As a work of autobiography—or, rather, of literary self-fashioning—Petrarch’s Secretum evokes many comparisons but admits few equals…Nicholas Mann is to be applauded for having produced a volume that at last does full justice both to the elegance of Petrarch’s prose and to the sophistication of his thought…There can be no doubt that Mann’s volume is a jewel in the crown of Petrarchan scholarship. It deserves to be cherished by readers for generations to come.

It’s the careful, hard-working crew at Harvard University’s I Tatti Renaissance Library who produced the best translation of 2016 with this meticulously-rendered and marvelously sensitive scholarly edition of Petrarch’s most quietly astonishing work, a work of plaintive and rigorous self-examination cast in the form of a dialogue with St. Augustine. The I Tatti Library has been uniformly excellent, but even so, this volume stands out.

The Loeb Classical Library…has been of incalculable benefit to generations of scholars… It seems certain that the I Tatti Renaissance Library will serve a similar purpose for Renaissance Latin texts, and that, in addition to its obvious academic value, it will facilitate a broadening base of participation in Renaissance Studies… These books are to be lauded not only for their principles of inclusivity and accessibility, and for their rigorous scholarship, but also for their look and feel. Everything about them is attractive: the blue of their dust jackets and cloth covers, the restrained and elegant design, the clarity of the typesetting, the quality of the paper, and not least the sensible price. This is a new set of texts well worth collecting.

An aristocratic devotion to our culture continues to manifest itself even today in the most prestigious centers of study and thought. One has merely to look at the very recent (begun in 2001), rigorous and elegant humanistic series of Harvard University, with the original Latin text, English translation, introduction and notes.