Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self

Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self Petrarch was one of the founding fathers of Renaissance humanism, yet the nature and significance of his ideas are still widely debated. In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch’s works – his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self. Zak argues that both are defined by Petrarch’s idea of care for the self. Overcome by a strong sense of fragmentation, Petrarch turned to the ancient idea that philosophy can bring harmony and wholeness to the soul through the use of spiritual exercises in the form of writing. Examining his vernacular poetry and his Latin works from both literary and historical perspectives, Zak explores Petrarch’s attempts to use writing as a spiritual exercise, how his spiritual techniques absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that arose from his efforts to care for the self through writing. Gur Zak is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self

gur zak The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521114677  c Gur Zak 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Zak, Gur, 1975– Petrarch’s humanism and the care of the self / Gur Zak. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-11467-7 (hardback) 1. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374 – Philosophy. 3. Humanism in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Humanists – Italy. I. Title. pq4542.z35 2010 851 .1 – dc22 2009039185 isbn 978-0-521-11467-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Dina

Contents

page ix

Acknowledgments Introduction

1

1 The Indeterminate Self: Writing, Desire, and Temporality in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 2 The Crisis of the Narrative Self 3 Petrarch’s Humanism and the Ethics of Care of the Self 4 Ovid, Augustine, and the Limits of the Ethics of Care of the Self Conclusion Bibliography

23 54 79 121 158 163 173

Index

vii

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is a long and solitary process, which would not be feasible without the support of continuous dialogues – both real and imaginary – with friends, colleagues, teachers, and family members. During my work on this book, I incurred debts to many such interlocutors, whom I am happy to have the opportunity to thank. My greatest gratitude goes to my PhD advisor, Brian Stock, whose brilliance, erudition, and gentleness of character have been a source of inspiration to me as both a scholar and a human being. His stimulating writings, friendly conversations, and legendary seminars at the Pontifical Institute Library at the University of Toronto have contributed to my work more than anything else, and I am grateful for having had the opportunity to work with him. Lawrin Armstrong, Kenneth R. Bartlett, William Robbins, and David Townsend closely followed this project from its inception and helped me greatly in its development, and I would like to express my gratitude to all of them. My sincere thanks also belong to Ronald G. Witt for his genuine support and insightful suggestions during my work on this project. Professor Witt’s scholarship has been a source of inspiration to me for a long time, and his interest in my work has given me much pride and encouragement. In addition, I wish to thank Timothy Kircher, an exemplary scholar and the best reader one can hope for. His honest and constructive criticism of parts of this book has contributed greatly to my thinking on Petrarch. During my years at the University of Toronto, I had the privilege of being part of the vibrant and stimulating academic community of the Centre for Medieval Studies, and I am especially grateful to Suzanne Akbari, Grace Desa, Wendy Greyling, Jennifer Harris, Amilcare Iannucci, Brad Inwood, John Magee, Mark Meyerson, Andy Orchard, Jill Ross, ix

x

Acknowledgments

and Nicholas Terpstra for making my time in Toronto so enriching and enjoyable. I also wish to thank Matthew Doyle, Ryan Greenwood, Jon Robinson, Jess Paelke, and Sarah Powrie for the many conversations, readings, and cappuccinos we have had together throughout these years. It was not a waste of time! The completion of the work on this book was made possible by the Bernard Lewis Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Faculty of the Humanities at Tel-Aviv University, and I am grateful to the Faculty and the Department of History for their support. I particularly wish to thank Aviad Kleinberg of Tel-Aviv University, who first converted me to the study of the Middle Ages while I was still an undergraduate student and has continued ever since to inspire my work and open my mind to exciting new ways of looking at the past. Gadi Algazi, Benjamin Arbel, Miri Eliav-Feldon, Rivka Feldhai, Igal Halfin, Tamar Herzig, David Katz, Josef Mali, Irad Malkin, Yoav Rinon, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Michael Zakim have also provided me with much appreciated guidance and support. I am also grateful to Hanan Yoran of Ben Gurion University for his insightful readings of parts of this book, as well as for his committed friendship. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Aya and Uzi Zak, who, even though a bit puzzled at first by the fact that their son did not go to law school, grew eventually to show sincere and appreciative interest in my pursuits. Special thanks is also due to precious little Daniel and Naomi who often show me (with inspiring assertiveness) that there are more important things in life than writing. And above all, my deepest and heartfelt thanks belong to my first reader, editor, and best friend, my wife Dina, who crossed an ocean with me twice, and truly made this book possible. A portion of Chapter 4 appeared in the article “A Humanist in Exile: Ovid’s Myth of Narcissus and the Experience of Self in Petrarch’s Secretum,” in the volume Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Press, 2007). It is reprinted here with permission.

