From poetry to politics: Petrarchism as discursive formation in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy

In my dissertation I provide a revisionist history of what has traditionally been understood as Petrarchism by exposing several strands of fifteenth-century humanism directly indebted to the intertwining of the political and the aesthetic in Petrarch's work. Whereas traditional scholarship has imagined the trajectory of neo-Latin humanism as separate from the development of the vernacular poetic movement of the sixteenth century, I argue that Petrarchism was a political movement in neo-Latin humanism long before it became the poetic movement heralded by Pietro Bembo. The dissertation's first two chapters examine the reversal of the hierarchy between patron and poet through the aestheticization of politics in Petrarch's Latin works, and through the politicization of the poetic in his lyric. If in his Latin works Petrarch provides a model to which his patrons must live up, then the lyric becomes the site where the political and the contemplative connect, infusing Petrarchan rhetoric with political and ethical paradigms which criticism has generally ignored. Thus the dissertation argues that Petrarch's vernacular and Latin works together constitute a discursive complex that simultaneously expresses and conceals relations of power. The next three chapters examine the discursive consequences of Petrarchism in the political and lyric traditions of Petrarch's humanist successors: the reconciliation of power and rhetoric through the figure of Petrarch both in Leonardo Bruni's republicanism and in the unofficial "principate" of Lorenzo de' Medici; Petrarchism as a discourse of mastery and power in Quattrocento epistles addressed to female neo-Latin humanists; and Pietro Bembo's nationalization of a Petrarchan-inspired language, a political project that must be viewed in the context of the sexual and political hierarchies embedded in his lyric poetry. Each case shows how Petrarch's rhetoric becomes the preferred model for linking literary mastery to political hegemony.