Palermo, Biblioteca centrale della Regione Sicilia, XII A 3

Caggio’s lecture on RVF 152 originates from the assumption that it is easier to have knowledge of other people’s affairs than one’s own. Hence, Petrarch’s troubled experience of love might help each academician to find ‘la medicina alle sue infermità’ (fol. 9v). This first lecture illustrates, drawing upon the medical authority of Galen, the effects of love on human souls. The second, philosophically-informed lecture, celebrates poetry and explains its intimate connection with philosophy (specifically Logic). Caggio then introduces the three Aristotelian genres of rhetoric (deliberative, forensic, and epideictic), with a particular focus on the forensic one. This genre is also adopted in Petrarch’s sonnet RVF 154, whose exposition concentrates on the rhetorical strategies employed in this sonnet.
 
Entry compiled on the basis of microfilm CNSM.POS 23517 of the Centro Nazionale per lo Studio del Manoscritto (Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II).