NOTES Introduction 1. For text and discussion of this important letter, see Petrarch, Senile V 2, ed. Monica Berté (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998). Petrarch’s scribe, who attaches the date “August 28,” seems to have dictated it in 1364, but Boccaccio didn’t receive it until 1366. It was one of three letters (Seniles 5.1–3) stolen and kept as souvenirs of their famed author by the messenger charged with their deliv- ery. Petrarch recovered them and asked his trusted friend Donato Albanzani to carry them to their destination. See the commentary by Ugo Dotti in Pe- trarch’s Lettres de la veillesse. Rerum senilium, ed. Elvira Nota (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), 2:529, n. 42. For the English, see Petrarch, Letters of Old Age. Rerum senilium libri I–XVII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 2. Petrarch tries to soothe Boccaccio by recalling Seneca, who ranked Cicero second after Virgil among Latin writers, followed by Asinius Pollio, and then Livy. The fl attering implication is that Boccaccio is “one up” on Livy. In an earlier letter to Boccaccio (Familiares 21.15), Petrarch cringes to think of Dante’s plebian public—fullers, tavern keepers, and woolworkers. He acknowledges, however, Dante’s superiority in the vernacular. See Petrarch Familiares 21.15.24 in Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence: Sansoni, 1926–42), 4:99: “in vulgari eloquio quam carminibus aut prosa clarior atque altior assurgit”; for the translation, Letters on Familiar Mat- ters: Rerum familiarium libri XVII–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 206: “[Dante] rises to nobler and loftier heights in the vernacular than in Latin poetry or prose.” 3. Petrarchino describes an edition of Petrarch’s lyric poetry in small edito- rial format. The fashion for such objects expresses Petrarchismo, mania for reading and imitating his vernacular poetry. From left to right, the subjects are Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti. The panel, today in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was commissioned by Luca Martini, a cultured gentleman who served Cosimo I de’ Medici as the ducal administrator in Pisa. In his portrait by Agnolo Bronzino (Pitti Palace), Martini holds a map of the swamps drained around that city. Martini, a poet in his own right, was an eager amateur Dantista. For commentary, see Edgar Peters Bowron, “Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Portrait of Six 347 CC4954.indb4954.indb 334747 99/26/08/26/08 112:36:062:36:06 PPMM 348 Notes to Pages 000–000 Tuscan Poets,’ ” Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 60 (1971–73): 43–54; Deb- orah Parker, “Vasari’s Portrait of Six Tuscan Poets: A Visible Literary History,” in Deborah Parker, ed., “Visibile parlare: Images of Dante in the Renais- sance,” special issue, Lectura Dantis (Spring–Fall 1998): 45–62. 4. See pp. for Petrarch’s career as a cleric, or member of the secular clergy. His book of poetry is today often called Canzoniere (Songbook) or Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes). He attached to it a Latin title, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Matters). Throughout his correspondence, he refers both to his epistles and his love poetry for the lady called Laura as “nugae,” that is, “trifl es,” “bagatelles,” or in Ugo Dotti’s Italian translation of the let- ters, “cosucce” (thinglets). See, for example, Familiares 1.1, 12.6. 5. Arturo Graf’s classic essays of 1888, “Petrarchismo” and “Antipetrarchismo,” in Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin: Giovanni Chiantore, 1926), 1–70, open with an aphorism that amusingly captures the persistent addiction to the ver- nacular lyric poet: “Petrarchism is a chronic illness of Italian literature.” A gallery of portraits whose sitters hold a Petrarchino has been assembled with illustrations by Novella Macola, “I ritratti col Petrarca,” in Le lingue del Pe- trarca, ed. Antonio Daniele (Udine: Forum [Editrice Universitaria Udinese], 2005), 135–57. 6. See, e.g., Dino Cervigni, ed., “Petrarch and the European Lyric Tradition,” special issue, Annali d’Italianistica 22 (2004); Valeria Finucci, ed., Petrarca: Canoni, esemplarità (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006); Leonard Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Christopher Kleinhenz and Dini, ed., Approaches to Teaching Petrarch and the Petrarchan Tradition (New York: Modern Language Associa- tion, forthcoming); Amedeo Quondam, Petrarchismo mediato: Per una critica della forma antologia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974); studies on women Petrarchists published in the University of Chicago Press “Other Voice” series, e.g., Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle: An Anthol- ogy, ed. Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). I would like to thank Mary W. Gibbons for a patient reading of this introduc- tion and for suggesting mention of these sibling volumes. 