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The immense fact of Petrarchism gives Renaissance literature some of its most obvious insignia of continuity and coherence, but we have not been especially resourceful in assessing what they mean or even in keeping track of what they are. There is no circumstantial history of the international phenomenon as a whole; the catalogue of the Petrarch collection at Cornell University is perhaps the closest thing,1 and even casual reading in its primary texts is apt to turn up surprises for scholars who thought they knew what they were going to find. Part of the problem is the multhingual vastness of the material - which in the fullest definition includes texts in sixteenth-century Croatian and demotic Cypriot - but the field of Renaissance studies copes with that all the time. There is something extra in this particular tradition which has resisted patient assimilation. The erotic trance at its emotional center is in some ways instantly familiar, even humiliatingly so - modern students understand it when you call it a crush - but its prolonged elaboration in uncountably similar poems tends to be alien to contemporary sensibilities, a program that (like other people's obsessions generally) manages to be simultaneously tedious and bizarre, both boring and a little alarming. When practical criticism deals with a poem's relation to Petrarchan conventions, it often puts its energy - as if this were mere common sense - into detecting deviation from those conventions and interpreting that deviation agonistically. The usual way in our profession to appreciate a specimen of Renaissance Petrarchism is to celebrate its attempt to break out of that category. There are times when such a perspective is clearly called for ("no such Roses see I in her cheekes"). There are also times, many times, when presenting a nuance as a rupture is not much more than a rhetorical decision on the part of the interpreter. Sorting such matters out will require a steadier, more informed effort of historical sympathy than we have yet been able to manage.
I do not know how widely this need is felt. References to Petrarchism in recent criticism (particularly English-language criticism) often imply that we largely know what to make of it now - an impression due, perhaps, to the conceptual power of...