The humanist Petrarch in Medieval and Early Modern England

Abstract

In 1906 Peter Borghesi published, in Italy, Petrarch and his Influence on English Literature, a first attempt to offer a comprehensive survey of the topic. Mentioned in Harold Bloom's volume dedicated to Chaucer as 'an esteemed Italian scholar of English medieval and Italian Renaissance Literature' , Borghesi in fact limited himself to an overview of the Petrarchan model present in the works of the Henrician and Elizabethan sonneteers; the few lines dedicated to the first appearance of Petrarch in English literature are, however, significant:

To understand Petrarch it was necessary to be a poet, and this poet was not long in making himself known: it was Chaucer who was the greatest of foreign verse-makers who lived in Petrarch's time. [ ... ] The influence that the Italian lyric writer had on Chaucer was great, although perhaps the former was known to the latter much more through his Latin works than through his sonnets.