Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance

Petrarch, the “father of Humanism”, has exerted a striking impact on early modern intellectuals. This volume discusses how Petrarch’s writings were understood, read and used by intellectuals, writers and artists from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Specialists from various disciplines (Italian, French, Neo-Latin, Dutch, art history, history of science) demonstrate that early modern reception is an extremely variable phenomenon; that it is largely dominated by the various discourses, paradigm’s, literary genres, interests, needs and experiences of the users, and to a much lesser degree by the author’s text, even if safeguarded with such great care and by such a famous author as in Petrarch’s case. The volume is important for all scholars interested in literature, Humanism, Renaissance Studies, Petrarch, reception, history of reading and the intellectual history of the early modern period.

Contributors include: Jean Balsamo, Dóra Bobory, Dina De Rentiis, Ugo Dotti, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Reindert L. Falkenburg, Ursula Kocher, Marc Laureys, Reinier Leushuis, Jan Papy, Paul J. Smith, and Bart Van den Bossche.

Karl A.E. Enenkel is Professor of Neo-Latin Literature at Leiden University and teaches classical Latin and Neo-Latin in the Department of Classics. He is the author of Francesco Petrarca: De vita solitaria, Buch 1. Kritische Textausgabe und ideengeschichtlicher Kommentar and of Kulturoptimismus und Kulturpessimismus in der Renaissance, editor and (co)author of Modelling the Individual. Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance (1998), Lipsius in Leiden (1997), Recreating Ancient History (2001) and of several studies on the reception of Classical Literature in the Early Modern Times. He has (co)edited recently Mundus Emblematicus. Studies on Neo-Latin Emblem Books (2003), The Manipulative Mode. Political Propaganda in Antiquity (2005) and Cognition and the Book. Typologies of Formal Organisation of Knowledge in the Printed Book of the Early Modern Period (2005). He has published extensively on international Humanism and on the reception of Classical Antiquity and is the general editor of Intersections. Yearbook for Early Modern Studies.
Jan Papy is Research Professor of Neo-Latin at the Catholic University of Leuven. His research focuses mainly on Italian humanism (Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola), Humanism in the Low Countries (Vives, Erasmus, Lipsius), Intellectual History and Renaissance Philosophy in the Low Countries (16th-17th centuries). He is the author of numerous articles dealing with subjects related to these fields. Besides, he is the editor of Iusti Lipsi Epistolae: Pars XIII (1600), Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten (Brussels, 2000), and he has co-edited Justus Lipsius, Europae lumen et columen. Proceedings of the International Colloquium Leuven-Antwerp, 17-20 September 1997 (Leuven, 1999), and Self-Presentation and Social Identification. The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times (Leuven, 2002). He is member of the editorial board of Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal for Neo-Latin Studies.