A major influence that led to the superiority of the Tuscan Florentine vernacular was the growth of the economy in Florence. Between 1100 and 1300, the population of Italy increased …show more content…
At the beginning of the 13th century, communes were formed. Councils and officials that were elected by the citizens governed them. They set up municipal schools and provided many people with vernacular education in reading, writing and arithmetic. According to Giovanni Villani, half of the male population of Florence attended schools or professional schools that prepared them for mercantile occupation. This had a major impact on the vernacular because more and more people were using it as a way of writing and for …show more content…
Despite the fact that many of Petrarch’s works were written in Latin, his sonnets and canzoni were written in the vernacular. His most popular work is the “Canzoniere”. Petrarch’s “Canzoniere” was a collection of 366 poems and 317 were in sonnet form. He was an early practitioner of the form and thus he influenced many later poets and helped to popularize the form and the vernacular. Through his work, Petrarch established a canonical poetic language as well as a conventional theme. The theme that Petrarch used for his poetry was that of being infatuated to a married woman, as it was a conventional theme in Medieval Europe, it created a worldwide recognition for the poem and helped to spread the popularity of the Tuscan Florentine dialect. Petrarch’s sonnets and canzoni were admired and imitated throughout Europe and it was a concrete model for lyrical poetry. By refining Dante’s literary Florentine vernacular Petrarch created an elegant and versatile poetic language, which later became a language that was accepted and consolidated to be the literary and unified language of Italy. Petrarch also wrote the “Trionfi”, which was a vernacular allegorical poem. Although the poems were unfinished they became subjects of visual art. This resulted in a worldwide recognition of Petrarch’s poetry. Petrarch’s poetry, as well as Dante’s,