An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet. Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca

Franceso Petrarch (1304-1374), creator of the sonnet form, remained for more than three hundred years the most influential poet in Europe, his works more widely

The 'Canzoniere', a sequence of sonnets and other verse forms, were written over a period of about 40 years. They describe Petrarch's intense love for Laura, wh

Petrarch fashioned so many different versions of himself for posterity that it is an exacting task to establish where one might start to explore. . . . Hainswor

Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) is best known today for cementing the sonnet’s place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator