Organisation: Timothy Kircher (Guilford College), Gur Zak (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Bernhard Huss (Freie Universität Berlin)

Other participants: Romania Brovia (Università degli Studi di Torino), Igor Candido (Trinity College Dublin), Aileen A. Feng (The University of Arizona), Jennifer Rushworth (University College London) and Hannah C. Wojciehowski (University of Texas at Austin)

In English and Italian

The conference will be held on the platform WebEx. Please register via email (bernhard.huss@fu-berlin.de) by Wednesday, March 9. You will receive your access details in time before the workshop.

A cooperation of: EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” (FU Berlin) and the Italienzentrum (Center for Italian Studies) of Freie Universität Berlin

The workshop concentrates on the function that affective bonds have for Petrarch’s formation of intellectual and social communities. Affects, or emotions, are omnipresent in Petrarch’s writings. Love, anger, compassion, grief – all repeatedly come up in his works and underlie his interactions with friends, patrons, favorite authors, and readers. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that affective bonds were a decisive feature in Petrarch’s revival of antiquity, occupying a crucial role in his formation of a devout community of friends dedicated to his humanistic cause. The aim of the workshop will be to offer an in-depth analysis of the role of the affects in Petrarch’s community-formation and by extension in his humanism as a whole. Looking at both his Latin and vernacular works, we will explore how Petrarch utilized the affects in his interactions with friends and patrons, how his understanding and representation of emotions departed from those of other »emotional communities« of his day, and the tensions between his Stoic mistrust of emotions on the one hand and deeply affective tendencies on the other. Particular attention will be given to a comparative analysis of the role of the affects in Petrarch’s Latin and vernacular works: in opposition to the scholarly tendency to regard these two corpora as distinct entities, we will look for the entanglements and overlaps between them, especially as they relate to affective bonds. These tensions and overlaps resonated with humanist readers of Petrarch’s writings, and the workshop will also examine how his writings fostered this broader community of readers in the Renaissance, who in turn often became authors themselves and produced petrarchistic texts to create communities.

11. 03. 2021
16:00 Welcome address and introduction
Bernhard Huss (EXC 2020)
16:15 Petrarch and the Vaucluse: Building a virtual community through place attachment
Hannah C. Wojciehowski (University of Texas at Austin)
16:45 discussion
17:05 break
17:15 Petrarch’s poetic conscience: Time, truth, and community
Timothy Kircher (Guilford College)
17:45 discussion
18:05 break
18:15 Affectivities of Reason, reasoning of affects: Strategies of community-formation in Petrarch’s De remediis
Bernhard Huss (EXC 2020)
18:15 discussion
19:05 break
19:15 Psicomachie petrarchesche: Il disordine degli affetti tra Secretum e De remediis
Romana Brovia (Università degli Studi di Torino)
19:45 discussion

12. 03. 2021
16:00 Linking the ancients to posterity: Petrarch’s ideal readership in the De vita solitaria
Igor Candido (Trinity College Dublin)
16:30 discussion
16:50 break
17:00 Sharing in common: Petrarchan humanism and the history of compassion
Gur Zak (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
17:30 discussion
17:50 break
18:00 Gendered Mourning in the epistolary collections of Petrarch and Isotta Nogarola
Aileen A. Feng (The University of Arizona)
18:30 discussion
18:50 break
19:00 ›Comune dolor‹ or dolore unico? Petrarch, mourning, and community
Jennifer Rushworth (University College London)
19:30 discussion
19:50 conclusion