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Placing Petrarch’s Legacy: The Politics of Petrarch’s Tomb and Boccaccio’s Last Letter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Lummus
David Lummus*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

In readings of orations, letters, and poems about Petrarch’s death composed in Paduan and Florentine intellectual circles, this article shows that the well-known praise of Petrarch in these texts is a function of a political competition over Petrarch’s remains and, with them, over the rightful location of his legacy. Boccaccio’s last letter, which stands out for its rhetorical sophistication and cultural sensitivity, intervenes in this largely provincial debate with farsighted theoretical coherence and cosmopolitan political ambition. Animated by a familiar vernacular poetics, Boccaccio theorizes an intellectual entombment of Petrarch in Florence that is consonant with Boccaccio’s ongoing cultural project.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , Summer 2017 , pp. 435 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Renaissance Society of America

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