Nicholas Mann’s fundamental assessment of the influence of Petrarch on the medieval English-speaking world, ‘Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles’ (Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 18: 139-509), published in 1975, has offered scholars a first opportunity to undertand the impact of the Italian writer, and the belatedness with which his Italian works, such as the Canzoniere and the Trionfi, had reached the English reader, while his Latin treatises and dialogues had been studied, translated, and debated at a much earlier stage. Petrarch’s Secretum, among his most beautiful and enigmatic works, remains a somewhat unknown quantity even by Mann’s own exacting standards. In 1980, however, Edmund Wilson identified in the fifteenth-century collection known as the Winchester Anthology (now British Library, Additional MS 60577) a Middle-English translation of the Proem and Book 1 of the Secretum. The manuscript was subsequently published in facsimile, but as yet no comprehensive study or edition of this translation has been proposed, in spite of its undoubted interest. This article is part of a larger project of edition and commentary on this fifteenth-century translation. It offers an overview of what is known of the dating and circumstances of the translation, working at the same time on the text, and analysing the reception of Petrarch’s philosophy through the reading offered by the anonymous translator of the Secretum.
The humanist Petrarch in medieval and early modern England
PETRINA, ALESSANDRA
2013
Abstract
Nicholas Mann’s fundamental assessment of the influence of Petrarch on the medieval English-speaking world, ‘Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles’ (Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 18: 139-509), published in 1975, has offered scholars a first opportunity to undertand the impact of the Italian writer, and the belatedness with which his Italian works, such as the Canzoniere and the Trionfi, had reached the English reader, while his Latin treatises and dialogues had been studied, translated, and debated at a much earlier stage. Petrarch’s Secretum, among his most beautiful and enigmatic works, remains a somewhat unknown quantity even by Mann’s own exacting standards. In 1980, however, Edmund Wilson identified in the fifteenth-century collection known as the Winchester Anthology (now British Library, Additional MS 60577) a Middle-English translation of the Proem and Book 1 of the Secretum. The manuscript was subsequently published in facsimile, but as yet no comprehensive study or edition of this translation has been proposed, in spite of its undoubted interest. This article is part of a larger project of edition and commentary on this fifteenth-century translation. It offers an overview of what is known of the dating and circumstances of the translation, working at the same time on the text, and analysing the reception of Petrarch’s philosophy through the reading offered by the anonymous translator of the Secretum.
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