Petrarch Exegesis

Petrarch Exegesis in Renaissance Italy

Scholars at Notre Dame are participating in a project coordinated by Prof. Simon Gilson, Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford, along with Dr. Federica Pich (Leeds) and Dr. Guyda Armstrong (Manchester), to create a census of manuscript and print copies of Italian-language exegesis on Petrarch's vernacular verse written between 1350 and 1650. The project aims to create a major scholarly tool in the form of an online catalog of all relevant vernacular commentaries, readings, and exegeses of Petrarch, as well as to provide analysis of many relevant works, genres, and contexts. Several 16th-century volumes of commentaries held by Hesburgh Libraries’ Department of Rare Books & Special Collections have been digitized on behalf of the project. These electronic copies will be displayed with a new major digital library of 100 digitized volumes from the John Rylands Library, Manchester UK, in an online environment that facilitates research on the production and dissemination of commentaries on Petrarch’s vernacular verse.

The original project description is available here. The pre-release, beta-version of the database is available here.