I Sonetti, Le Canzoni, et I Triomphi di M. Lavra in Risposta d M. Francesco Petrarcha per le sve Rime in Vita, et Dopo la Morte di Lei Peruenuti alle mani del Magnifico M. Stephano Colonna, Gentil'huomo Romando, non per l'adietro date in luce. Con Privilegio

[Venice] A San Luca al segno del Diamante [per Comin da Trino di Monferrato], 1552. Small 8vo, 153 x 95 mms., foliated, 174 leaves + [8] leaves Index + 3 blank leaves, printer's device on title-page, woodcut portrait of Stephano Colonna on verso of title-page, colophon reading In Vinegia per Comin da Trino di Monderrato L'anno. M. D. LII, printer's mark repeated on verso of last leaf, autograph of "W. J. O'Neill Daunt" on top margin of title-page, bound in contemporary vellum, with what appears to be an image of a turtle in very faded color on the front cover; no leaves before title-page, corner cut from leaf 105, folio 109, stub between Y8 and Z1, small piece of fore-margin torn from P5, leaf 217, some spotting and staining, ties gone, stain on title-page goes through to recto of leaf, slight evidence of worming or rodent active of fore-edge of last three leaves and read cover, binding soiled, but text clean and clear, a respectable copy, from the collection of the Irish author William J. O'Neill Daunt (1807 - 1894); he was born a Protestant but converted to Catholicism in 1827. He was a member of the Repeal Association, the Irish political movement formed by Daniel O'Connell in 1840. "Colonna, in the persona of Laura, to whom the work is "attributed", engages Petrarch in a lengthy tenzone, a literary joust, played against Petrarch's own poems, verses, and words. The poems so effectively censored here (and utterly illegible) are based on the order and words of the "Babylonia" sonnets" (Pennsylvania University Library). Interestingly, the copies of three editions at Penn, including this one from 1552, have been "censored" by defacing the text: "Indeed, the same poems in each edition are defaced. Three of them are easier to see in the 1552 edition than in 1549: they are numbers 136, "Fiamma dal Ciel" ("Flames from heaven"), 137, "L'avara Babilonia" ("Greedy Babylon"), and 138, "Fontane di dolore" ("Font of sorrow"). Each criticizes the decadence of the papal court at Avignon, which Petrarch even compares to the Whore of Babylon — a pejorative whose sixteenth-century adoption by Protestants he could not have foreseen in the fourteenth century, when no Protestants existed. But Counter-Reformation censors clearly thought contemporary reformers likely to read Petrarch's criticism as prefiguring their criticisms of the Roman papacy of their own era, and they sought to eliminate these poems from the printed record." One of the entries in OCLC quotes from Gaetano Melzi's Dizionario di Opere Anonime (1852) that, "Quest opera fu veramente fatica, non già di Laura, ma di esso Stefano Colonna; come si leggeva in un testo a penna allegato da' postillatori del Crescimbeni," i. e., that the work was not by Laura [or for that matter, Petrarch] but by one Stefano Colonna, the Roman gentleman of the title-page "who was a 16th century descendent of the same Roman family. He was a mercenary who served Cosimo I de' Medici as lieutenant general of the Tuscan army. Also a member of the Florentine Academy, he was the subject of one of painter Angelo Bronzino's most celebrated portraits (1546)..." (also from Penn).