Canzoniere [antikvár]

Introduction petrarch The hfe of Petrarch is a story of uninterrupted success. He was born in 1304, the son of an exiled Florentine notary who, at the papal court in Avignon, acquired enough wealth to give his son a solid grounding first in rhetoric with a private tutor and then in law at the universities of Montpellier and Bologna. Before the age of thirty Petrarch had achieved financial independence by entering the service of an enlightened patron. Cardinal Colonna, who granted him every possible facility for study, travel and literary composition. As a minor ecclesiastic, with no pretension to a priestly vocation, he accumulated the canonries and chaplaincies that were the age's equivalent to generous subsidies. He was not yet forty when he was crowned poet laureate at the Capitol in Rome. For the rest of a life that was long by medieval standards he was an unquestioned celebrity, sought after by princes and admired as the archetypal man of letters, not only in Italy but throughout Europe. Chaucer's tribute, written a few years after Petrarch's death in 1374, speaks for a whole generation: Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rethorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie.' The Petrarch who was so revered is not, however, the one that most modern readers know. The vernacular lyrics of the Canzoniere may have assured his posthumous fame, but they were not what