PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Christopher S. Celenza is Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His previous books include Machiavelli: A Portrait (2015) and The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (2004).
The striking appeal of Celenza's study is how the scattered worlds of Petrarch are brought together in vigorous unity--the passionate classicist haunted by a yearning for modernity, the Tuscan love poet whose melodious sonnets for Laura would be imitated for centuries, the restless Augustinian pilgrim, and the self-conscious yet enigmatic spider in a network of powerful friends and acquaintances. In his elegant and poetic style, Celenza combines reader-friendliness with scholarly sophistication and depth. This is a timely intellectual biography written by one of today's leading Renaissance scholars. --Unn Falkeid, University of Oslo, author of The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena
