Dartmouth College Dartmouth Digital Commons Dartmouth Scholarship Faculty Work 11-30-2016 Exile and Petrarch’s Reinvention of Authorship Laurence E. Hooper Dartmouth College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa Part of the History Commons Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation Hooper, Laurence E., "Exile and Petrarch’s Reinvention of Authorship" (2016). Dartmouth Scholarship. 2717. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/2717 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Work at Dartmouth Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dartmouth Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Dartmouth Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Exile and Petrarch’s Reinvention of Authorship LAURENCE E. HOOPER, Dartmouth College This article demonstrates a systematic connection between the novelty of Petrarch’s authorship and his self-definition as an exile. Petrarch employs the unusual term exilium/esilio to substantiate his unprecedented claim that literature is a legally valid officium (civic role). Following Dante, Petrarch grounds his exilic authorship in the Christian discourse of peregrinatio: life as pilgrimage through exile. But Petrarch’s new officium allows him a measure of control over literary creation that no prior Italian writer had enjoyed. This is especially true of the “Canzoniere,” Petrarch’s compilation of his vernacular lyrics, whose singularity functions as a proxy for its author’s selfhood. INTRODUCTION PETRARCH (1304–74) IDENTIFIED all his life as an exile: the opening letter of his Familiares (1366) declares, “I was conceived in exile and I was born in exile.”1 The claim has a biographical foundation: the poet was born at Arezzo, some two years after his father, Ser Petracco di Parenzo (1267–1326), had been banished from Florence.