PETRARCH FOR THE GERMAN ROMANTICS. Large 8vo. (7), 6-324 pp, (4), plus stipple-engr. frontispiece and a further plate after p. 252 depicting the death of Laura. Bound in contemporary publisher’s cartonnato, edges deckled. A beautifully unsophisticated copy. Light dampstaining to lower corner of pp. 281-304, otherwise clean and fresh. Rare first edition of Engel Christine Westphalen’s second published work, a play based on the life of the medieval poet Petrarch. The Romantic movements in Germany and England had embraced Petrarch as the inventor of the love sonnet, thanks to partial translations by August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) and musical adaptations by Schubert and Liszt. At the time of Petrarca’s publication, Westphalen preferred to remain anonymous and identifies herself on the title-page only as the ‘authoress of Charlotte Corday’ [itself a successful play]. Petrarca is certainly steeped in the Romanticism of Sturm and Goethe: the frontispiece merely depicts an idyllic scene of mountainous natural beauty, while Westphalen asks her reader in her preamble, “Suchst du verwachsene Wälder? Höhlen? reissende Ströme?... Wanderer, folge mir nicht! Ich wandle durch Blumengefilde…”. As The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature notes, the text of Petrarca pays particular attention to the relationship between the poet and his muse, the married noblewoman Laura. At the end of the work Westphalen includes an appendix of ‘Anmerkungen und Erläuterungen’ (pp. 311-324) containing her own historical and biographical notes on the episodes of Petrarch’s life.Engel Christine Westphalen von Axen (1758-1840) was “deeply engaged in the political issues of her time, although little else remains known about [her] life. Her father, Jacob von Axen, was a prominent merchant in Hamburg, as was her liberal-leaning husband, Johann Ernst Friedrich Westphalen.” (Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama, p. 20). She knew Christoph Christian Sturm in her childhood, and was a friend and correspondent of Christoph Martin Wieland, Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring, Johanna Schopenhauer, and Caroline Pichler. Westphalen began to publish under her own name only in 1809, at the age of 51. OCLC shows copies in the US at Cornell, U Conn, Indiana, William & Mary (VA), and Wisconsin.* Fiske, A Catalogue of Petrarch Books, pp 50-51; The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature, p. 274; and cf Aurnhammer, Francesco Petrarca in Deutschland: Seine Wirkung in Literatur, Kunst und Musik, pp 409-421.