Borrowing ‘great Petrarchs name’: Rewriting the Canon in Anna Hume’s Translation of Petrarch’s ‘Triumphs’

Abstract: This paper examines Anna Hume’s fragmentary translation of the Petrarchan Triumphs (Edinburgh, 1644), focusing on her three prefatory poems and her annotations. Her work has been previously regarded as proto-feminist, given her questioning of literary misogyny and the plurality of female voices which inhabit her text and, most prominently, her paratexts. Taking into consideration the centrality of early modern translation as a cultural and authoritative activity, as suggested by recent scholarship, the present study explores the dynamics established by Hume between ‘great Petrarchs name’, her own role as his translator, and previous Petrarchan critics from the Italian tradition. How does the interrelationship she builds between these agents challenge the canonised narratives of patriarchal romance endorsed by Petrarch, and what does such rupture imply for the modern reception of her translation? This essay suggests that, in her paratextual material, Anna Hume symbolically rejects romance and asserts the cultural import of her role as a Petrarchan translator and commentator. Reshaping the interpretative works of previous Petrarchists, which she cites as ‘Italian Commentary’, she rewrites Petrarch’s tales of tragic love as patriarchal violence, turning her translation into a feminised, critical revision of the canon in seventeenth-century Scotland.