Petrarch is an ideal subject for biography, and he has found the perfect biographer in Morris Bishop, whose scholarship is both authoritative and unobtrusive, and whose urbane prose sparkles with color and wit. Yet this is more than a biography, for Petrarch's story is told against the background of a pageant of daily life in the later Middle Ages—sometimes brilliant, sometimes squalid, sometimes merely human.

Many selections from Petrarch's poems and prose writings, in Mr. Bishop's deft translation, depict Petrarch's many-sided character in his own words, while twelve drawings by Alison Mason Kingsbury provide a rich embellishment for this entertaining book.