Introduction

In a letter written to a friend, Giovanni Colonna of the Order of Preachers, Petrarch describes a tour the two had taken through the ruins of the ancient city of Rome.1 Fascinated by the surroundings of his beloved city, Petrarch nevertheless refrains from portraying the actual sites present to his eyes but rather flies on the wings of his imagination to the absent events and people to which the ruins allude2 : “here was the palace of Evander, there the shrine of Carmentis, here the cave of Cacus, there the nursing she-wolf and the fig tree of Rumina with the more apt surname of 1 Rerum

familiarium libri (Fam.) 6.2. Most scholars date the final revision of the letter to 1341. See Ernest H. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Correspondence (Padua: Antenore, 1960), 59. The Latin edition of the letters is from Petrarca, Le familiari, 4 vols., eds. Vittorio Rossi (vols. 1–3) and Umberto Bosco (vol. 4) (Florence: Sansoni, 1942). The translations are from Bernardo’s translation in Petrarca, Rerum familiarium libri (Letters on Familiar Matters), 3 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975–85), unless otherwise indicated. 2 This technique of connecting descriptions of memory and place, time and space, is borrowed from Virgil, for example, in Aeneid 2.29–30. See Jennifer Petrie, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the Canzoniere (Dublin: Published for the Foundation for Italian Studies, University College, Dublin, 1983), 45. See also the discussion in Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 88, who emphasizes the way that Petrarch’s readings allow him to impose order on the landscape of ruins. Kenneth Gouwens, in response to Greene, stresses the equally affective impact that the landscape had on Petrarch. See Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the ‘Cognitive Turn’,” AHR 103 (1998): 55–82, at 68. In his classic study, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Theodor Mommsen uses Petrarch’s division of the description of his tour into two distinct periods – pagan and Christian Rome – as an example of Petrarch’s formation of a new “concept of history” – “drawing a sharp boundary-line between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ history.” See Theodor M. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” in Mommsen, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 117.

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Romulus.”3 Starting thus with the description of the mythical origins of the city, Petrarch then continues his journey in space and time, advancing mostly linearly through the ages of Roman history, from these mythical origins through the glory of the Empire and early Christianity to the time of Constantine. He then concludes this short chronicle, lamenting not only that what is left from the glory of Rome is mere ruins but also that the significance of the ruins is mostly forgotten: “For today who are more ignorant about Roman affairs than the Roman citizens?”4 Ignorance, he adds, that is in turn complemented by the “flight and exile” ( fugam exiliumque) of the many virtues that flourished in bygone times. Promising to return to this complaint at another time, Petrarch then brings the discussion back to himself and invites Giovanni to recall how they used to stop at the baths of Diocletian, weary of the long excursion, and to enjoy there the “healthy air, the unimpeded view, silence and desired solitude.”5 Alone at the baths, the noises of the outside world ceased to bother them – “we did not discuss business at all, nor household problems nor public affairs”6 – and with the “fragments of the ruins” (ruinarum fragmenta) still in front of their eyes they turned their gaze to higher matters, discussing history and moral philosophy, the arts and their authors and principles. At a certain point, Petrarch recalls, Colonna asked him to explain the origins of the liberal and mechanical arts, and the poet, taking advantage of “the hour of day, the absence of trivial cares, the place itself,”7 and not least “the attentiveness” of his hearer, responded with ease – haud duriter. Now, Petrarch tells us, Colonna asked him to go back to that discussion and commit to writing what he had earlier spoken in his ears. His response is striking: I confess that I did say many things which I can only repeat with different words. Give me back that place, that idle mood, that day, that attention of yours, that particular vein of my talent and I could do what I did then. But all things are changed: the place is not present, the day has passed, the idle mood is gone, and instead of your face I look upon silent words, my spirit 3 “Hic

