Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri), Vol. 1, Books I-VIII by Francesco Petrarch

Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri), Vol. 1, Books I-VIII by Francesco Petrarch

THIS TRANSLATION makes available for the first time to English-speaking readers Petrarch's earliest and perhaps most important collection of prose letters. They were written for the most part between 1325 and 1366, and were organized into the present collection of twenty-four books between 1345 and 1366. THE COLECTION represents a portrait of the artist as a young man seen through the eyes of the mature artist. Whether in the writing of poetry, or being crowned poet laureate, or in confessing his faults, describing the dissolution of the kingdom of Naples, summoning up the grandeur of ancient Rome, or in writing to pope or emperor, Petrarch was always the consummate artist, deeply concerned with creating a desired effect by means of a dignified gracefulness, and always conscious that his private life and thoughts could be the object of high art and public interest. AS EARLY AS 1436 Leonardo Bruni wrote in his Life of Petrarch: Petrarch was the first man to have had a sufficiently fine mind to recognize the gracefulness of the lost ancient style and to bring it back to life. It was indeed the very style or manner in which Petrarch consciously sought to create the impression of continuity with the past that was responsible for the enormous impact he made on subsequent generations. THIS COMPLETE TRANSLATION by Aldo S. Bernardo has long been out of print and is reproduced here in its entirety in three volumes. Vol. 1, Books I-VI. 472 pp. Introduction, notes, bibliography.

Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch until English speakers, was an Italian poet who grew up and lived in and around Avignon, France, from 1304 to 1374. On Good Friday in 1327, he claimed, he beheld for the first time a beautiful, God-fearing, and married woman named Laura in church. He completed his first collection of Italian lyric poems by the end of 1337, and was named poet laureate in Rome in 1341. Petrarch spent the next thirty years or more finishing his masterpiece, Canzoniere, Rime sparse, and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which chronicled the speaker's unrequited love for Laura both while she was alive and after she died of bubonic plague in 1348.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781599100005
ISBN 10	1599100002
Title	Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri), Vol. 1, Books I-VIII
Author	Francesco Petrarch
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Italica Press
Year published	2009-08-25
Number of pages	472
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.