Ronsard, Petrarch, and
by Sara
Sturm-Maddox This comparative study focuses on the shaping influence of Italy’s greatest Renaissance poet, Francesco Petrarca, on the lyric collections of France’s most celebrated Renaissance poet, Pierre de Ronsard. By helping to define the nature of Ronsard’s particular response to Petrarch, Sara Sturm-Maddox revises the history of French Renaissance "Petrarchism." Unlike previous works, which compared individual poems by these authors in terms of source and imitation, this study traces the larger lines of Ronsard’s engagement with the underlying "story" and evolving self-portrait of the Petrarchan lyric protagonist. Sturm-Maddox argues that Ronsard’s imitative strategy in three of his lyric collections—the Amours of 1552-53, the Sonets pour Helene, and the small sequence "Sur la mort de Marie" added to the Second Livre des Amours in 1578—draws upon what she terms lyric impersonation, giving singular prominence to the relation between the textual Ronsard and the textual Petrarch as protagonists. In this first
book-length exploration of the presence of Petrarch in
Ronsard’s Amours, Sturm-Maddox draws upon
her extensive previous work in the French and Italian
lyric, including two books examining intertextual
strategies in Petrarch’s Rime sparse. Her
study cites the French and Italian poems under discussion
in both the original and translation, thus facilitating
further comparative examination. Many of the poems by
Ronsard appear here in English for the first time. Sara Sturm-Maddox,
professor of French and Italian at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author or editor of eleven
books, including Petrarch’s Laurels,
Petrarch’s Metamorphoses, and, with coeditor
Donald Maddox, Froissart Across the Genres (UPF,
1998).
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"An engaging and provocative study of how Ronsard has written not merely like Petrarch but quite literally as Petrarch, assuming the persona of the great Italian master while appropriating and manipulating his story."—JoAnn DellaNeva, University of Notre Dame
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