It gives me great pleasure to thank and acknowledge all of the people and various communities who have supported me in the writing of this book. First, I must thank those who have supported me from the earliest stages of my career. Daniela Bini first introduced me to Petrarch's poetry as an undergraduate, igniting a passion in me that would forever change the course of my professional career. JoAnn DellaNeva opened my eyes to the richness of the Pléiade poets and to Petrarch's influence beyond the Italian borders. I am indebted to Albert Ascoli, Steven Botterill, Tim Hampton, and Barbara Spackman for their guidance and all manner of advice during my doctoral studies and beyond. Likewise, my fellow Berkeley italianisti were a source of continual intellectual stimulation, while providing much-needed social diversion and support at just the right moments:

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Scholarship on Petrarch has generally intepreted the figure of Laura-as-Medusa as a projection of the poet's internal conflict between sacred and profane love. Such a reading takes Medusa as a threat to Petrarch's agency. Yet Petrarch's Laura-Medusa is suggestively figured as only her disembodied head, a weapon ultimately manipulated by Perseus. This reversal of agency has an impact on Petrarch's complicated theory of poetic inspiration, and reaches beyond the relationship between poet and beloved to encompass another fraught paradigm of power: the relationship between poet and patron. By recalling the disembodied head of Medusa in the figure of Laura, and recovering the political symbolism of the appropriation of her petrifying gaze, Petrarch creates a model of poetic agency that he uses to stage his relationship to patronage in the Latin Africa and a poem addressed to his Colonna patrons.