Openness and Intensity:Petrarch’s Becoming Laurel in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 23 and 228

Our paper offers a comparative reading of Rvf 23 and 228, which describe the poetic subject’s transformation into (23), or implantation with (228), the laurel tree that normally represents the poet’s beloved, Laura. Bringing Petrarch’s poems into dialogue with philosophical works that consider the nature of plant existence as a form of interconnectedness and porosity to the outside, we argue that the becoming tree these poems stage is a form of desire to be understood not as lack but as intensity.
Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, ‘Openness and Intensity: Petrarch’s Becoming Laurel in *Rerum vulgarium fragmenta/* 23 and 228’, in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 209-24 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23_11>