Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer

Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch (1304–1374), gave the sonnet its most influential model in the Canzoniere (formally titled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), 366 poems addressed largely to a woman he calls Laura, whose exact identity remains uncertain. Where Dante's Beatrice ultimately points toward theology, Petrarch's Laura poems dwell on the psychology of desire itself — its contradictions, its self-consciousness, its endless deferral — establishing the octave-and-sestet 'Petrarchan' sonnet form and rhyme pattern that later poets across Europe, including English writers of the sixteenth century, would adapt to their own languages. Petrarch was equally important as a scholar: crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341, he rediscovered lost letters of Cicero and is often called the father of Renaissance humanism for his championing of classical Latin learning.