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Two editions of the Vite dating from the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reprint a history of Rome's emperors and popes from Julius Caesar (100[?]-44 B.C.E.) to Pius III (Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, 1440-1503, and Pope for a brief period in the last two months of his life). The Vite is one of several works attributed to Petrarch. One might have supposed that the author's death in 1374 would have made even the most credulous of early modern readers suspect the likelihood of his having written anything about a Pope not born until 1440. Yet this work was printed, marketed, and apparently accepted as Petrarch's for many years (like "De vera sapientia). The Vite's seventeenth-century printer notes that he follows a fifteenth-century printed edition whose authority, by implication, he has no reason to suspect. But printers might have attributed such works to Petrarch merely to promote their sale. No matter: they contributed, as did works whose authorship is now uncontested, to the impression his readers had of Petrarch. They remain worthy of attention for contributing to the ways in which the fourteenth-century author not only survived but was also made -- more or less literally manufactured -- by the works circulated under his name in both manuscript and print. |