Evandri regia, hic Carmentis edes, hic Caci spelunca, hic lupa nutrix et ruminalis ficus, veriori cognomine romularis” (Fam.6.2.5; Familiar Letters, 1:291 [translation slightly modified]). 4 “Qui enim hodie magis ignari rerum romanarum sunt, quam romani cives?” (Fam.6.2.14; Familiar Letters, 1:293). 5 “Aer salutaris et prospectus liber et silentium ac votiva solitudo” (Fam.6.2.15; Familiar Letters, 1:294). 6 “Ibi de negotiis nichil omnino, nichil de re familiari nichilque de publica” (Fam.6.2.15; Familiar Letters, 1:294 [translation slightly modified]). 7 “Hora diei et vacuitas inutilium curarum et ipse locus” (Fam.6.2.17; Familiar Letters, 1:294 [translation slightly modified]).

Introduction

3

is impeded by the din of the business matters I have left behind, matters which until recently roared in my ears, although I fled as soon as I could in order to answer you more freely.8

Mutata sunt omnia – everything is changed – Petrarch declares, including his own talent, experience, and mood. The words he spoke at that perfect moment of solitude are therefore forever lost: time passed, leading him away from the moment of presence he enjoyed at the baths, and has taken with it also the words he used at that time. The description of the ruins of Rome thus becomes a metaphor of Petrarch’s own self: like the glorious city, he himself is subjected to the ravages of time, constantly changing, leaving behind only fragments – scattered memories and words retained in the minds of the two interlocutors that cannot, as he insists, invoke the past in full. The subjection to the passage of time, Petrarch therefore implies, is a subjection to a constant sense of absence and loss. But time is not the only cause of the poet’s sense of fragmentation and loss. Society has a part in this experience as well: it was the perfect solitude of the baths, detached from the cares of the world, that allowed him to step, as it were, out of time, and freely reflect on higher matters, and it is the “din of business matters” (rerum fragor) that is now impeding his spirit from retrieving the state of mind he then enjoyed. The diachronic fragmentation is thus accompanied in the letter by the synchronic dismemberment imposed by society. As Petrarch declares near the end of the letter, it is only in solitude that he “belongs to himself ” (Ibi enim, non alibi, meus sum). The reference to solitude as the one state in which Petrarch can feel that he fully belongs to himself suggests that the sense of fragmentation and flux in the letter is accompanied by a feeling of exile. Just as Rome is exiled from her own golden age – the time to which the ruins allude – and to which she might return if she would only begin to “know herself,” so Petrarch is exiled from the state of wholeness that he might regain by returning to solitude. The experiences of exile and fragmentation, as this letter exhibits, are intrinsically intertwined in Petrarch’s mind: it is 8 “Multa,

fateor, dixi, que si non mutatis verbis dicere cupiam, non possim. Redde michi illum locum, illud otium, illam diem, illam attentionem tuam, illam ingenii mei venam: potero quod unquam potui. Sed mutata sunt omnia; locus abest, dies abiit, otium periit, pro facie tua mutas literas aspicio, ingenio meo relictarum a tergo rerum fragor officit, qui adhuc in auribus meis tonat, quamvis ob hoc ipsum in primis inde diffugerim, ut tibi liberius responderem” (Fam.6.2.18; Familiar Letters, 1:294).

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the loss of a mythical state of presence and bliss, according to him, that is responsible for his current sense of disintegration and flux.9 Significantly, for Petrarch the return to the safe haven of solitude, to himself, is characterized above all by writing – his ability to write what he truly wishes: “only there and not elsewhere I belong to myself. There lies my pen which at present rebels everywhere I go and refuses my orders, because I am preoccupied with burdensome matters. Thus, while it is constantly busy when I have plenty of leisure, it prefers to have leisure when I have much to do, and almost like a wicked and insolent servant, it seems to convert the fervor of the master into its own desire for rest.”10 His return from exile to himself, Petrarch therefore implies here, is above all a return to his vocation as a writer. However, given that in returning to solitude he would be able to compose the book on the liberal arts he promised Colonna, his personal return from exile is also a significant step toward curing the malaise of his society – bringing Rome back to herself. Petrarch’s preoccupation in Fam.6.2 with the passage of time and the scattering impact of society reflects two of the major developments taking place in the society of the later Middle Ages. From the eleventh 9 The

