My Secret Book

As a work of autobiography—or, rather, of literary self-fashioning—Petrarch’s Secretum evokes many comparisons but admits few equals…Nicholas Mann is to be applauded for having produced a volume that at last does full justice both to the elegance of Petrarch’s prose and to the sophistication of his thought…There can be no doubt that Mann’s volume is a jewel in the crown of Petrarchan scholarship. It deserves to be cherished by readers for generations to come. -- Alexander Lee * Renaissance Quarterly *
It’s the careful, hard-working crew at Harvard University’s I Tatti Renaissance Library who produced the best translation of 2016 with this meticulously-rendered and marvelously sensitive scholarly edition of Petrarch’s most quietly astonishing work, a work of plaintive and rigorous self-examination cast in the form of a dialogue with St. Augustine. The I Tatti Library has been uniformly excellent, but even so, this volume stands out. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Monthly *