Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer

by Christopher S. Celenza

Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private.

In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.
 

Genres: Biography, History, Renaissance, Poetry, Italy, Nonfiction, Italian Literature

233 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 29, 2021

Reviews

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short book has been enormously helpful. So many of my favourite writers love to allude to Petrarch, yet he has always eluded me.

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the year I read Petrarch and I picked this book up to learn something about him, and to get me excited to read his poetry. I wanted to know who he was, and who his Laura was.

Petrarch is generally considered the Renaissance kick-off point because he bemoaned the "dark ages" (a term he came up with) and the forgotten past of Roman intellectual life. He heavily and successfully promoted Latin and the reading of the Classical Latin works like Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Livy, etc. This is all maybe his biggest claim to fame. He's also famous for this laurel crown, his Latin letters, which are preserved, and especially for his Vernacular poetry, Canzoniere, written in Tuscan and the model for modern Italian.

This is a nice, readable, pretty and somewhat brief overview of Petrarch. It makes a good start for my look into him this year. It made me want to read his poetry, especially his Canzoniere, and it also kind of made me not want to read any of his letters or other works.


(22-yr-old Petrarch being pierced by an arrow emanating from Laura‘s gaze - from a 1470 codex of his poetry. )

I wrote a 1900 word review, but I'm also trying to be more readable this year. So, in that light I'm experimenting with hiding all the stuff you don't need read, but that I still want available to me, as spoilers. These are basically my notes.

A long biographical sketch of Petrarch.
Petrarch has Florentine heritage and associated himself with Florence, but never actually lived there. Born in 1304, he grew up outside Avignon during the Papal schism. His father was a notary, which was at that time something like a secular clerk and lawyer, and he was sent to school to become a notary, but left school upon his father's death, having mostly imbibed Virgil and Cicero in Latin. He read them over and over again, memorizing them. Setting out on his own he found ways to ingratiate himself with wealthy and ruling families, who would sponsor him. Like Dante, he promoted a unification of Italy through a re-creation of the Roman Empire. This led to embracing tyrants, some embracingly deranged, and also conveniently led him to a life of constant patronage through wealth ruling families that really liked this pro-tyrant idea. Part of the reason he never lived in Florence is that it was essentially a republic during his entire life time and there was no patronage for him. (Boccaccio was a younger contemporary and also Florentine, and was famously not very well off...but I don't know his life story yet.)

As a person Petrarch gains some sympathy in his continual self-questioning and contradictions, and also a lot disgust for his arrogance and associated insecurity. He would almost never mention Dante by name - a sign he felt insecure about how his work matched up. He developed a close friendship with Boccaccio, while also counseling the younger scholar to be content with being Florence's 3rd best poet, behind himself and one other unnamed poet (Dante)--this is found in this personal preserved letters. But he had a friendly affect on many scholars who essentially worshipped him, and they are responsible for preserving and spreading his work after his death in 1374. Many of Petrarch's personal notebooks and other materials are available today in various museums, with his personal handwriting and signature.

As an intellectual Petrarch helped spread obscure Roman-era manuscripts, famously discovering lost letters by Cicero in a monastery in modern Belgium, Pro Archia . His great failed work was a Latin epic on end of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, especially on Scipio, the general who finally defeated Hannibal. The unfinished work is titled Africa and is not highly regarded. He is also famous for his letters, many written to person friends, but also many written to dead historical figures. He not only carefully preserved them, but reworked them throughout his life. It was a big part of this intended legacy. He kept a kind of secret notebook where he generated a dialogue between a fictional self and a fictional St. Augustine. Petrarch was devoutly Christian and this book explores his balancing of Christian ethics, and humbleness with his full out push for and desire for fame (and maybe by implication sex). It's a work that apparently was not shared during his lifetime, but has been preserved.

Petrarch was an extremely devout Christian. He spend a lot of effort merging Roman and Christian ethics, and was famously, and importantly, hostile to the intellectual trend in universities to blend Christianity with Aristotle (and Aristotle's medieval Arabic commentator, Averroes). This led to a famous letter he wrote condemning these Aristotle scholars. In it, all written in Latin, he tore apart the scholars for pronouncing things they had no evidence for and so could not validate it, while pushing heavily for Christian faith - this makes an interesting pro-science/anti-science contradiction. His influence would go both ways, both toward suffocating empirical methods under Christian faith, and eventually toward promoting them. His legacy of not accepting the conventional wisdom of the universities would justify a trend of always questioning the experts and conventional wisdom and would place a link between him and the likes of Erasmus and Montaigne.

on the Canzoniere
But Petrarch's Latin writings aren't so highly regarded today and aren't widely read. Instead it's his collection of Tuscan dialect vernacular poetry that makes him read today. He always associated his poetry with a phase in his youth, but he wrote and reworked them throughout his life, keeping the evolving collection together and calling them in Latin his rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or his fragments of things in vernacular. They are known today as the Canzoniere, or, in Italian, songs. This poetry would help define modern Italian.

