Canzoniere

'Love found me with no armour for the fight,
my eyes an open highway to the heart'

On Good Friday of 1327 the poet Petrarch first saw and fell in love with a young woman he called Laura. Written over more than forty years, the poems of the Canzoniere are an intense and passionate discourse on his unrequited love for her. The 'lovely hand, gripping my heart so tight' provokes moods that range from melancholy, resignation and remorse, to jubilant hope and spiritual exaltation.

Petrarch has been described as the father of Renaissance humanism and is the unquestioned founder of the sonnet-sequence. The massive range of his works in Latin made him famous in his lifetime, but it is the Canzoniere, in the vernacular Italian, that provides a rhetoric of introspection for later Renaissance sonneteers such as Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. This bilingual edition is a selection of sixty poems and remains faithful to the Petrarchan structure and technique, with a lyrical and moving English translation.

Translated and edited with an introduction by Anthony Mortimer

• with an introduction, chronology, textual and biographical notes and an index of first lines •