Letters from Petrarch, translated by Morris Bishop

Letters from Petrarch, translated by Morris Bishop

Selected and translated by Morris Bishop with drawings by Alison Mason Kingsbury

Morris Bishop, author of Petrarch and His World, has performed an important service in his new translation of Petrarch's letters, many of which were not previously available in English. In renderings that are idiomatic and fresh, Mr Bishop's selections reveal the intimate thoughts and daily life of the most admired poet of his day, who was also a prolific and engaging letter-writer.

The letters, varying in type from moral essays to humorous anecdotes, afford vivid glimpses of Petrarch's extensive travels, his pastoral life at Vaucluse, his political involvements and personal relationships.

Whether inviting a friend to a country supper - "'no gourmets' bazaar" - describing a wartime trip down the River Po between the battle lines, or exhorting the Pope to move the Church from Avignon back to Rome, Petrarch emerges as a man of extraordinary versatility who was intensely absorbed in the present, yet always "looking beyond the addressee to posterity."

Mr Bishop's selections are drawn from Petrarch's "Letters on Familiar Matters," "Miscellaneous Letters," and "Letters of Riper Years." The collection begins with the classic "Epistle to Posterity" and appropriately ends with a letter addressed to Cicero, use "Familiar Letters" probably inspire Petrarch to edit his own correspondence. The arrangement follows the plan of the structured book that Petrarch originally envisioned, and thus provides an informal narrative of turbulent events set against the pageant of daily life in the fourteenth century. Above all, the letters paint a sharp and intimate portrait of Petrarch the total man, the scholar-cleric-poet who in his intellectual curiosity and wide capacities is quite properly called "the first modern man."

Morris Bishop, poet, humorist, scholar, and educator, is the author of numerous books, including biographies of Pascal, Ronsard, and La Rochefoucauld, and his recent work Petrarch and His World. He has contributed many poems and articles to the New Yorker and other magazines and has translated Molière's plays and Petrarch's lyric poems. Professor Emeritus of Cornell University, he has received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the French decoration Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur.

Details

• Hardcover with dust jacket (very good)  
  
• Condition: Good, has a binding default on the first pages (see photo's) 
  
• Jacket design by Ann Wilkinson
• Jacket illustration by Alison Mason Kingsbury
• Publisher: Indiana University Press