Petrarch, the "father of Humanism," has exerted a striking impact on early modern intellectuals. This volume discusses how Petrarch's writings were understood, read and used by intellectuals, writers and artists from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Specialists from various disciplines (Italian, French, Neo-Latin, Dutch, art history, history of science) demonstrate that early modern reception is an extremely variable phenomenon; that it is largely dominated by the various discourses, paradigm's, literary genres, interests, needs and experiences of the users, and to a much lesser...