Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c. 1350-c. 1650

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The poet and humanist Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) or Petrarch remains to this day one of Italy's most iconic and influential vernacular poets. Petrarch's influence on poetic and linguistic practice was epoch-defining in Renaissance Europe. His vernacular poetry became the supreme model for lyric poetry and indeed for refined literary style itself. It spawned countless admirers and imitators in England, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere. In Italy, Petrarch's poetry provided the basis upon which to establish the standards for developing and regulating the Italian language. This project envisages a 3-year research collaboration focusing on the production and dissemination of commentaries and other exegetical writings upon Petrarch's vernacular verse (that is, his 'Canzoniere' or 'Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta' and his 'Triumphi') in Renaissance Italy. The collaboration involves the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick, the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at Leeds, and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures and John Rylands Research Institute, Manchester. With the rise of Petrarch's reputation and influence came the emergence, especially in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of a rich and extensive body of critical commentary upon both of his vernacular poetic works. In manuscript and increasingly in print, we find over twenty major full-length commentaries (many in multiple reprints), several hundred items of other exegesis such as annotations in editions, public and private lectures ('lezioni'), dialogues, and treatises. And yet, quite remarkably, especially given Petrarch's influence, diffusion and transnational appeal, no attempt has been made to catalogue or understand as whole this body of critical interpretation. This ambitious collaborative project aims to address this neglect and to lay the foundations for all future research on the Italian context, and, given Italy's formative role in this period, for research on Petrarch's afterlife in a variety of other European contexts - by providing the following:1. the first fully searchable online census of Petrarch commentaries, public and private lessons and related writings (c. 1350-c.1650). The database will incorporate a wealth of information on the authors, printers, dedicatees, paratexts (the corpus is especially rich in annotations, lives, commentaries, illustrations, and maps).2. a digital library with full digitizations of 75 texts of commentary/exegesis made publically accessible3. an enriched set of catalogue records, based on the census, surfaced to a worldwide audience of researchers via enhanced local catalogue records uploaded to the national and international union research catalogues4. 10 academic articles and two sets of conference proceedings which will provide ground-breaking studies of: (i) the diffusion of the various works in both manuscript and print, their mechanisms of circulation and the interests/roles of particular printers; (ii) the major genres of critical discussion (e.g., public readings, commentaries, dialogues), thereby determining the extent to which the content and strategies used in the discussion differed by genre; (iii) the interactions between major commentators and other exegetes (not only on Petrarch but also on classical and vernacular authors), and the philosophical interests and citational practices of select commentators. 5. an international workshop will consider commentary on Petrarch in this period outside Italy.6. a permanent online exhibition (based on the digital library), a month-long exhibition at the Marciana Library, Venice (plans are at an advanced stage), writers' workshops and school visits. Since so little is known about commentary/exegesis on Petrarch as a whole, the project will define its contours, establishing a new field of study that will appeal to specialists across literature, language, philosophy, science, religion, print and scribal culture.