[Princeps of RVF and Triumphi – with index]

British Library copy is extensively annotated by a late-fifteenth-century hand. The same hand wrote annotations in Italian, Latin, and Greek, including loci similes, sources, and explanations about the content of, or the circumstances that brought Petrarch to write a particular poem. Before the index of poems there are two fols. on which the annotator transcribed five Latin translations of five different Petrarchan texts (‘Retrorsum aspicio passim dum corpore fesso’ in elegiac couplets = ‘Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo’ (RVF 15), translated by Alberico Longo Salentino; ‘Nex pacem invenio, nec sunt migi bella gerenda’ in elegiac couplets = ‘Pace non trovo et non ho da far guerra’ (RVF 134); ‘Saevus Amor vinctum [††]tigno me carcere rursus’ in elegiac couplets = ‘Amor co sue promesse lusingando’ (RVF 76); ‘Coelicolum Pater, exacto male numine Phoebi’ in elegiac couplets = ‘Padre del Ciel, dopo i perduti giorni’ (RVF 62); and ‘Non tot ceruleis animalia pascit in undis’ in six strophes of six hexameters each followed by three hexameters as ‘congedo’ = ‘Non ha tanti animali il mar fra l’onde’ [RVF 237]). After the poems, there are other fols., on which these texts have been transcribed: a text entitled ‘In un ritratto del Poeta molto antico’ (this is the Latin life of Petrarch – by Sicco Polenton); another life of Petrarch ‘tratto d’un Cronico di Padoua’ (in Italian); two fols. of scattered lines and few annotations.
 
In the British Library copy coloured initials for each poem.
 
In the John Rylands Library copy, on the verso of the guard sheet before fol. 1 is Petrarch’s note on Laura (‘Memorabilia quaedam de Laura, manu propria Francisci Petrarcae scripta in quodam Codice Virgilii in Ambrosiana Bibliotheca reperto’, <inc> Laura, propriis virtutibus illustris, et meis longum celebrata carminibus; <exp> et inexpectatos exitus acriter ac viriliter cogitanti). At fol. 8r is an illuminated architectural frame with floral decorations in purple, green, and gold on a blue background; at the bottom is a coat of arms (a golden ‘N’ on a red background, divided in two by a horizontal blue stripe with three golden stars). Every fol. has vertical and horizontal red lines (presumably made in the nineteenth century) that square off the space of the page occupied by the poems.
 
In the Holkham Hall copy, decorated initials in gold for RVF 1 (fol. 8r) and Triumphus Amoris I (fol. 144r); coloured initials (in red) for most RVF poems and the capitoli of the Triumphi; at fol. 8r is an illuminated architectural frame.