Abstract: Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) is one of the most important publications in the history of English Renaissance literature. With it, Petrarchism became an essential element in the development of English poetry while the Italian verse forms it imported provided influential models for the succeeding generations of English poets. However, Tottel’s Miscellany was itself modeled on a particular kind of Italian book, a poetic miscellany featuring work by various hands and thus capturing the best and most recent poetry produced in the Italian language. Such miscellanies became especially numerous toward the middle of the sixteenth century. This presentation focuses on Dinko Ranjina (1536-1607), a Ragusan poet whose Italian poetry was included in one of these miscellanies, but who in 1563 also published an impressive book of Croatian verse. The book was published in Florence by the sons of Lorenzo Torrentino, the official ducal printer, in a beautifully produced edition that features some interesting visual material, including the poet’s portrait. My aim is to reconstruct the multilingual literary network within which Ranjina operated and to investigate the role played by Ranjina’s Ragusan predecessors who, in the European borderlands, fashioned an important but still largely disregarded vernacular poetic tradition inspired by Petrarch’s works
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