Petrarchism. Competing Models for Early Modern Community Building (1400–1700), edited by Bernhard Huss (Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"), analyses different strategies and dynamics within European Petrarchism, aiming at the constitution of cultural communities in the early modern period, with a particular focus on different media (literature and visual arts) and various linguistic areas (German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Neo-Latin Petrarchism). The interdisciplinary contributions focus on the central question of which ideology was promoted and which methods were used by groups and individuals in the various European countries to follow Petrarch's authoritative self-stylisation as the founder of an overarching, transtemporal cultural community.

The volume presents the results of the workshop of the same name (2023), organised by the EXC 2020 research project "Petrarchan Worlds". It is published in the series Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. Beihefte (Universitätsverlag WINTER Heidelberg) and is available in open access.

  

The book also includes the latest publication by Nicolas Longinotti (former member of Research Area 1: "Competing Communities", now at the Institute for Romance Philology of Freie Universität Berlin), entitled "Was Petrarch Florentine? Competing Circulations in the Quattrocento Commentaries on the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta". 

Longinotti explores the tension between Petrarch's affiliation with the Florentine literary tradition and his broader transregional influence by examining the commentaries of Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Patrizi da Siena on the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. While Cristoforo Landino's Proemio al commento dantesco (1481) presents Petrarch as a central figure in the refinement of the Florentine vernacular, his reception outside Florence – particularly in Milan and Naples – reveals a more complex dynamic. Drawing on Alexander Beecroft's framework of literary circulation, and Gianfranco Contini's notion of "fiorentinità trascendentale", the study investigates how Petrarch's language and authorship oscillate between a localised identity for the Florentine community and a transregional legacy claimed by a vernacular cultural community. By analysing linguistic and political constraints, such as the competition between Milan and Florence and the role of Latin in vernacular literary culture, Longinotti illuminates the broader stakes of Petrarch's canonisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.