Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer

The marriage contract also added a new twist, as it had been supposed that Laura was an unmarried member of the family, which fits better, or at least more literally, with Petrarch’s descriptions of her as ‘chaste’. In a letter to his wife he recounts a dream in which Laura appeared to him ‘draped in black muslin’:

It is piquant to think that Laure de Noves occupied the dream life of both Petrarch and the Marquis de Sade, but the identification is much debated. In a letter written in Latin to his friend Giacomo Colonna, Petrarch responded vigorously to the charge that Laura was a fiction:

But like the poems themselves, these letters are layered with ironies and postures, and readers cannot rest on any firm ground of interpretation.

Source: www.lrb.co.uk