"Side by side on facing pages, Mortimer gives us the original Italian and his own translation into English of 46 of the 366 poems that make up Petrarch's Canzoniere." --

Petrarch's letters are both typical and exceptional. They are typical as records of life in the gloomy latter end of the Middle Ages in Europe, especially in Italy and southern France. They are packed with information about the literary, eccesiastical, and courtly worlds, about food, clothing, travel, medicine, agriculture, and the routine of ordinary existence. They are also typical in their expression of the ideas and responses which all men of...