Petrarch Mania: Love, Poetry, and Fan Fiction in the Renaissance

The first bestseller in the history of Western print was a love story. Petrarch’s poems about his adoration of a woman named Laura made the couple the most famous of the Renaissance.

Petrarch wrote that he first saw Laura at a church in the French city of Avignon on Good Friday, April 6, 1327. The observance of Christ’s crucifixion might seem an unlikely occasion for love at first sight, but Petrarch goes all in with his poem on the event, likening the darkness that befell the Earth during the crucifixion to his being blinded by love.

Petrarch didn’t invent the sonnet, but he did revolutionize it—a literary feat that still impacts how we talk about love. Without Petrarch’s poems, Shakespeare never would have compared his beloved to a summer’s day; without Petrarch’s obsession with Laura’s veil, Taylor Swift never would have sung about Jake Gyllenhaal making off with her scarf.

Centuries before the pop song, love sonnets provided the thrill of peeking into another’s romantic experience. Petrarch’s verses provided the terminology for falling in love that we now think of as universal, like opposing sensations (ecstasy and despair) and obsession as ailment (“lovesickness”). We tend to think of poetry as private, like a diary written in rhyme, but Petrarch’s opening sonnet, pictured above in the original Italian, addresses an audience: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse (You who listen in scattered rhymes).

When Laura died suddenly in 1348, Petrarch’s grief was immense: “This life holds no further pleasures for me,” he mourned in a private obituary for her on the flyleaf of a precious book in his personal library. In the woodcut above, Apollo, god of poetry, tries to honor Petrarch with the laurel crown, but the poet is too brokenhearted to care.

Petrarch turned his pain into writing, ultimately composing 366 poems for Laura. He was still working on them when he died in 1374. His handwritten collection is preserved in the Vatican Library.

Petrarch also wrote many significant works in Latin, and his devotion to the rebirth, or renaissance, of ancient culture made him famous as the first “Renaissance man.” But readers ultimately proved less interested in classical disputation than a juicy love story, and once the printing press made its way to Italy in the late 15th century, Petrarch and Laura’s love story took on a life of its own.

“Petrarch mania” swept the Renaissance reading public, an eagerness apparent in such objects as the map below, created by Alessandro Vellutello, who used the poems to retrace Petrarch’s and Laura’s steps.

Both scholar and fan, Vellutello proved to be a massive “shipper” of the two lovers. (A “shipper” is a fan who roots for a relationship.) In 1525, he produced an edition of Petrarch’s poems in which they were completely reordered to create a clear, chronological love story.

Vellutello’s amorous cartography helped inspire the wave of pilgrims who flooded Laura’s tomb when it was supposedly “discovered” in 1533. The cult of Petrarch was widespread enough to be satirized: In a 1539 literary dialogue, a Petrarchan fanboy rhapsodizes about traveling to see such “relics” as Laura’s toenail clippers and chamber pot. But mockery could not stymie the fervor. Vellutello’s edition was reprinted dozens of times, embraced by readers enamored of its hybrid nature—at once critical edition and fan fiction.

Printings of Petrarch’s poetry heralded significant changes not only for literature but also for society. Scholars such as Kim F. Hall have highlighted how his praise of Laura’s blond hair and fair skin had an outsized role in making whiteness a Western beauty ideal. However, in other ways, his poems helped usher in an era of women’s literary output in Renaissance Italy. The verse of Vittoria Colonna, the most important woman writer of the Italian Renaissance, was printed in 1538, only a decade after Vellutello’s first edition of Petrarch.

Following Vellutello’s footsteps all the way to Avignon might be difficult, but Petrarchan devotees can make a miniature pilgrimage to The Huntington. Your first stop should be to see the laurel growing along the fence on the north side of the Herb Garden. More than a general symbol of poetic fame for Petrarch, the laurel—lauro in Italian—was inextricable from Laura. His quest to possess both is captured in wordplay throughout the poems, as in poem 228, when he describes how Love planted inside his heart a lauro greener than emeralds.

Afterward, visit the Library Exhibition Hall, where one of the treasures currently on display is an early edition of Petrarch’s poetry. His verse is set in a heavy Gothic type, drifting on a sea of erudite exposition. (Because the commentator, Francesco Filelfo, abandoned the project for unknown reasons, this volume contains only the first 136 poems.)

This edition is beautiful and consequential, purchased by Henry E. Huntington himself. But it was created for an audience of elite (and thus, at that time, almost exclusively male) readers. Vellutello’s edition (in The Huntington’s holdings but not on display) may have gotten some facts wrong, but the prominence he gave to Laura’s story proved enticing to a wider audience, including women. Renaissance reactions to this love story anticipated modern fannish reading practices by 500 years—providing strong validation for those of us still “shipping” Petrarch and Laura.

Shannon McHugh is an associate professor of French and Italian at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the 2023–24 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at The Huntington. She is the author of Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).

You can learn more about Petrarch and Laura—as well as other lovers whose stories can be found in The Huntington’s library, art galleries, and gardens—by signing up for McHugh’s Huntington U class, Love and Death in the Archives.