The Fragmenta's Timeline Models for Reconstructing and Interpreting the Text

There are times in a text when we have to dig deep below the erasure to discover uncertainty itself and then, perhaps uncomfortably, report it to readers who will eventually have the tools to read it better.

—H. Wayne Storey, "Doubting Petrarca's Last Words: Erasure in MS Vaticano Latino 3195"

For decades, scholars and editors have attempted to reconstruct the chronologies of Francesco Petrarca's life and works, simultaneously presenting historical facts and conjectures. The present study discusses a new method for investigating and representing the history of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, proposed in the creation of a digital interactive Timeline for the Petrarchive project.¹ While the indistinct coexistence of certainty and assumption has often influenced and ultimately altered the way we interpret Petrarch's work, the core principle of this new digital approach is transparency in sources and results, aiming at creating clear distinctions between what is clearly dated, what is datable with a fair amount of certainty, and what can only be conjectured. The drastic change of perspective proposed allows for a new and more authentic rethinking of Petrarch's methods and times of work in the compilation of his songbook Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.

It is crucial in creating a timeline of Petrarch's life and works to start with basic methodological questions: how to build the timeline; what kind of data to include and how to interpret and organize this data; what forms of geographical referencing to reasonably rely upon for placing Petrarch's activities and production. First of all, to answer these questions, it is necessary to "clear the ground." Our perception of Petrarch and his work has been heavily influenced by centuries of studies, biographies, and editions presenting a chronology not always based on proved or provable evidence: the common practice of combining historical facts with anecdotal events and conjecture has led to the transmission and acceptance of information about Petrarch and his Fragmenta that is, in many cases, far more mythical than factual. Conjectures, which are inevitably part of the study of the past due to the potential lack of material evidence, are often not clearly recognizable and certainly not always reported. Modern studies based on reconstructed chronologies have garnered authority in Petrarchan studies: from Henry Cochin's attempt at dating every single poem of the Fragmenta (1898) to Ernest H. Wilkins's (1961) and Ugo Dotti's (1963 and 2004) biographies and Wilkins's (1951) to Marco Santagata's (1992) conjectures on the genesis of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.² In the introduction to his work on the chronology of the Canzoniere, Cochin admits the impossibility of dating with certainty all of Petrarch's lyrics: "la chronologie du Canzoniere, comme celle de tout recueil semblable, ne saurait jamais être, évidemment, fixée que d'une façon relative [the chronology of the Canzoniere, like that of any similar collection, can only be set, of course, in a relative way]" (2). Even though all of these studies have contributed greatly to the development of Petrarchan scholarship, none of them provides the reader with a clear distinction between facts and conjectures, or a methodological approach to evaluating these histories.

In the midst of the complex literary tradition of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, it is necessary to clarify what the interpretative role of a timeline might be. Reasoning through the conjectures of many of Petrarch's biographers would amount merely to a simplified essay on the scholarship itself. Rather, the first step is to turn to a reorientation that emphasizes simple methodological guidelines: to examine carefully what is verifiable, to distinguish among three levels of information, and especially to use reliable philological practice, as recently used, for example, in the formula applied to "datable manuscripts":³

1. 1. dated, what is certainly verifiable from the material evidence

2. 2. datable, what can be deduced from the study of the material evidence and its context

3. 3. conjectured, what is assumed to be true, without material evidence

This is a crucial methodological shift in the role and importance of the timeline not only in displaying data, but also in studying and...