Petrarch's Fragmenta

de Thomas E. Peterson

"Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity and biblical intertextuality, this study argues that Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is an ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures. The author begins with the premise that the multiple voices of the Petrarchan figure (or subject) call for a reading informed by historical and autobiographical considerations. Within such a reading, the internal chronology of the work coincides with a temporal framework provided by Petrarch's Latin prose and poetry. Drawing on this material, he argues that Petrarch's derivations from early poets in the Italian vernacular, his Augustineanism and his humanism are manifest in the Fragmenta and contribute to its narrative and theological unity."--