The Questione della Laura: Speech and Historicity in Petrarch's Lyric

Modern readings of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta tend to emphasize silence and violence in the poet’s (mis)treatment of the beloved. But early modern readers seem to have read Laura differently. This is evident in the most popular sixteenth-century edition of Petrarch’s lyric, edited by Alessandro Vellutello in 1525, which treats Laura as a historical, intelligent, and highly verbal subject. In this talk, Shannon McHugh draws on her recent book, Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), as well as on new research to get closest to the way that early modern readers experienced Laura.

Shannon McHugh is Assistant Director of Research at The Huntington Library. She is a scholar of early modern Italian and French literature and gender and the author of Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam UP, 2023).