"... historical lore and tales of virtue, rascality and wonder from ancient and medieval times. Conrad H. Rawski... gives us a translation that is muscular, graceful and suggestive of Petrarch's Latin style... Anyone who can get to a library that can afford this work will find a great old world filled with humor, folly, failure and glory, all suffused with an eloquent and gentle wisdom." -- New York Times Book Review
"... reveals much about the life situation, the external hazards and the inner moral dilemmas of European society... The translation itself is accurate, strong and pungent." -- Charles Trinkaus
"This is philology at its best: scholarship that enables us to hear the voices of the past."Â -- Speculum
"... a formidable example of thorough and dedicated scholarship.... There is little question that it represents the definitive study of the De Remediis for all time." -- Renaissance Quarterly
"Rawski's achievement is thus not simply to have made Petrarch's great moral encyclopaedia accessible to the modern reader who has no Latin, but in addition to have made it possible to appreciate the full extent of Petrarch's learning as it is displayed in the De remediis.... No serious library can afford to be without these elegantly printed volumes... and no serious medieval or Renaissance scholar can afford to ignore them." -- Italian Studies
"... an admirable and meticulous work of scholarly. Elegantly produced... it is sure to stimulate a renewal of interest in Petrarch's Latin treatise both among specialist and non-specialist readers." -- Romance Philology
"Petrarch's miraculous achievement was to bring an antique Roman secular mind, with much of its knowledge and sensibility, back to life in a radically foreign and antipathetic 14th-century world... The translation is engaging idiomatic English, that mirrors Petrarch's thought and rhetorical register... " -- Choice
The greatest scholar of his age, Petrarch was far more than an inspired writer of Italian love poetry. At the time of its publication in 1366, De remediis utriusque Fortune was his most popular and influential work. This guide to the resolution of moral and philosophical crises remains universal and timeless to this day.
A Petrarchan Remedy for Prosperity (Academic Titles):
Joy: I am professor of the Liberal Arts.
Reason: This subject often contains more impudence than knowledge.
