Petrarch

Petrarch Bibliography

Biographies

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch.
Life of Petrarch.
University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Wilkins was the great American expert on Petrarch and he wrote several fine studies of various aspects of Petrarch's life and work. Sadly, this fine little book is out of print, so you will have to hunt in libraries or out-of-print sources. But if you find it, you will be rewarded with a fine study. Wilkins says of Petrarch: "Petrarch was the most remarkable man of his time; and he is one of the most remarkable men of all time."

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch.
Petrarch's Eight Years in Milan.
Cambridge, Mass: Medieval Academy, 1958.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch.
Studies in the Life and Work of Petrarch.
Cambridge, Mass: Medieval academy, 1955.

Bishop, Morris.
Petrarch and His World.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1963.
This is another very fine book about Petrarch with much helpful material on the larger cultural context of his life and work.

Critical Studies

Baron, Hans.
Petrarch's Secretum: Its Making and Its Meaning. Cambridge, Mass: Medieval Academy of America, 1985. Hans Baron was one of the most influential scholars to write about the Renaissance since World War II, and thus a book by him about one of Petrarch's most important works is itself noteworthy.

Bergin, Thomas.
Petrarch.
New York: Twayne, 1970.
This is an excellent introduction to the work of Petrarch.

Trinkaus, Charles.
The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness.
New Haven: Yale University press, 1970.
Trinkaus takes up one of the most important issues in the study of Petrarch: to what extent did he contribute to the formation of Renaissance ideas and concepts. There is no doubt that he had an enormous impact upon the literary and historiographical thinking of later fourteenth-century Italy. But, how much? And in what way? These are fascinating questions and Trinkaus is a master of Renaissance literary history.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch.
Studies in the Life and Work of Petrarch.
Cambridge, Mass: Medieval academy, 1955

Letters

Thompson, David, ed.
Petrarch, A Humanist Among Princes:
An Anthology of Petrarch's Letters.
New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
This is the best edition of the letters in English. It is based on the great James Harvey Robinson edition of the letters first published in 1898, but David Thompson has improved the translations and provided new translations of texts never before translated. Unfortunately it is now out of print so you will have to use the libraries or out-of-print search sources. Many of the letters are now on the web (go to the Petrarch index page here on motwm.com and click on "Letters") in the Robinson translation.

Editions of Petrarch's Works

For a good bibliography of the original sources see Mark Musa's Bibliography in Selections from the Canzoniere. New York: Oxford World Classics, 1985.

Musa, Mark, ed. and trans.
The Canzoniere.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996.
We all must be grateful to Mark Musa for his lifelong dedication to Italian literature and especially for this spectacular edition of Petrarch's most important work of poetry. The Canzoniere, was a collection of poems written over a lifetime and then collected together by Petrarch. The collection had an enormous influence in the history of European poetry as the most accomplished collection of sonnets by any European author before Shakespeare. Everyone read the Canzoniere and all later writers of sonnets were influenced by what Petrarch did. Musa has given us this beautiful collection in a bilingual edition with Italian on one page and English on the opposite page. The translations are exquisite. For those who wish to understand Petrarch as a genius of poetry, this is the book to buy.