7. See, e.g., the manuscript note connected with one such exchange, in which Petrarch (or his correspondent?) writes via the poem he sends how “sweet” it was to have heard the other person and talked with him. Giuseppe Frasso calls attention to the jotting, which may relate to poem 17a in Rime estrava- ganti, ed. Laura Paolino, in Petrarch, Trionfi , Rime estravaganti, Codice degli Abbozzi, ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino, 2nd. ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), 726. See Frasso, “Minime divagazioni petrarchesche,” in Il genere “ten- CC4954.indb4954.indb 334848 99/26/08/26/08 112:36:062:36:06 PPMM Notes to Pages 000–000 349 zone” nelle letterature romanze delle Origini, ed. Matteo Pedroni and Antonio Stäuble (Ravenna: Longo, 1999), 159–63. 8. Edward H. R. Tatham codifi ed the epithet in the title of his classic two- volume biographical study, Francesco Petrarca: The First Modern Man of Letters (London: Sheldon Press, 1925). Dante had spoken of the “maternal tongue” learned by nursing infants in his De vulgari eloquentia 1.1.2: “vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam qua infantes assuefi unt ab assistentibus, cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus, quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus” [we call vernacular speech that to which infants are accustomed by those at their sides when they fi rst begin to recognize words, or since it could be said more briefl y, I assert that vernacular locution is what we take in without any rules at all, imitating the woman who nurses us]. By nutrix is meant “mother.” Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Aristide Marigo, 3rd ed. edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), 7. Cf. De vulgari eloquentia 1.14.7 with reference to “materno . vulgare.” 9. On his boyhood in Provence, see Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 3–4; Ugo Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Bari: Laterza, 1987), 7–16; Ariani, Petrarca (Rome: Salerno Editore, 1999), 19–27. Petrarch’s Virgil is now at the Ambrosiana Library in Milan (MS A 79 inf.). See the description from the Enciclopedia Virgiliana in Michele Feo, Petrarca nel tempo: Tradizione lettori e immagini delle opere (Pontedera: Bandecchi and Vivaldi, 2003), 496–99. 10. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch, 179. For the Latin, see Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years (Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1959), 8: “Ioannes noster, homo natus ad laborem, ad dolorem meum, et uiuens graui- bus atque perpetuis me curis exercuit, at acri dolore moriens uulnerauit, qui, cum paucos letos dies uixisset in uita sua, obiit anno Domini 1361, etatis sue XXV, die Iulii X seu IX medio noctis, inter diem Veneris et Sabbati. Rumor ad me Paduam xiiijo mensis, ad uesperam. Obiit autem Mediolani in illo publico excidio pestis insolito, queue urbem illam hactenus immunem talibus malis nunc tandem reperit atque inuasit.” 11. The eulogy is Epystole 1.7; cf. Seniles 10.2. For the text, see Panegyricum in funere matris, ed. Carlo Muscetta, reproduced by P. Blanc in “Petrarca ou la poétique de l’Ego: Éléments de psychopoétique pétrarquienne,” Revue des Études Italiennes, n.s., 29, nos. 1–3 (1983): 124–69, with an appended doc- ument, 180–83. On the commonplace tradition of the Pythagorean Y as a symbolic road branching to virture on the right and vice on the left, see Janet Levarie Smarr, “Boccaccio and the Choice of Hercules,” Modern Lan- guage Notes 92, no. 1 (1977): 146–52. Although Wilkins dates the panegyric CC4954.indb4954.indb 334949 99/26/08/26/08 112:36:062:36:06 PPMM 350 Notes to Pages 000–000 to Eletta’s death (Life of Petrarch, 5–7), Blanc, who reproduces the text, dates it to ca. 1325, but without any other evidence than the absence of Laura, who supposedly didn’t enter Petrarch’s life until 1327. This eulogy must postdate, at least by a few years, the loss it mourns since Petrarch would at that time have been only about fourteen years old. 12. Elena Giannarelli, “Fra mondi classico e agiografi a cristiana: Il Breve pan- egyricum defuncti matri di Petrarca,” Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa 9, no. 3 (1979): 1099–118, identifi ed many of the sources, an inventory revisited by Blanc in “Petrarca ou la poétique de l’Ego.” See further on Petrarch’s deeply affectionate memories of his mother and the maternal aspects of Laura in the Canzoniere, in Kristen Ina Grimes, “A proposito di Rvf 285: Petrarca tra Laura e Monica,” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Galileiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti già Ricovrati e Patavina 117 (2004–5): 273–95. 13. Feo, Petrarca nel tempo, fi g. 155, pp. 479, 481. The manuscript is Paris, Bibl. nat., Lat. 2201, fol. 58v, “Libri mei peculiares.” Cf.