Petrarch intends to speak about himself, his interests,
his outlook—in short, about his personality. What strikes
the modern reader is the egotism that pervades the letter,
the dramatic departure from the more humble attitude
generally adopted by medieval authors who were less
likely to put themselves and their accomplishments on
display in such a self-centered and self-serving way.
Although idealized, conventional portraits are common
in works of medieval literature and although the vidas
of the troubadours and Dante’s Vita nuova present so-
called personal data as historical facts, the authorial “I”
and the empirical “I” remain distinctly separate persons.
With Petrarch, however, we see a dramatic change in
the attitude toward autobiography, such that we know
more about this fourteenth-century author than about
virtually any other person of his age, precisely because
the author himself decided that this would be the case.
To make sure that we would know about him, Petrarch
compiled large collections of letters, made copious an-
notations on his manuscripts, and left us other pieces of
evidence that allow us see and understand his life as he
wanted it to be recorded and remembered. Thus, in the
Letter to Posterity, Petrarch fashions his own identity,
creates his own historical persona, and delineates his
role in the events of his time. From other, independent
documents we are able to judge the accuracy of the
Letter to Posterity, and we may conclude that he was a
master of self-promotion, acutely aware of his particular
place in history. For this reason, we may view him as a
precursor of humanistic attitudes on the individual that
would emerge in the next centuries.
In the Letter to Posterity, Petrarch describes him-
self as modest and even tempered, as one who prefers
sacred literature to vernacular poetry, who is acutely
aware of the greatness of antiquity to the impoverished
state of his own age, who yearns for the tranquil life
of the country and disparages the hectic pace of urban
society. While he notes that in his youth he had been
overwhelmed by a powerful love, he declares that this
is a thing of the past. Despite his voluminous literary
production in both Latin and Italian, Petrarch refers
only to his works in Latin—his epic poem Africa, his
treatise on the solitary life (De vita solitaria), and his
pastoral poems (Bucolicum carmen)—for they are the
reason for his coronation as poet laureate in Rome atop
the Capitoline Hill. As Petrarch tells the story, on the
same day (1 September 1340), he received invitations
for coronations from the chancellor of the University
of Paris and from the Roman senate; to have chosen
Paris would have been to give precedence to scholastic
culture, and thus his choice of Rome was intended to
help restore the ancient glory of that city.
In the Letter to Posterity, Petrarch also speaks about
his family and friends, his personal habits, his travels,
the cities where he lived, and the benefi ts—for work
and mind—of his “transalpine solitude.” The last few
sentences of the letter speak of Petrarch’s affection for
Jacopo da Carrara the Younger, ruler of Padua; and while
Petrarch would have liked to reside permanently in
Padua, Jacopo’s untimely death in December 1350 made
that impossible. Petrarch notes: “I could stay no longer
[in Padua], and I returned to France, not so much from
a desire to see again what I had already seen a thousand
times as, like a sick man, to be rid of distress by shifting
position.” This sentence represents perfectly Petrarch’s
carefully constructed persona: he is the restless traveler,
the seeker of old manuscripts, the frequenter of ancient
sites in an attempt to recapture something of their past
glory. The image of the sick man who tries to assuage his
pain by shifting position recalls Saint Augustine’s image
of the sick woman, who, in allegorical terms, represents
the unquiet human soul that will fi nd its peace only in
God (Confessions, 6.16); however, here Petrarch’s frame
of reference is limited to earthly life. In this passage,
we also observe the drama of his own internal confl ict
as one caught between earthly attractions and spiritual
aspirations, one who, profoundly discontent with his
own age, but powerless to change it, dreams of a past
grandeur and of a better future time. His confessional
work, the Secretum, in which Augustine is one of the
interlocutors, is concerned with this same confl ict.Life and Works
Petrarch was born in Arezzo to Pietro di Parenzo and
Eletta Canigiani. His father, usually called Ser Petracco,
was a notary who had migrated to Florence from his
hometown of Incisa in the Arno River valley. During
the tumultuous early years of the fourteenth century, he
made some political enemies in Florence and was exiled
on false charges of corruption in public offi ce in October
1302—some nine months after the expulsion of Dante
Alighieri on similar grounds. Early in 1305, Petrarch and
his mother moved to Incisa, where his brother Gherardo
was born in 1307. After six years in Incisa, the family
moved to Pisa (1311), where Francesco may have seen
Dante among a group of fellow Florentine exiles. In
1312, Ser Petracco resettled his family in Carpentras in
southern France, where he was associated with the papal
court of Clement V in Avignon. In Carpentras, Francesco
began his study of grammar and rhetoric with Conve-
nevole da Prato and became friends with Guido Sette,
a boy his own age whose family had moved to France
from Genoa. In 1316, Ser Petracco decided that Petrarch
should become a lawyer and sent him to the University
of Montpellier. During this period his mother died, and
to commemorate the sorrowful occasion Petrarch com-
posed his earliest surviving work, an elegiac poem in
thirty-eight Latin hexameters. In 1320, Francesco went,
together with his brother and Guido Sette, to BolognaPETRARCA, FRANCESCO