Abstract
This essay reexamines some of the affinities between Petrarch's Rime sparse and Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome. In particular, I show how Petrarch conflates personal memory with a longer view of history, associating (ruined) Roman antiquity with Laura at key moments in his sequence. By doing so, he anticipates Du Bellay's sequence, which also accentuates loss by emphasizing the absolute temporal distance between the poet-lover and his "imperial mistress."
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