Petrarch

Past Masters (Oxford)

by Nicholas Mann

Genres: History, Biography, Italy

128 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 1984

About the author

Colin Nicholas Jocelyn Mann, CBE, FBA (usually Nicholas Mann), scholar of Italian humanism specialising in Petrarch. Director of the Warburg Institute from 1990 to 2001. Professor emeritus at the University of London.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Perhaps you will have heard something of me though it is doubtful whether my obscure little name will have been able to come down to you across space and time. And perhaps you will want to know what kind of a man I was, and what has become of my works, especially those of which you have heard tell, however vaguely

Posteritati - Letter to Posterity

The past Masters series are short introductions to a life. In this case the large, comfortable print makes the book even shorter than the page count implies. Mann's approach is to write an extended essay, split in to different aspects of Petrarch's life: life as a journey, the life of the intellect, the poetic life, the active life, the life as a work of art and so on. The overwhelming sense is of Petrarch as a self invented and reinvented man. His collections of letters to friends and contemporaries were edited, amended, dates changed even invented entirely to create collections that were complete as works of art and thematically unified, not true and faithful records of correspondence.

The sense of his poetic vocation being in part the invention of himself reminded me of Goethe and his Dichtung und Wahrheit. Did Petrarch's Laura really exist? Or was she just a convenient literary invention? The love for Laura transforming itself embodied in poetry into the laurel wreath with which Petrarch was crowned as Poet Laureate in Rome on Easter Sunday 1341. One of Petrarch's patrons had his doubts. There is no resolution here. It is probably an irrelevant question. If she hadn't have existed Petrarch would have invented her and her continuing existence in Petrarch's verse is his creation whether or not there ever was a real woman at the root of that Laurel tree. Again like Goethe, or I suppose more correctly, Goethe like Petrarch, had an aversion to completing works. Everything was an ongoing process, subject to revision and alteration. Everything was in tension, desire for acclaim as much as for the contemplative life.

Everything was open to reinvention for literary ends. An apparently simple account of Petrarch and his brother climbing Mont Ventoux turns out to be a spiritual allegory. Did it happen at all, or did Art improve on nature. It matters only to show how far Petrarch took the moulding of his own life as subject and object of his artistic endeavour. Petrarch made himself.

Petrarch's interest in classical antiquity lead him to become a literary scholar. He gathered together manuscripts of Livy and through comparison of variants tried to produce a more accurate version. In this regard he stands at the beginning of the Renaissance and the humanists interest in collecting classical texts. Yet at the same time Petrarch stands at neither the end nor the beginning of a tradition but is simply a point on a circle. Petrarch looked to Seneca, Cicero and St.Augustine. While St.Augustine had himself looked back to Seneca and Cicero. There is a continuous flow and a continuing syncretism between Pagan and Christian virtues that at once looks forward towards the renaissance but also back to the roots of medieval Europe.

In his time Petrarch was a friend of Boccaccio and for a long time one of his most popular works was a translation of the Griselda story, the tenth story of the tenth day of the Decameron into Latin. Petrarch, unlike Chaucer, liked Boccaccio's version of the Griselda story invoking her as example of feminine virtue in De remediis. Latin was to remain the common language of Europe, but in time with the rise of the vernaculars to become establish literary languages Petrarch's Latin works have been increasingly over looked in favour of his Italian works like Canzoniere which Petrarch himself saw as secondary to his artistic enterprise in his own lifetime.

In Nicholas Mann's analysis his peculiarly elusive character, far from resolving itself into so epigrammatic a formula, was the subject, and the object, of an immensely complex work of art. Were there no other, that would be his legacy to us. (p104)

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short scholarly introduction to possibly the most significant intellectual figure of the first half of the fourteenth century, this might seem abstruse to most potential readers but understanding Petrarch is understanding a great deal of what underlies our much vaunted Western civilisation.

There are three aspects to this: his influence as the type of the public intellectual; his important role in transmitting a particular vision of Classical Antiquity which was to underpin the ideology of the Renaissance; and his influence as a lyric poet.

This last is probably the most obvious to us today since his relatively youthful Canzoniere helped to kick start the Golden Age of English Renaissance Literature through Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (but had also influenced Chaucer and others before them).

However, this fame would have surprised and perhaps even depressed Petrarch who, as Mann outlines, saw himself as engaged in a far more serious and 'moral' lifetime project of reconciling his love for Pagan virtue with his spiritual commitment to Christian salvation.

This tension between Pagan Roman (based on Virgil and Cicero but also Horace and Seneca) and the prevailing Christian culture of the day was mediated through a reading of St. Augustine and resulted in fascinating if unsatisfactory compromises that would eventually lead to cultural crisis.

Even in Petrarch's day, there were political tensions with Popes in exile in Avignon and the continued attempt to encourage the Holy Roman Emperors to take charge of Italy. The contradictions would eventually explode as Reformation and Renaissance alike.

Petrarch's life work was undertaken in the public gaze. At the end of the day, we have to conclude that he was both a true genius and the type of the inauthentic public intellectual, presenting an ideological stance while hiding the self, the modern Western curse.

It is not that he was not self-aware - Mann makes a good case for him as creator of the modern sense of self in the intellectual class - but that his self awareness had a certain hollowness as he managed his reputation and his self-presentation to fit with his 'moral' project.

We actually know very little of who he actually was despite his voluminous confessional and epistolary writings because, as Mann points out, his literary self is not a reliable guide to his actual self in real space and time. Did he even climb Mount Ventoux or was it merely a literary trope?

Frankly, after well over half a millennium, he is mostly of specialist intellectual interest. Life is short so a deep study of his moral concerns is probably not going to connect with our own day-to-day life - our culture has now moved on too far from its medieval Christian base.

However, outside the world of literary scholarship, Petrarch is worth knowing about and understanding to some degree because of the Western cultural problem of the public intellectual, the over-sanctification of texts and the opinions of those educated in texts.

The problem of the New York Times or London Times Op Ed - the idea that there is a class of persons who can opine as moral forces from a high ground they have created themselves - is the same problem as the problem of whether Petrarch 'mattered' or 'matters'.

Petrarch mattered because the structure of medieval society, centred on the authority of conflicting texts (Church Fathers and Latin Classical Pagan), required an intellectual to 'square' the conflict and then create moral virtue out of the contradictions.

However, it might have been better to have a society that did not take authority from texts at all but concentrated on science, experience and open debate where anything was permitted in the struggle for truth - but that would come later, a revolution still not adequately completed.

The public intellectual is a problem for the masses because their cultural dead weight lies not so much in failing to enlighten us as to possibility but in trying to do what Petrarch did - square contradictory realities with the pre-set ideology of the culture in order to create 'morality'.

Today, the public intellectuals tend to be soi-disant liberals trying to square eighteenth century texts with the realities of the internet age and the freedoms it enables but the essential fakery and inauthenticity of Petrarch are still there just the same if without the genius.

General readers may find the book (under 120 pages) a little dry but it is worth persevering with. Petrarch emerges as a human being much like us, just one living in a culture largely alien to us. And he remains as opaque despite his writings as we all remain fundamentally opaque to each other.

Indeed, one of the great virtues of Mann's analysis is to point out how the dialogue between the two sides of Petrarch's character (as Augustinus and Franciscus) in the Secretum can be seen a form of self psycho-analysis that reveals as much to us as it may have done to Petrarch.

I doubt whether many will have the patence to read through the Secretum but we might add contemporary psychology to the small band of specialists who might do so. The struggle to invent oneself before society against one's hidden nature remains a human obsession today as then.