Petrarch's Succession of Crowds: Inheritance and Readership from Lyric Sequence to Testament

This thesis gives a reading of Petrarch’s aversion to the legal profession through three overlapping paradigms: the testament, the final “sententia,” and the vulgar crowd. The first chapter looks at Petrarch’s testament as it relates to fourteenth-century will writing and inheritance-related metaphor. The second chapter focuses on Petrarch’s continual postponement of conclusive meaning and final adjudication as both notions become visible in the term “sententia.” The third chapter reads Petrarch’s engagement with unlearned masses in relation to the question of readership. Juxtaposing Petrarch’s lyric with his testament’s legal prose, I argue that “testamentum,” “sententia,” and “vulgus” are ambivalent and generative terms to approach Petrarch’s work.