Dante and Petrarch

The nature and significance of Petrarch's indebtedness to Dante in the Rime sparse, Sara Sturm-Maddox argues, is revealed not only in the many individual poems or isolated echoes disclosed by recent studies. Here it is explored in a strategically placed sequence of poems, the well-known canzoni 125-127. In each of them we find the reinscription of elements drawn from the scene of Dante's encounter with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. Read together, these poems constitute a rewriting of the episode in the Purgatorio that affords insight into the nature of Petrarch's rivalry with his unacknowledged master. The contrasts that emerge between the scenes as written by Dante and by Petrarch, moreover, have far-reaching implications from the reading of the poet's story in the Rime sparse as a whole.