1. The final poem of the RVF, numbered 366, is a long Marian poem, i.e. a poem in praise of Mary using traditional imagery or turns of phrase normally associated with devotion to that saint. Using examples from the text and Musa’s notes on this particular piece, please explain how the imagery and wording show Petrarch both praising the Virgin and recalling his verse on Laura.
2. Please discuss how, in any one poem in the RVF, gratitude (to God, Love, or Laura herself) mingles with the Petrarchan persona’s own sorrow.
3. Please compare and contrast the ways in which two of RVF’s poems proclaim Laura as an exemplar of beauty or goodness for the whole world to admire, and analyze the mixed emotions that the Petrarchan persona feels when he praises her.
4. On Saturday, June 28, 2008, Italy’s most important daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera published a review by Armando Torno of a recently released French edition and translation of Petrarch’s Africa. Torno’s article concludes as follows:
The humanists, Petrarch in particular, are our cultural heritage. If, across the Alps, they can make editions of Italian writers that are based on Italian scholarship and sometimes even edited by Italians, then perhaps the Italians themselves could do something more.
Please choose one long work of Petrarch’s or two short works and discuss to what extent Petrarch reveals himself to be an Italian writer. It will be helpful first to establish a working definition of what ‘being an Italian writer’ might mean, and then proceed accordingly.
5. Possibly you have been asked already, or will be asked someday, why on earth you ever decided to take a course on Petrarch. Perhaps someone will pose this question to you at a dinner party, where Chianti wine or prosecco is flowing freely. Perhaps you’ve been flowing freely to wherever the Chanti or prosecco is being kept, as a result of which you now find yourself—hypothetically, of course—in the mood to discourse fluently about the importance of Petrarch’s place in higher education or in world history. Please so discourse, using specific details from our readings in RVF.
• Your essay should be typed in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman font (or Calibri), with the page number in the upper right-hand corner.
• Each paragraph should contain at least three sentences, but typically a single paragraph should not fill up a whole page. Avoid ending a paragraph with a quotation; doing so mutes your own critical voice. It’s fine and even essential to quote Petrarch, of course; just make sure that the last sentence of each paragraph is in your own words, in the form of analysis.
• There should be an introductory paragraph with a relevant and specific topic sentence; this latter usually appears at the beginning of that paragraph. Avoid vague and unhelpful topic sentences like “Poetry is an important vehicle of self-expression,” “Life has always been full of suffering,” or “Petrarch’s RVF 194 and 196 have many similarities and differences.” Essays that begin like this can go pretty much anywhere, and precisely because of the excessive breadth of those topic sentences, they usually end up going nowhere.
• You’ll also need a focused thesis statement; this normally serves as the introductory paragraph’s last sentence or two. (A thesis statement can indeed extend over two or sometimes even three sentences, depending on sophistication.) But here’s a tip: come up with a workable, tentative thesis statement just to get the old creative juices flowing, but wait until you’ve drafted the whole essay before you actually finalize the thesis statement, because you won’t know what argument you’re trying to make until you’ve actually completed it. The more specific your thesis statement, the better, and the better your paper is likely to be, too. Some students hate being specific and explicit early on; they seem to want to maintain suspense until the very end. Please don’t make this mistake; a critical academic essay isn’t detective fiction, and your reader (namely me) will want to know right from the get-go what your paper will argue.
• Be sure to quote the poem when making claims about it. Quotations constitute evidence for your argument. You’ll also need to analyze what you quote, so first introduce your evidence, then present it via quotation, and then comment on it. For the purposes of this short essay, brief parenthetical citation is fine: e.g. “(RVF 1.4)” or “(RVF 214.30-32).”
• If you need to quote/cite Musa & Manfredi’s Introduction, use parenthetical citation, e.g. “(Musa and Manfredi xxxiv)”. When quoting/citing Musa’s Notes and Commentary, it’s enough to use this format: “(Musa 562)”, which will tell me that you’re quoting or citing p. 562. If you quote from the Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, it’s enough simply to refer to the author of the individual chapter followed by a page number.
• Remember to create transitions between and within paragraphs to ensure that the essay flows well, i.e. that it coheres. When we write, we often lull ourselves into assuming that our sentences flow from one into the other and that the reasoning throughout is continuous. It ain’t necessarily so; thought progression that’s obvious to writers isn’t necessarily clear to readers. For this reason, it’s useful to make connections between paragraphs, or between sentences in a single paragraph. These can be whole sentences, or (if circumstances permit) just single words or phrases, e.g. ‘Nevertheless’, ‘yet’, ‘however’, ‘in addition’, ‘furthermore’, ‘by contrast’, ‘similarly’, ‘The preceding point suggests that’, ‘it might be claimed, though,’ etc. Avoid inserting blank spaces between paragraphs; keeping the spacing uniform makes it easier to spot discontinuities in thinking and to take steps to improve cohesion.

1. The final poem of the RVF, numbered 366, is a long Marian poem,...