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Petrarch
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The year before (1357) Petrarch had been made Count Palatine by the emperor. The document must have been impressive, it covers three pages of print in a modern edition and had a great gold seal attached to it (PBW, pp. 221-4). Petrarch accepted the title but at first declined to accept the gold seal, returning it to the chancellor as a sign of his esteem. In the letter covering the return, he described the seal in some detail, revealing his clear, if reluctant understanding that Charles was King of Bohemia as well as Roman Emperor. However, he took genuine satisfaction in the seal's motto, Aurea Roma.
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Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Boccaccio among his notable friends who he wrote to often. After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Avignon in 1326, where he worked in numerous different clerical offices. This work gave him much time to devote to his writing. With his first large scale work, Africa, an epic in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. On April 8, 1341, he became the first poet laureate since antiquity and was crowned on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol. He was the first laureate of the tradition in modern times to be given this honor.[3]
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While remaining a devout Catholic, Petrarch had perhaps his most enduring influence by his re-initiation of humanistic studies. Traveling widely as an ambassador and celebrity, he collected manuscripts that led to the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece. The correspondence of Cicero was one of his most important discoveries. In his enthusiastic dissemination of an ancient culture that focused on the pre-Christian idea of man as the measure of all things, Petrarch became the first humanist of the Italian renaissance. As such, he instigated that process of change that gathered momentum in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution.
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Petrarch's admiration for antiquity had contemporary political relevance. He was a supporter of the Roman populist Cola di Rienzo (d. 1354), who attempted a revival of the glories of ancient Rome. Petrarch's Trionfi, shown here in a 15th-century edition, were based upon the triumphs of ancient Rome. This was not "mere antiquarianism." Cola had staged actual revivals of the triumphs during his revolution of 1347.
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Petrarch says he was born on Garden Street of the city of Arezzo, just at the dawn on a Monday. He was the son of Ser Petracco. He spent his early childhood in the village of Incisa, near Florence. Petrarch spent much of his early life at Avignon and nearby Carpentras, where his family moved to follow Pope Clement V who moved there in 1309 to begin the Avignon Papacy. He studied law at Montpellier (1316–20) and Bologna (1320–23) with a lifelong friend and schoolmate called Guido Sette. Because his father was in the profession of law he insisted that he and his brother study law ....
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From 1345 to 1347 Petrarch lived at Vaucluse and undertook his De vita solitaria and the Bucolicum carmen the latter a collection of 12 Latin eclogues. Early in 1347 a visit to Gherardo's monastery inspired Petrarch to write his De otio religioso. In May of that year an event occurred in Rome that aroused his greatest enthusiasm. Cola di Rienzi, who shared Petrarch's fervent desire for the rebirth of Rome, gained control of the Roman government through a successful revolution. Petrarch encouraged Cola with his pen, exhorting him to persevere in his task of restoring Rome to its universal political and cultural missions. Petrarch then started out for Rome.
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Petrarch