Edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Sukanta Chaudhuri Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, survives in literary history not only as the author of a significant body of literary works, but also as a person, a self, a subject. Writing in the European Middle Ages, he is a critical figure in the cultural turn known as the Renaissance. He speaks of himself as standing between two worlds, looking back at classical antiquity, and forward to a rebirth of classical culture through the labours of humanist scholarship. As a poet, he created arguably the most important tradition of European love poetry, while the huge volume of his prose writings offers a record of his personality, his life, and his times. In nineteenth-century India, at the peak of what is sometimes called the Bengal Renaissance, Michael Madhusudan Dutt adapted the Petrarchan sonnet to create the new poetic form of the chaturdashpadi, or 'fourteen-liner', while the young Rabindranath Tagore's translations of some of Petrarch's Canzoniere survive to this day in his own handwriting. Publication Jadavpur University Press