Celenza doesn't go into his poetry in depth, but he does bring out interesting elements. Petrarch's poetry brings all his contradictions together, in one place, in tension. His Christianity and desire for chastity and humbleness and meaning are in tension with his sexual desires and need and quest for fame. He claimed as a young man to have fallen for a married woman, who he called Laura, specifically on April 6, 1327 in Avignon. His personal copy of Virgil, which still exists, has numerous notes by him about the work and about key events in his life, especially death notices. One notice is on the death of this Laura when the Plague hit Avignon in 1348.

It's interesting to me that Petrarch basically followed Dante in having a poetic muse presented as real and married and unreachable, and who died in a plague during his lifetime. Dante did marry but does not mention his wife or children in any of his preserved works. But if you read his Comedia, you could not be blamed for imaging he was gay. There is a distinct kindness to homosexual sinners and some other arguably homosexual touches in this work. Petrarch does not have this gay element. He was always associated with ecclesiastical roles and was never supposed to marry. He never named the mother of his two acknowledged children, but clearly has an affection for woman. I make this point because when Dante wrote his love poetry, his Vita Nuova, he writes in layers, beautiful on the surface and heavily ironic underneath. They are not sincere. If you read this work and think the author is crazy and over infatuated with his Beatrice, you aren't alone. Mark Musa has a wonderful essay on how this is Dante's intended meaning in his translation of Vita Nuova. Plutarch does not seem to have had this ironic sense of humor. Seems he was more sincere in his poetry. Well, I haven't read it yet, so I'll have to see what I can gleam in translation. (I'm now wishing I had Musa's translation. I have David Young's. The Poetry of Petrarch.)

miscellaneous extra stuff
As I seem to be writing everything down, I'll add some more details on Petrarch.

-- He essentially founded and named Humanism - that is the study of the humanities, namely grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. Or, if you like, roughly the word for secular intellectual pursuits of the era after him. The word comes from Cicero's Pro Archia , the work Petrarch discovered in Liège (in modern Belgium) and then promoted, where Cicero defends the arts (as a legal defense of his client, the poet Archias).

-- He had himself coronated, as a literary conqueror of sorts, in Rome with a laurel crown. (The laura/laurel linguistic connection and the association of the laurel with Apollo, the Greek god of the arts and poetry, is something he worked into his poetry.)

-- Celenza breaks his contradictions down this way. He promoted the vernacular, but wrote mostly in Latin and praised Latin as the best language to use. He pushed for fame, and yet minimizes this in his work (and seems to have battled this contradiction for real, internally). His poetry and other writing focuses on his love interests and his mythical Laura, while downplaying them by claiming this was a fault of his youth that he had overcome in middle age. He continued to write and rework these poems throughout his life. His love for Laura epitomizes what he sees as the earthly struggle of Christians for chastity, a maybe fourth contradiction.

-- There are in a way three historically important Petrarchs. First the classicist that damned the dark ages, condemned the conventional wisdom on universities, and promoted a return to the Romans and classical arts. Second the Latin specialist. And third the vernacular poet, whose Canzoniere promoted both the Tuscan dialect and all vernacular languages in to the arts.

a bit on tyranny
One last note on the Roman Empire. Rome was a Republic for several hundred years, from its mythical past until Augustus walked into Alexandria Egypt in 31 bce, ending his civil war with Mark Antony and becoming the unchallenged ruler of the empire. From then on Rome promoted itself as empire. Almost all the great preserved Roman works, those by the poets Virgil, Ovid and Horace, by the historians, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Pliny the Younger, by the philosophers Lucretius, Emperor Marcus Aurelius and by the naturalist Pliny the Elder, worked within the empire and within the sort of unofficial censorships of that state. Virgil's work is literally designed to justify Augustus a emperor (and to get Virgil his patronage). So we are left with a heavy pro-Empire propaganda legacy. I bring this up because I find it interesting that both Dante and Petrarch bought this propaganda whole and preached it in all their works. The Roman Republic gets short shift. They are all about empire ... and its tyranny. (of coarse they lived in a chaotic world of violently competing small states and no real legal justice.)

