Francesco Petrarch Rime Disperse: Rime Disperse (Library of Medieval Literature)

First published in 1991. It was the lyric poetry of Petrarch that popularized the sonnet in European literature, that set the standard for love poetry for centuries to follow. Compared to the large volume of prose, poetry and notes in Latin, the corpus of Petrarch’s Italian writings is small: the 366 poems that make up the Canzoniere, the 2000 or so verses of the Trionfi, and an undetermined number of poems, drafts and fragments that comprise what we call the Rime disperse. This collection includes indexes of first lines in both Italian and English.