use of the metaphor of exile to describe his spiritual and existential condition, as we shall see throughout this book, is central to Petrarch’s works. A. Bartlett Giamatti describes exile as the defining feature of Petrarch’s sense of self: “Petrarch’s whole existence, his sense of himself, would be determined by his obsession with origin and exile; by his conviction that he was displaced and marginal.” Giamatti, Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 13. Nonetheless, whereas Giamatti focuses mainly on Petrarch’s sense of exile from the ancient world, the following chapters attempt to show that the “port,” the homeland, from which Petrarch feels himself exiled and that he attempts to regain, constantly shifts – the golden age of his youth, the ancient world, the state of virtue – a fact that contributes to the overall sense of fragmentation and flux dominating his writings. On the theme of exile in Petrarch, see also Thomas M. Greene, “Petrarch’s Viator: The Displacements of Heroism,” Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982): 25–57, and, from a different perspective, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., “Introduction,” in Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land, ed. and trans. Theodore J. Cachey, Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 1–51. W. Scott Blanchard argues that the condition of exile also has positive aspects for Petrarch, because it allows him to practice dissent and commit himself to “world emancipation.” See Blanchard, “Petrarch and the Genealogy of Asceticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 401–23. For a general study of the theme of exile in medieval and Renaissance Italy, see Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 10 “Ibi enim, non alibi, meus sum; ibi meus est calamus, qui nunc passim rebellat et recusat imperium, molestissimis occupationibus meis fretus. Ita ille, qui ex otio meo iuge negotium habet, ex negotio sibi otium querit, et quasi impius servus ac contumax, domini laborem in requiem suam trahit” (Fam.6.2.21; Familiar Letters, 1:295 [translation slightly modified]).

Introduction

5

century onward, medieval society experienced a rapid process of urbanization, accompanied and facilitated by the emergence of money economy and mercantile culture.11 These new urban centers, particularly in northern Italy, became centers of innovation and change in all walks of life – the economy, politics, education, and so on – introducing a plethora of new professions and avenues for advancement.12 At the same time, the emergence of urban life transformed the way people of the period experienced time. As Jacques Le Goff has argued, changes in working patterns in the cities led to the replacement of the old circular and agricultural conceptions of time, alongside the traditional clerical hours of the Church, with a new perception of time as a linear continuum, a development enshrined by the placement of clocks in the city centers.13 The growth of urban life and the emergence of the linear conception of time in the period have traditionally been considered by historians as the motivating forces behind the rise of the “modern” individual and autonomous self in the period – a development for which Petrarch himself was often regarded as the ultimate embodiment.14 The new prospects 11 Jacques

Le Goff, The Birth of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 99–121. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 23–4. 13 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 48. See also Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 3–27, Gianfranco Folena, “L’orologio del Petrarca,” Libri e documenti 5.3 (1979): 1–12, and Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 14 Jacob Burckhardt was of course the first to popularize the notion of the discovery of the individual in the Renaissance in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) (originally published in 1860). On Petrarch as the “first modern man,” see Hans Baron, “Petrarch: His Inner Struggles and the Humanistic Discovery of Man’s Nature,” in Florilegium historiale; Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, eds. J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the University of Western Ontario, 1971), 18–51; Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarch and the Ancient World (Norwood: Norwood Editions, 1976), 3–40 (originally published in 1907); Ugo Dotti, Petrarca e la scoperta della coscienza moderna (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), 15–26; Arnaud Tripet, P´etrarque, ou la connaissance de soi (Geneva: Droz, 1967); and Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). The modernity of Petrarch was emphasized from a very different perspective by John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40, and Robert Durling, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory,” Italian Quarterly 18 (1974): 7–28. Freccero argues that Petrarch rejects in his poetry the Augustinian “Logos” and creates his own self-contained poetic universe to affrim his own subjectivity and individuality. For Durling, it is Petrarch’s historical awareness, preventing the possibility of allegory, that separates him from the Middle Ages. 12 Lester

