LIT 231
Prof. G. Steinberg
We owe Petrarch a lot – both good and bad. Petrarch is generally seen as the first major figure of the Renaissance. One thing that separated him from earlier writers was the way he approached history and time. He looked back on the ancient past and perceived it as distantly removed from the present. He apparently thought of time as a line that can be measured and divided into sections, and he viewed history as a line divided into the ancient world, the "Middle Ages," and the present. The ancient world seemed to have accomplished so much compared to the Middle Ages and the present – in art, in science, in politics. Petrarch wanted to recapture those ancient accomplishments. He and others like him called for a rebirth of ancient learning, and that's how the Renaissance got its name (renaissance is French for "rebirth").
Petrarch studied classical Latin with great care and became a renowned scholar of the language (as well as of ancient Greek). He despised many of his scholarly contemporaries for not having a very good grasp, in his eyes, of Latin grammar and vocabulary, and he really worked hard to improve understanding of the language through his meticulous linguistic research.
He also argued that poets should write exclusively in Latin. Since vernacular languages (like French, Italian, and English) seemed to be changing so much in Petrarch's day and seemed so far from one another, Petrarch thought that any writer who wanted to transcend his own age needed to write in a timeless language – a language that all educated people knew, that was "dead" and therefore didn't change anymore, and that was respected as a privileged language. Petrarch thought that Dante was a poor poet for having written in Italian. Petrarch himself began to write a Latin epic (called the Africa), which he never completed.
Like Dante before him, Petrarch relied a great deal on Virgil as his poetic model. Before Dante and Petrarch, Virgil was much honored and admired, but Ovid was the classical poet that most people actually imitated. Dante began the first steps in replacing Ovid with Virgil as a model for poets, but Petrarch was the one who would bring the change to completion. Petrarch was appalled (as, to a lesser extent, Dante had been before him) that writers no longer aspired to the kind of grand, ambitious writing to which Virgil had aspired. The lack of epic grandeur in his contemporaries seemed to Petrarch just another sign of how degraded humans had become since the days of ancient Greece and Rome. In order to encourage his peers to raise their standards, Petrarch formed what has come to be called the "Petrarchan Academy" – small groups of scholars and writers all over Europe who, with Petrarch's personal sanction, met to discuss the improvement of education, the arts, and literature.
Ironically, we usually don't read Petrarch's Latin epic anymore today. What we read instead is a collection of love poems that Petrarch himself characterized as an indiscretion of his youth. Petrarch often cultivated the image of his canzoniere as just his "wild oats." Petrarch wrote the poems about a supposed love he had for a woman named Laura. Whether there really was a Laura or not isn't clear. There may have been, or Petrarch may have just made her up as an excuse to write a bunch of exquisite love poems (in the manner of a creative writing exercise). In any case, the "mature" Petrarch was bound to think of this collection of love poems as a lesser work – not in the same league with the ambitious epic poetry that he would write later in his career. But the poems became so famous and influential that we remember Petrarch primarily as a writer of love poems (and Petrarch is probably rolling over in his grave at the thought).
One last note: Petrarch, like Dante, was considered a Florentine (although Petrarch was actually born and lived his entire life in other cities, including Avignon, Bologna, Parma, Padua, and Milan). After Dante's death in 1321, Florence became something of a bastion of democracy in northern Italy. Most north Italian cities were ruled by tyrants who seized power for themselves and looked out for their own petty interests, but the Florentines in Petrarch's day were trying (with varying success over the years) to hold off the surrounding tyrants and continue as a republic. One of the tyrants who threatened Florence was Giovanni Visconti of Milan. Petrarch, to the dismay of his Florentine countrymen (including Boccaccio), accepted a position at Giovanni Visconti's court in Milan in 1353. As Petrarch saw it, there was so much instability in northern Italy (because of political infighting and incessant wars between cities) that the relative stability offered by tyrants was preferable to the continued insecurity and constant struggle of the republican experiment in Florence. Petrarch claimed that his position at the Visconti court was an independent, apolitical one, but many Florentines viewed Petrarch as a traitor and a sell-out to tyranny.
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