Petrarch’s exegesis in Cinquecento Italian Academies

In the first part of my paper, I will present the project ‘Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c. 1350-c. 1650’ and its provisional research findings. This project, founded for 3 years, starting January 2017, by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aims to reconstruct the corpus of all the exegetical works on Petrarch’s Italian literary production. This vast and variegated material includes commentaries, academic lectures, glossaries, annotations, and all the other forms of exegetical works dealing with the RVF and the Triumphs. The core of the project is the creation of an online freely accessible database, where all this material will be listed, described, and illustrated.

In the second part of the paper, I will concentrate in particular on the academic lectures as form of exegesis and their different typologies. I intend to offer the different ways in which Petrarch’s text was read and received in the contest of Cinquecento Italian academies. So far, I have been able to distinguish three main aims that speakers pursued while presenting Petrarch’s poems: 1) to illustrate some grammatical, linguistic, and/or rhetorical aspects strictly connected to the poetic language adopted by Petrarch; 2) to focus on the philosophical concepts derivable from the reading of Petrarch’s sonnet; 3) to spread moral teachings to the other members of the academy.