On this book itself
Celenza writes like a contemporary professor talking to his students. He expresses some over-certainty early on in promoting his topic as a great one. But he wants the reader to follow him and catch all his facts and leads the reader there step by step, limiting his references to maybe his favorite ones. He's thorough but also avoids any real literary or philosophical exploration. He sticks to the accepted perspective - which does cover the literary and philosophical aspects, but takes no risks. It's a also a pretty book, well made, with color photographs of Petrarch's own books with his own handwriting and also of beautiful 15th century illuminations in some early copies of his works. His book seems to serve as a solid introduction to Petrarch, and is recommended to anyone looking for that.

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the data:

1. Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer by Christopher S. Celenza
published: 2017
format: 246-page hardcover
acquired: December
read: Jan 1-6
time reading: 7 hr 45 min, 1.9 min/page
rating: 4
locations: Avignon, Rome, Vacluse, France, Milan, Venice, Padua, Arquà, Italy, etc.
about the author: born 1967 on Staten Island, currently James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins


(Petrarch‘s personal copy of Virgil's works. The handwritten note over the beginning of the Aeneid (all in Latin) says, “It is already from this point that the conflicts of the gods and their interventions in human affairs begins. Almost no part of this entire work, all the way up to the end, remains untouched by them. In this respect Virgil follows Homer‘s lead most of all. ...")

[Jo Walton]

While I loved it, it also felt strangely thin. Still thinking about that.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Petrarch has endeared himself to me first through his poetry and now reading a bit more about his life. If the sources are there, I would love a big long biography with all the little details, but this one is a good first step to learning more about his life and works. Petrarch's writings form the core of this biography.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to know about the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance and the literary, philosophical, linguistic and cultural revolution it brought to the world, you have got to know something about Petrarch. Celenza's book is a great start. It is a very readable and insightful biography that does not shy away from tackling the many contradictions of Petrarch's life and times.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It could not have been easy for Celenza to write a popular biography of a man known primarily both for and through his writings. Nevertheless, he proves up to the task, painting a compelling literary portrait of a man for whom literature was the art of living. Celenza's style is light, conversational, personable, but his insights are sharp and powerful.

His approach, a good choice for his subject, is to take an exemplary text and unfold it with an eye toward what it reveals about its author. One of Petrarch's endeavors was to craft his sense of self through writing; Celenza picks up that thread at its endpoint and traces it back to its source. The result is vivid, almost cinematic, as if you were in Petrarch's study, watching him put his words on page, hearing him think out loud, experience him forming himself by his art. There are a few drawbacks to this approach. The first is that the book is rather episodic; a few times I felt myself losing touch with the chronology, as Petrarch's life gets overshadowed by his works. Also, occasionally Celenza lingers a bit long over one text, veering toward an exegetical lecture and crowding out others. (I am slightly miffed that my favorite Petrarchan work, "On the Solitary Life," was never discussed.)

All in all, this was a highly enjoyable book and certainly my highest recommendation among English-language biographies. It's appropriate for scholars and non-scholars alike. Scholars just now becoming acquainted with Celenza should check out his thoughts on Renaissance studies in The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy.

[T-Mom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed this read. From the beautiful cover to the photos of Petrarch's annotated manuscripts to the engaging writing voice of the author, after reading this book you'll come away with a better understanding of Petrarch, the man, poet and humanist. Celenza has a wonderful way of giving Petrarch's words another dimension by placing them firmly within historical and cultural context of the Renaissance.

[Caomhghain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an introduction to the Canzoniere, the vernacular poems for which Petrarch is now most famous. Celenza gives each element of Petrarch's life and work the emphasis the man himself did. So we get a lot of analysis of the Latin works as well as the vernacular. It is a marvellous book for getting an all round view of Petrarch the man and the writer and the scholar. The linguistic analyses, especially the Latin ones, are excellent as you would expect from Celenza.

[Stephen Kimber · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional and contradictory character; much of what Petrarch says of the church is still pertinent today. Understanding the medieval period may well offer insights to our modern era.

[Phillip Sawyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine review of an important man in the late Medieval times. Worth reading.