Description
Book SynopsisThe Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (13041374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These Petrarchan poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poetsas craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch's legacy.
Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique
Trade Review
Kennedy's command of the source materials and close readings of poetic variants are exceptional. With Petrarchism at Work he has written another authoritative and original study of Petrarch's legacy that will greatly impact theeld.
* Renaissance Quarterly *
Invites debate, reflection, and further contributions on a widening variety of textual corpora. This fine book has much to recommend it, especially to English-language students of Renaissance literature and history who seek to weigh the importance of one of Renaissance Europe's principal literary idioms as its distinctive forms appear in a representative variety of national contexts.
* Renaissance and Reformation *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Marketplace of Mercury
Part One: Petrarch and Italian Poetry
1. Petrarch as Homo Economicus
2. Making Petrarch Matter: The Parts and Labor of Textual Revision
3. Jeweler's Daughter Sings for Doge: Gaspara Stampa’s Entrepreneurial Poetics
4. Incommensurate Gifts: Michelangelo and the Economy of Revision
Part Two: Pierre De Ronsard and Pléiade Aesthetics
1. Polished to Perfection: Ronsard’s Investment in Les Amours
2. Ronsard Furieux: Interest in Ariosto
3. Passions and Privations: Writing Sonnets like a Pro in Les Amours de Marie
4. The Smirched Muse: Commercializing Sonnets pour Hélène
Part Three: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Economy of Petrarchan Aesthetics
1. To Possess Is Not to Own: The Cost of the Dark Lady and the Young Man
2. Polish and Skill: Will’s Interest and Self-Interest in Sonnets 61–99
3. Owning Up to Furor: The "Poets’ War" and Its Aftermath in Sonnets 100–126
4. Shakespeare as Professional: The Economy of Revision in Sonnets 1–60
Conclusion: Mercurial Economies
