The Time of His Life: Petrarch's Marginalia and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 23

Petrarch's draft notebooks, MS Vaticano Latino 3196, contain marginalia that often record the date and time of composition of a poem, along with date and time of transcription into Vaticano Latino 3195 (the volume of collected poems that became known to posterity as Canzoniere), interleaved with personal notations. I examine these marginalia, haunting in their immediacy and intimacy, for what they can tell us about Petrarch's poetics, with particular attention to the notations to Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, the poem that became number 23 and the first canzone of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.