On His Own Ignorance

by Francesco Petrarca

25 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1368

About the author

Famous Italian poet, scholar, and humanist Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, collected love lyrics in Canzoniere .

People often call Petrarch the earliest Renaissance "father of humanism". Based on Petrarch's works, and to a lesser extent those of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, Pietro Bembo in the 16th century created the model for the modern Italian language, which the Accademia della Crusca later endorsed. People credit Petrarch with developing the sonnet. They admired and imitated his sonnets, a model for lyrical poems throughout Europe during the Renaissance. Petrarch called the Middle Ages the Dark Ages.

Reviews

[feifei · Rating 3 out of 5]

obviously the father of sonnets writes beautifully, and the metaphors and other flourishes were enjoyable, but half of this was just "guys Plato is better than Aristotle because he's more Christian" without him ever seeking to justify why Christian-ness makes something more true, more good. i thought this was an anachronism on my part, but petrarch makes the special effort to attack his contemporaries who 'think that those who question Catholic thought are intelligent but those who defend it are silly'—but why, my good sir, why??? his defense of eloquence thus falls a little flat because his eloquence has not, in fact, moved my will