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Petrarchan Byways

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

The Canzoniere and the Triumphs of Petrarch are as full of fascination for the scholar as they are rich in enjoyment for the lover of poetry. Their fascination for the scholar is due largely to the fact that each of these two great works reveals itself as the product of a long process of growth: a process perhaps not quite complete in the case of the Canzoniere, and certainly very far from complete in the case of the Triumphs.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Modern Language Association of America, 1946

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References

1 The longest of these intervals was due to the refusal of Petrarch's favorite scribe to go on working for him. This scribe, himself a budding humanist, may very possibly have felt that the transcription of Italian lyrics—mere trifles in the vulgar tongue—was beneath Ms dignity.

2 Edited by Seymour De Ricci and W. J. Wilson, and published in New York, in three volumes, from 1935 to 1940.

3 When I was in my first year of work as a graduate student at Harvard, I needed a transscription of a few pages from a manuscript in the Laurentian Library in Florence. At Professor Grandgent's suggestion I wrote to Pio Rajna, then the venerable dean of all Italian scholars, and asked him to arrange to have the pages in question copied for me, at my expense. Instead of doing that, he copied the pages for me himself, and sent the transcription to me with his blessing. I should like to pay that happily remembered debt.

4 The one in New Orleans is being made available to me in microfilm, through the kindness of its owner, Mr. Edward Alexander Parsons; and the one in Camarillo has been studied for me by Professor R. V. Merrill.

5 This younger Filippo is the hero of Niccolini's tragedy, Filippo Strozzi, and is the subject of a biography by Thomas Adolphus Trollope.