The Petrarchive Project: An Overview

Abstract

When you hear the words “sonnet,” “Renaissance,” “Western literature,” and “love songs,” you are hearing the direct influence of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and of his collection of lyric poems that he called “Fragments in the Vernacular” (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). The Petrarchive is a TEI-based rich-text digital edition of Petrarch’s songbook, designed as a tool both to introduce the collection—a collection that continues to influence modern cultures in many languages—and to give advanced users access to Petrarch’s “original” text and an extensive “material” commentary for each poem. This article describes the Petrarchive, which includes edited and diplomatic transcriptions of Petrarch’s songbook; visual maps illustrating Petrarch’s design, layout, and visual poetics; and multi-layered commentary addressing prosodic, historic, textual, and thematic issues along with an English translation of the poems.