The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374), or Francesco Petrarca, is best known for the Iyric poetry of his Canzoniere and is considered one of the greatest love poets of world literature. A scholar of classical antiquity, he was the founder of humanism....

Petrarch(1304–1374) Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca, the Italian humanist, poet, and scholar, was born in Arezzo into an exiled Florentine family. He was taken to Avignon in 1312, and there he spent most of his life until 1353, except for a...

Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet, and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often popularly called the "father of humanism".[1] Based on Petrarch's works,...

William J. Kennedy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. 301 pp. $36.50. ISBN: 0-8014-2947-9. Authorizing Petrarch offers a remarkably erudite study of Petrarch's complex interpretive legacy. This book explores the intersection between Petrarch's Rime sparse and a vast array of Renaissance...

Formulator of a modern mode of thinking while still rooted in the medieval world he was transforming, Petrarch is one of the most elusive and complex personalities of European intellectual history. The multifaceted and forever contradictory writings of Petrarch have been the subject...

Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction. In a convoluted way, my plea to Dmitri...

Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction. In a convoluted way, my plea to...

In the following excerpt, Regan focuses on themes of love and self-examination in her reading of the Rime sparse.

In the review below, the anonymous critic remarks on Henry Reeve's Petrarch (1878) and discusses Petrarch's contribution to the Italian Renaissance as a humanist and poetic stylist.

In the essay below, Durling provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the Rime sparse.

This essay argues that although others have been called the leader of the renaissance in Italy, I argue that Petrarch was truely the father of the Italian renaissance.

"Whilst Petrarch's sonnets represent the idealised female form, they simultaneously explore deeper issues of love, lust and morality." Petrarch's Sonnet 3, Sonnet 189, and Sonnet 190 best represent these ideas, through Petrarch's expressions of his feelings toward Laura.

Two of Francesco Petrarch's works, Secretum, or "My Secret," and De Vita Solitaria, or "Solitary Life," share the common theme of humanism.