This book studies in detail the complexities of these conflicting aspects of Petrarchism as they are boldly juxtaposed in moments of recantation, or palinode. Manipulations of recantatory gestures in the poems of Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser are especially succinct points of focus for considerations of these authors' more general relationships to and revisions of both Petrarchism and the cultural climates in which they wrote.

Because they involve questions of confessions and autobiography, ethics and aesthetics, the concerns of the palinode are aligned with those of the Petrarchan lyric, and also engage larger cultural discourses surrounding the lyric poem that would demand recantation. Given the recantation's role of mediating between the poetic work and the world beyond, critical categories such as "monologic" and "dialogic," derived from the works of M. M.

Bakhtin, are suitable tools for an examination of the Petrarchan lyric and its recantation, while at the same time, the nature and value of these critical concepts are interrogated.