Petrarch 2.0

The manuscripts displayed here reveal the merest fraction of the enormous tradition and equally enormous range of Petrarchan manuscripts that have survived from Petrarch's own times and the periods immediately following his own. These manuscripts were made in Italy, Germany, and France, but Petrarch's manuscript circulation was geographically far more widespread than these examples alone indicate. The examples displayed come from only three American collections, those in the Libraries at Cornell and Penn, and one exemplar from the collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg.

Some of these manuscripts are plain, others are fancy. Some are beautifully adorned, others simply made for ease of use. Some are finished, others fragmentary. Some show a writer still at work. Others offer variant texts created by a writer rarely satisfied with his own work and almost always engaged either in trying something new or revising the old.

Every manuscript is, by definition, unique—but with a writer like Petrarch that canard takes on a certain special force. Thus this display makes evident—although one can say so only with a modicum of diffidence—that, if for most purposes Petrarch remains a writer whose textual difficulties must be investigated in those European libraries that preserve the vast majority of his manuscript remains, American libraries also contain materials needed for the ongoing effort to establish Petrarch's texts on as firm a codicological and bibliographical basis as possible.

The manuscripts exhibited here suggest how, even in an era before print made easy the widespread dissemination of literary works, some writers nonetheless managed to garner audiences throughout Europe. Petrarch became one of them while he was still alive. The sheer physical beauty of many of these manuscripts, and the evident pride in their skills shown by the scribes, illuminators, and rubricators who worked on them, offer visible proof of the hold on audiences that Petrarch quickly took. He has kept that hold as an author who continues to be read and valued for seven, now moving on to eight, centuries.