Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare
William J. Kennedy
Abstract
The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These “Petrarchan” poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets—as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As the book shows, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petr ... More
The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These “Petrarchan” poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets—as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As the book shows, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch’s legacy. The book contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. It traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique. Their polarities harbor economic consequences, the first privileging the poet’s divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largess of patrons, the other emphasizing the poet’s acquired skill and hard work. Petrarch was the first to exploit the tensions between these polarities, followed by his poetic successors. As the book shows, the poetic practices of revision and redaction by Petrarch and his successors exemplify the transition from a premodern economy of patronage to an early modern economy dominated by unstable market forces.
Keywords:
Italian scholar,
Italian poet,
Francesco Petrarch,
love poetry,
Renaissance writers,
revision,
redaction
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501700019 |
Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501700019.001.0001 |