Translating Petrarch in Early Modern Britain: 'Canzoniere' and 'Triumphi', c. 1530-1650

Gathering essays from an international team of emerging and established scholars, 'Translating Petrarch in early modern Britain' explores the many ways in which Petrarch’s famous poetic works, the 'Canzoniere' and 'Triumphi', were translated, adapted, reshaped, and transformed by English and Scottish writers across the early modern period. For English-language poets, translating Petrarch’s verse meant joining a prestigious transnational literary movement. While Wyatt and Surrey’s translations famously launched the English sonnet, versions of Petrarch remained a crucial component of Britain’s literary tradition throughout the period, featuring in lyric sequences, poetic miscellanies, and even songbooks. Through their literary and commercial success, these productions contributed to shaping early modern Britain’s cultures of manuscript and print. This collection examines the specific role of translation, in all its early modern variety, as a key mode of poetic, imaginative, and cultural engagement with one of the most revered and imitated authors in early modern Europe. It revisits well-known works such as Tottel’s Miscellany, the productions of the ‘Castalian band’ at the Scottish court of James VI and I, and versions of the 'Triumphi' by Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anna Hume. It also pays attention to lesser-known pieces by anonymous or ‘minor’ translators, poets considered marginal to English Petrarchism, and alternative modes of translation such as indirect translation and musical transposition. By examining the interconnected trajectories of both the 'Canzoniere' and 'Triumphi' in English translation, this collection sheds new light on early modern translation practices, British Petrarchism, and its place in the European literary landscape.