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of advancement available in the city created, at least in theory, an “equality of opportunities” and a much greater emphasis on individual merit than in the preceding feudal order. Furthermore, the new awareness of the linearity of time made it possible for early humanists such as Mussato and Petrarch to assert that any individual achievement – including that of the great men of the past such as Cicero or Aristotle – is bound by a specific time and place and thus to validate the importance of their own first-person perspective and subjective experience. A new sense of individuality and human agency, accompanied by an intensified form of self-consciousness, thus emerged, according to these views, in the period.15 Yet at the same time, as Petrarch’s letter attests, these developments also proved to be a double-edged sword. Faced with the transformation of the traditional ways of life – and the inability of the established Church to address these changes – people of the period experienced an acute spiritual and existential crisis.16 The pressures of urbanization and the growing materialism of society are often cited as the causes of the spiritual reform movements of the period, from the Waldensians to the Franciscans to the Devotio Moderna.17 The growing awareness of the passing of time, in turn, also emerges in itself as a source of anxiety and concern. Le Goff portrays the new preoccupation in the 15 Historians

of humanism have often attributed the emergence of the new awareness of the passage of time, and with it of the new conception of subjectivity, to the humanists’ “discovery” of classical antiquity as a distinct historical period. In the famous words of Eugenio Garin, “For this reason one should never seek to distinguish between the humanistic discovery of antiquity and the humanistic discovery of man – for they amount to exactly the same thing. For the discovery of antiquity implied that one had learnt to make a comparison between antiquity and oneself, to take a detached view of antiquity and to determine one’s relation to it. And all this implied, further, the concept of time and memory and a sense of human creation, of human work in this world and of human responsibility.” Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 15. For the Italian, see Garin, L’umanesimo italiano: Filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1994), 22 (first Italian edition was published in 1952; the original edition appeared in German in 1947). Thomas M. Greene argues that Petrarch’s “intensified historical consciousness” is responsible for his “exacerbated self-consciousness.” See Greene, The Light in Troy, 101. See also the discussion in Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17–21. 16 See Little, Religious Poverty, 1–59. 17 Little, Religious Poverty, 97–218. See also Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 94–5, 98–9; Richard W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1970), 273–7; and Daniel R. Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence: The Social World of Franciscan and Dominican Spirituality (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 35–45.

Introduction

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period – particularly among Italian humanists born into merchant circles – with “wasting time,” the fear of not using it properly.18 The fourteenth-century Dominican preacher Domenico Cavalca of Pisa, as Le Goff shows, developed a whole spirituality based on the sinfulness inherent in wasting time.19 Timothy Kircher has also shown the preoccupation of Dominican preachers of the period, such as Jacopo Passavanti, with the flux of time, emphasizing the need to choose between the “sinful transience of the saeculum and the eternal permanence found in the Church.”20 Petrarch’s writings and personal history can thus be regarded also as a manifestation of this other, less bright, side of the developments taking place in the later Middle Ages. Growing up in the vibrant city of Avignon as the son of an exiled Florentine notary, Petrarch used well the opportunities the city had to offer to advance his ambitions – establishing connections from an early age with powerful people such as the members of the Colonna family – but these commitments, as he declares, came at the price of endless obligations and anxiety.21 In the introductory letter to his Familiares, Petrarch dramatizes the fragmentation imposed on him by the intricate web of connections in which he is engaged by describing the contradictions inherent in his letters: “Therefore in these 18 In

a letter Petrarch wrote to his brother, the Carthusian monk Gherardo, in which he describes the composition of his Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch provides a revealing statement on the ways these new norms affected his upbringing: “Thus I found myself there in this state of mind: while not daring to undertake anything major because of my countless pressing matters, I nevertheless was incapable of doing absolutely nothing, since from childhood I was constantly taught to do something, if not always something good. Thus I chose a middle course; though delaying greater projects, I got involved in something to while away the time” (“Illic ergo tunc eram eo animo qui, sicut sub tanta rerum mole magnum aliquid aggredi non auderet, sic omnino nichil agere nesciret, ab infantia mea bono utinam, sed certe in actu perpetuo enutritus. Media via igitur electa est, ut maioribus dilatis, aliquid pro solatio illius temporis meditarer” [Fam.10.4.10–11; Familiar Letters, 2:71]). 19 Le Goff, Time, 50–1. 20 Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 194. In a striking passage from his Sermones de tempore, quoted by Kircher, Passavanti declares, “The world is in motion and also its desire. For you will either love temporal things and move in a temporal fashion. Or love Christ and we shall live in eternity. But it is better to choose that we live with the Lord in eternity and let go of this temporal world” (“Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius. Quod vis utrum amare temporalia et transire cum tempore. Aut christum amare et in eternum vivemus. Sed melius est eligere ut cum domino in eternum vivemus et transeuntem mundum relinquemus”). Quotation and translation are from Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom, 194. 21 For Petrarch’s biography, see Ugo Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Rome: Laterza, 1987), and Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self

