SOURCE: Thomas P. Roche, Jr., "The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch's Canzoniere" in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXXI, No. 2, April, 1974, pp. 152-72.

In the essay below, Roche argues that Petrarch consciously utilized Renaissance concepts of numerology in the structuring of the Canzoniere.

The purpose of this essay is to argue that the ordering of the three hundred and sixty-six poems in Petrarch's Canzoniere is numerologically oriented and that one of the main structures in this ordering is a calendrical framework that places the Canzoniere unequivocally in the context of fourteenth-century Christian morality. Without even referring to recent studies about numerological composition in English poetry of the Renaissance or to the overwhelming evidence of Biblical commentaries from earliest times through the seventeenth century,¹ we have the figure of Dante, whose numerological structuring of La Vita Nuova and La Divina Commedia has never been called into question. Behind Dante are the...