Performing Failure in Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

This chapter examines the way Petrarch makes deliberate use of failure in his fourteenth-century sonnet sequence the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF) in order to unify a fragmented speaking subject. Whereas, in the past, lyric speakers were drawn to love as a source of virtue and merit, in Petrarch, love itself is seen as a moral shortcoming. Unlike Dante, Petrarch binds together the ideals of spiritual virtue and physical desire into a necessarily impossible fit. And although in the course of 366 poems the RVF eventually negotiates a state of spiritual success, that success is rooted in the precondition of moral and amatory failure. By beginning the sonnet sequence on a note of proleptic failure, Petrarch constructs a complexly unified pattern that obliges the reader to understand these competing positions as superimposed rather than discordant. In the process this creates a new level of psychological complexity in its representation of this self-aware and unified construction of character.