Items related to Worlds of Petrarch (Duke Monographs in Medieval &...
At the center of Petrarch's vision, announcing a new way of seeing the world, was the individual, a sense of the self that would one day become the center of modernity as well. This self, however, seemed to be fragmented in Petrarch's work, divided among the worlds of philosophy, faith, and love of the classics, politics, art, and religion, of Italy, France, Greece, and Rome. In recent decades scholars have explored each of these worlds in depth. In this work, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows for the first time how all these fragmentary explorations relate to each other, how these separate worlds are part of a common vision.
Written in a clear and passionate style, The Worlds of Petrarch takes us into the politics of culture, the poetic imagination, into history and ethics, art and music, rhetoric and theology. With this encyclopedic strategy, Mazzotta is able to demonstrate that the self for Petrarch is not a unified whole but a unity of parts, and, at the same time, that culture emerges not from a consensus but from a conflict of ideas produced by opposition and dark passion. These conflicts, intrinsic to Petrarch's style of thought, lead Mazzotta to a powerful rethinking of the concepts of "fragments" and "unity" and, finally, to a new understanding of the relationship between them.
Written in a clear and passionate style, The Worlds of Petrarch takes us into the politics of culture, the poetic imagination, into history and ethics, art and music, rhetoric and theology. With this encyclopedic strategy, Mazzotta is able to demonstrate that the self for Petrarch is not a unified whole but a unity of parts, and, at the same time, that culture emerges not from a consensus but from a conflict of ideas produced by opposition and dark passion. These conflicts, intrinsic to Petrarch's style of thought, lead Mazzotta to a powerful rethinking of the concepts of "fragments" and "unity" and, finally, to a new understanding of the relationship between them.
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Review:
"A very important study. Mazzotta not only gives us a dense and rich new portrait of a much-studied and absolutely major figure, but he also brings to the fore the abiding force and value of Petrarch's 'worlds' of discourse and thought to many of today's debates regarding, for example, the relation of aesthetics and rhetoric to the politico-historical realm, or the epistemological validity of poetry, or the constructedness of the self."—Rebecca West, University of Chicago
"A richly textured, deeply learned, and broadly inclusive study of Petrarch's writing, his historical situation, and his contribution to our own cultural formation."—William Kennedy, Cornell University
About the Author:
"A richly textured, deeply learned, and broadly inclusive study of Petrarch's writing, his historical situation, and his contribution to our own cultural formation."—William Kennedy, Cornell University
Giuseppe Mazzotta is Professor and Chair, Italian Language and Literature Department, Yale University. His is the author of Dante, Poet of the Desert, The World at Play, and Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge.
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- ISBN 10 1417798602
- ISBN 13 9781417798605
- BindingHardcover
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