Petrarchan Passions: Affects and Community-Formation in the Renaissance World

Abstract

This volume is the result of the international workshop “Affects and Community-Formation in the Petrarchan World”, which was hosted online by the Italienzentrum della Freie Universität Berlin on March 11-12, 2021. The workshop was held by the generous support of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, EXC 2020 – Project ID 3900608380) as well as that of the Italienzentrum della Freie Universität Berlin. The workshop and the articles presented here all form part of the project “Petrarchan Worlds”, directed by Bernhard Huss in Research Area 1, “Competing Communities”, of the above-mentioned Cluster of Excellence. The workshop focused on the study of Petrarchan “affects”. These “affects”, passions”, or “emotions” are omnipresent in Petrarch’s writings. In addition to feelings of love so frequently expressed in his work, other emotions – sorrow, compassion, anger, envy, for example – are also represented and these too play a crucial role in his interactions with friends, patrons, favorite authors, and readers. Analyzing Petrarch's complex engagements with those "affects" in both his Latin and vernacular works, the essays in this volume explore the different types of emotional, intellectual, and political communities that his writings helped forge.