Petrarchism at WorkThe Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (13041374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "Petrarchan" poets were self consciously aware of themselves as poetsas craftsmen,