The Essential Petrarch

Hackett’s one-volume selection from Petrarch, edited and translated by Peter Hainsworth: lyrics from the Canzoniere alongside the Latin letters and prose of the fourteenth-century Italian usually credited with beginning humanism’s deliberate recovery of the classical past — the man who went hunting through monastic libraries for Cicero’s letters and wrote back to dead authors as if they were correspondents.

Why it’s on the list: It is the opening text of Renaissance and Reformation, ahead of Erasmus, Pico della Mirandola, Montaigne and Bacon. The course starts with the recovery of antiquity before it gets to the theological split, and Petrarch is where the recovery starts.

Where I saw it: Assigned in Renaissance and Reformation on the University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list — “65 Texts Our Students Are Reading”, 65 assigned texts across 12 courses, shared by @uaustinorg on November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this was assigned in.
• The University of Austin — the institution whose course list this is.
• Renaissance — the movement this text opens.
• Classics — what Petrarch was recovering.
• Literature
• Republic of Letters