The Westering Laurel: Charting Epic in Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen

• In Event: Real and Imagined Landscapes in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Abstract

Petrarch’s career-encompassing attentiveness to landscapes—figural, cultural, geopolitical—is well known, yet these concerns assume new urgency and nuance in his understudied Bucolicum carmen. Situating the collection within the eclogue tradition and examining its local and global representation of landscape, I will address how Petrarch herein remaps pastoral’s spatial imagination, and will explore the implications this has for the text’s genre status. Such a focus allows us to move beyond the vague sense that the Bucolicum carmen seems to resemble an epic, and individuate how its spatial dynamics at once appropriate and critique epic poetics, in particular the discourse of translatio imperii, In his representation of fragmentary green fields, but also the movement between and networks that connect them, Petrarch fashions a radically acentric pastoral geography through which he structurally and discursively approximates epic trajectories, while commenting on the ideological impossibility of composing an uncompromised epic in his era.

Author

• Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Ohio State University