Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng's engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism. Though Petrachism is usually read solely as a vernacular poetic tradition, in Writing Beloveds, Feng recovers the initial political purposes in Latin prose and traces how poetry set the terms for gender, agency, and power in early modern Italy.

By revealing the literary motifs in men's and women's writing about gender she maps how certain figures in Petrarch's...