Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini Andrew Hiltzik Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini, Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series 129 (New York: Modern Language Association of America 2014) 312 pp. Kleinhenz and Dini’s entry in the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series covers not only Petrarch’s seminal work, the Canzoniere, but also the important poets of the literary tradition that preceded and followed him. It is designed as a resource for a wide range of class types—from courses dedicated to the poet’s major and minor works, to broad survey courses that include Petrarchism as only one of several units. The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Materials,” is a brief overview of various bibliographic materials—from critical editions of the Canzoniere to secondary readings that may be assigned to students—and the types of courses they are best suited to. The second, “Approaches,” includes a selection of essays [End Page 251] addressing the most common and pressing pedagogical questions faced by teachers of Petrarch. While some may be assignable to students of higher-level classes, the majority are addressed to instructors themselves, and regard techniques for making Petrarch more accessible to students in different contexts. The “Materials” section starts with over three pages dedicated to editions of the Canzoniere, both critical and commercial, in Italian and in English, with detailed descriptions of the level of annotation and the style of the translation. Translations in Spanish, French, and Russian are also cited. The next section comprises a review of commonly-assigned supplementary readings, including reference texts, biographies, and background on Medieval Italian society. Finally, the editors suggest a number of electronic resources, including digital texts like the Oregon Petrarch Open Book, digitized manuscripts, and audiovisual resources such as recordings and performances of selected poems. The “Approaches” section contains twenty-six essays grouped by theme, starting with essays on dealing with the Canzoniere directly, and ending with those that consider Petrarch in a global context. The introduction, by Kleinhenz and Dini, aside from quickly summarizing the essays for ease of reference, also includes suggestions, based on responses to a survey they performed, regarding which specific poems should be selected depending on the goals of the course (that is, if the instructor is not planning on teaching the Canzoniere from cover to cover). The five types of “teaching modules” the editors address are the following: poems that illustrate the emotional narrative of the collection; poems exploring major moral, political, and psychological themes; poems demonstrating the construction of “Laura” as a poetic device; poems that put Petrarch in a historical context; poems that consider the “ethics” of writing, primarily little-taught poems more suited to upper-level courses. The first section of Part 2, “The Canzoniere’s Form: Design, Themes, Style,” contains a series of essays on methods of engaging directly with the text, by Germaine Wakentin, Aldo S. Bernardo, Christopher Kleinhenz, Madison U. Sowell, and Christopher Martin. Wakentin addresses the architecture of the collection and the arrangement of poems within it; Bernardo considers the figure of Laura and the competing impulses that construct her as a poetic figure; and Sowell suggests teaching with a concordance to explore the richness of Petrarch’s lexicon and themes. Kleinhenz describes how to use Petrarch to teach about Italian poetics, meter, and rhyme, while Martin provides a case study of Canzone 126 that may be helpful for a new teacher interested in leading close readings. The next section, “The Canzoniere and the Life,” broadens its focus to consider biographical approaches to teaching Petrarch, with essays by Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Fabian Alfie, Jobst Welge, and Massimo Lollini. Cachey focuses on Petrarch’s itinerant lifestyle and the many ways this restless mobility informs the construction of the work, and Alfie provides tips on teaching the conflict between profane and spiritual love to modern students, for whom such a crisis may be completely alien. Welge suggests utilizing some of Petrarch’s more philosophical works, such as De vita solitaria and Secretum, to introduce some of...