We owe Petrarch a lot -- both good and bad.  Petrarch is generally seen as the first truly Renaissance figure.  He was the first major figure to look back on the ancient past and perceive it as removed from the present.  He thought of time as a line that can be measured and divided into sections.  He viewed history as 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.

Petrarch also tried to revive classical Latin literature by writing a Latin epic (called the Africa) in imitation of Virgil.  Like Dante before him, Petrarch relied a great deal on Virgil as a model of a great poet.  Before Dante and Petrarch, Virgil was much honored and admired, but Ovid was the poet that most people actually imitated.  Dante began the first steps in replacing Ovid with Virgil as the model of the poet, but Petrarch was the one who would bring the changeover to complete fruition.  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.

Ironically, we usually don't read Petrarch's Latin epic anymore today.  What we read instead is a work that Petrarch himself characterized as an indiscretion of his youth.  Petrarch often cultivated the image of the Rime Sparse 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).  Petrarch was familiar with the courtly love tradition, and the Rime Sparse are a series of poems (mostly sonnets) that clearly build on that tradition.  But like most of the poetry in the courtly love tradition, they imitate Ovid rather than Virgil.  For that reason alone, the "mature" Petrarch was bound to think of them as a lesser work -- not in the same league with the ambitious epic poetry that he would write later.  But the poems became so famous and influential that we remember Petrarch primarily as a writer of love sonnets (and Petrarch is probably rolling over in his grave at the thought).

In class, we're going to look at some of the more famous poems in the group.  I'd like us to compare them to the courtly love lyrics that we've read earlier in class.  Has Petrarch changed the courtly love tradition in any way?  As you read the poems for class, think about how they compare to the courtly love lyrics of the Middle Ages.  Why does Petrarch write these poems?  What purpose do they serve?  Is their purpose the same as the purpose of the courtly love lyrics of the Middle Ages?