Petrarch’s English Laurels, 1475–1700 by Jackson Campbell Boswell, Gordon McMurray Braden (review)

This book aims to ‘provide [. . .] citations of all references to Petrarch or quotations from his works from printed sources in the Anglophone world up to 1700’ (p. ix). The compilers do not attempt to catalogue manuscript items but do refer to significant manuscript sources when relevant. First references to individual works include lightly modernized transcriptions of allusions or quotations; although Boswell and Braden catalogue editions and issues beyond the first, they do not duplicate material unless substantial revisions were made. Helpfully, they translate unglossed foreign text, reproduce references from the original sources, and cite standard modern editions of Petrarch’s works. Although they do not give any indication of how long it took to complete this project, the achievement is quite staggering.

The volume opens by proposing, ‘The European Renaissance [. . .] began on Easter Sunday, 8 April 1341’ (p. 1), the day Petrarch had himself crowned poet laureate and, in so doing, permanently altered European literature and culture. The brief introduction shows that Petrarch’s influence extended beyond poetry and explains that the bibliography ‘corrects some of the bias of modern interest’, particularly with regard to Petrarch’s Latin prose (p. 3). Their discussion of polemic (usually proto-Protestant or Protestant) uses of Petrarch is intriguing but attenuated. Regrettably, the latter half of the introduction reinscribes the traditional emphasis on Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, and much of the material presented here is developed more fully elsewhere and will already be familiar to those interested in English Petrarchism. Boswell and Braden describe the ‘two major waves’ in which Petrarchism entered English literary culture — a first initiated by Thomas Wyatt and a second following the 1591 publication of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (p. 9) — but make only passing reference to earlier English sequences (including those by Anne Vaughan Lok and Thomas Watson) and do not mention the influence of the French Pléiade poets. Similarly, they assert that Petrarchism’s ‘naturalization [was] swift and permanent’ but do not explain their chosen chronological limits. One obvious explanation is that these dates correspond to those of Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (STC) and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Book Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America, 1641–1700 (Wing), but an explicit rationale would be welcome. A fuller introduction might have helped remedy these imbalances and omissions.

Bibliographical entries are organized chronologically, and, within each year, alphabetically by author. Each includes the author’s name (when known), the work’s catalogue title and number, and a succinct introduction, sometimes with references to relevant secondary material. The transcriptions reproduce the use of black letter and italic fonts, but the editors have opted to modernize the use of i/j, u/v, long s, and capital letters. These latter textual conventions are familiar enough, but the justification that ‘[r]eaders will of course be more interested in substance than form’ (p. ix) is unsatisfying. Spot-checks against digital facsimiles from Early English Books Online reveal a few minor discrepancies in transcription, including incorrect or inconsistent spellings (‘Royal’ for ‘Royall’ and then ‘Royall’ for ‘Royal’ in no. 1014) and missing (no. 252) or superfluous (no. 171) commas, but these errors may result from stop-press corrections and do not interfere with comprehension. Information about imprint and format would give readers a better sense of each book’s material form, but of course, one can easily find this information in STC or Wing.

A select bibliography is weighted heavily toward recent scholarship, and Boswell and Braden direct readers elsewhere for more comprehensive coverage. Two indexes round out the volume. The first, an ‘Index of References to Petrarch’s Works’, will be invaluable for anyone interested in the reception or adaptation of Petrarch in England. Canzoniere, predictably, garners the most entries (nearly 400), but the 248 references to De remediis...