1980, 163 p.

Literary-historical study which concerns the "literary inter-relationship inscribed in the Petrarchan texts themselves between a notion of the self and its history or story, an understanding of language which raises problems concerning any and all narrative representations."

Wilkins, Ernest H. "The Evolution of the Canzoniere of Petrarch." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America LXIII, No. 2 (June 1948): 412-55.

Traces Petrarch's revisions of the Canzoniere through nine major versions.

——. Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1955, 324 p.

Collects new and revised essays on Petrarch's life and works, including a discussion of the chronology of the Triumphs and a survey of Renaissance Petrarchism.

Additional coverage of Petrarch's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8, and DISCovering Authors Modules.