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 William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work , this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch's legacy.
Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy 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. These include Gaspara Stampa in the emergent salon society of Venice, Michelangelo Buonarroti in the “gift” economy of Medici Florence and papal Rome, Pierre de Ronsard and the poets of his Pléiade brigade in the fluctuant Valois court, and William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the commercial world of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. As Kennedy 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.
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Review
" Petrarchism at Work is an excellent book, immensely learned, nuanced, timely, and strikingly original in its argument. William J. Kennedy is the undisputed master of the Renaissance lyrical tradition, and this book is a major contribution to our understanding of how poetry works and of how literature functions in different social and economic contexts. Petrarchism at Work will help invigorate our understanding of how poetry works in early modern culture and reaffirms the centrality of the Petrarchan tradition for literary culture in the European West. Highly recommended."
(Timothy Hampton, Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe )
"No one knows the Renaissance reception of Petrarchism with the depth and detail that William J. Kennedy does, and he brings all his learning to bear on beautiful readings of particular sonnets that unfold into overarching social and intellectual trends. This terrific book offers a compelling reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition, and it will be required reading for all students of the period."
(Christopher Warley, University of Toronto, author of Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton )
About the Author
William J. Kennedy is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England and Authorizing Petrarch .
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