Focusing especially on Petrarchism, and instances of lyric innovation, poetic (re)negotiation, and moments of sociocultural resistance, my lovely colleague, dear friend, and the Huntington Library’s Assistant Director of Research Shannon McHugh’s wonderful 2023 Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy is another riveting contribution that carefully parses the entwined story of lyric poetry and gender from the Renaissance onwards.

One of the most preeminent scholars working on Petrarchism in Spain (and one of the most delightful writers), Anne J. Cruz’s Imitación y transformación: el petrarquismo en la poesía de Boscán y Garcilaso de la Vega offers a meticulous, elegant and exciting overview of the phenomenon of literary imitation as it moved from Italy to Spain.

Ignacio Navarrete’s wonderfully titled Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (published in 1994 by the U of California Press) is matched by the equally wonderful material his monograph contains. Discussing Boscan, Garcilaso Herrera, Góngora, and Quevedo, his book provides a cogently-situated broad perspective on Spanish Petrarchism during the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Sara Sturm-Maddox’s Petrarch’s Laurels (Penn State, 1992) is another excellent book. It offers another broad, comprehensive, and ultimately comparative view of Petrarch’s lasting literary resonance(s), after first situating him at the helm of the premodern mythmaking authorial ethos, so bent on establishing a personal authorial/poetic identity and name for oneself.