With his deep passion for the Roman poets and historians and with his effort to transform the cultural agenda through a revival of Antiquity, Petrarch inaugurated new reading and writing practices that would influence and dominate future generations for centuries. Celebrated as the “father of humanism,” he articulated a modern conception of authorship and a new understanding of self. However, a close reading of Petrarch’s writings reveals from time to time a radical scepticism towards the assumptions underlying the hermeneutics of the humanists. The experience of historicity and of the radical instability of the world challenged the notion of a centred and coherent self. In other words: at the same time that he maintained the connection between authorship and identity Petrarch seemed to formulate as well a deep distrust of the concept of author itself.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Falkeid, U., (2025), "Style, the Muscle of the Soul. Theories on Reading and Writing in Petrarch's Texts", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Falkeid, Unn. "Style, the Muscle of the Soul. Theories on Reading and Writing in Petrarch's Texts." Quaderni d'italianistica 29 (1): 2009. 21-38. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v29i1.8492. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.