| Shortly after the arrival of the printing press in Italy in 1465, the first edition of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta was published in Venice in 1470 by Windelin of Speyer. From that moment until the end of the century, during the period in book history known as the age of incunabula, twenty-five editions of the work would appear as a companion to the Triumphi: most had a commentary, many had a short biography or vita and other biographical materials, and almost none had any claim to philological accuracy. Copied from pre-existing manuscripts or other editions, this set of books perpetuated a uniform hermeneutic that both reflected the tastes of its readers and helped to shape them. These editions raised critical questions about the language, life, and text of the poet that took on growing urgency with the wider circulation of Petrarch's vernacular texts and the resurgence of vernacular literature in the last quarter of the century. This thesis thus adopts three frames of reference—biography, commentary, and philology—to argue that while the incunabula consolidated a reading anchored to manuscript culture, they also positioned the vernacular at the center of the poet's literary production and helped pave the way for the development of vernacular philology. The first chapter analyses the impact of print culture on the works of Petrarch, and the overlapping of the new technology and the old models of reading. The second chapter analyzes the vite of the poet and how they translate Latin texts and a Latin poet into the vernacular. The third chapter focuses on the Filelfo-Squarzafico commentary to the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and how it addresses the exegetical complexities of the work. The fourth and final chapter illustrates the grammatical and stylistic commentary implicit in Bembo's philological approach to the 1501 Aldine edition of Le cose volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarca, inaugurating a new and programmatic Petrarchism. |