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storms of life, to return to the point, not throwing my anchor for any length of time in any port, and making a number of ordinary friends but unsure of how many true ones (being uncertain of their status and not really having very many), I struck an acquaintance with countless famous ones. I thus had to correspond a great deal with many of them who differed considerably in character and station. As a result, the letters were so different that in rereading them I seemed to be in constant contradiction.”22 Moreover, his acute awareness of the passage of time and historical context – unparalleled by any of his predecessors – also led to his sense of fragmentation and loss. In yet another of his many letters on the theme of fuga temporis – his introduction to the book of letters to ancient authors – Petrarch discusses his sense of the threat this constant passage poses to the very “ontology” of the self 23 : I too shall be dying while you read this, you are dying while I write this, we both are dying, we all are dying, we are always dying; we never live here except when doing something virtuous to pave our path to the true life, where in contrast no one dies . . . where there are no change and no reason to fear its ending.24

This Heraclitian assertion, based in a large part on Letter 58 of Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, thus suggests that in Petrarch’s view, one truly exists, truly has being, only when committed to virtue.25 When diverting our attention from virtue, he implies, we become part of the great stream of nonbeing, swept away into the exile and oblivion of history and change. 22 “In

his ergo vite tempestatibus, ut ad rem redeam, nullo portu anchoram longum in tempus iaciens, quot veros amicos nescio, quorum et iudicium anceps et penuria ingens est, notos autem innumerabiles quesivi. Multis itaque multumque animo et conditione distantibus scribere contigit; tam varie ut ea nunc relegens, interdum pugnantia locutus ipse michi videar” (Fam.1.1.27; Familiar Letters, 1:9). 23 Wilkins dates the letter to 1360–1. See Petrarch’s Correspondence, 88. The term “ontology of the self ” is taken from Greene, The Light in Troy, chap. 6. 24 “Ego quoque dum hec leges moriar, tu moreris dum hec scribo, ambo morimur, omnes morimur, semper morimur, nunquam vivimus dum hic sumus, nisi quandiu virtuosum aliquid agentes sternimus iter nobis ad veram vitam, ubi contra nemo moritur . . . nec mutatio sentitur, nec timetur finis” (Fam.24.1.27; Familiar Letters, 3:312). 25 Petrarch quoted Seneca’s Letter 58 earlier on in this letter: “Every visible object accompanies time in its flight; of the things which we see, nothing is fixed. Even I myself, as I comment on this change, am changed myself ” (“Quicquid vides, currit cum tempore. Nihil ex iis, quae videmus, manet. Ego ipse, dum loquor mutari ista, mutatus sum” [Ad Lucilium 58.22]). The text and translation are from Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, 3 vols., trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934). Petrarch’s quotation is at Fam.24.1.8 (Familiar Letters, 3:309).

Introduction

9

This focus on fragmentation and exile in Petrarch’s representation of the self in his writings has led historians and literary critics in recent years to replace the previous notion that Petrarch was “the first modern man” with the new assertion that he is in fact the embodiment of the postmodern self – “fragmented, divided, even fictitious.”26 As one literary historian remarked recently, the Renaissance in general is no longer considered as “the bright moment when . . . individualism found widespread nascent expression but as the far darker moment when the modern fragmented self . . . [was] painstakingly born.”27 This notion was discussed in relation to Petrarch particularly by Giuseppe Mazzotta in his influential The Worlds of Petrarch, arguing that Petrarch’s works call into question “precisely the myth of the center and of the centrality of the self ”28 : “In Petrarch’s poetry, time’s ruptured dimensions (past, fleeting present, and expectation of the future) are internalized within the self, and they are even identified as the constitutive, broken pieces of oneself.”29 26 See

John Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 5. 27 Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), x. Quoted by Martin, Myths, 5. The most influential critique of the Burckhardtian thesis of the discovery of the individual is that of Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, claiming that the Renaissance self is not a unique and authoritative individual that can freely fashion itself as Burckhardt envisioned but rather “the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.” See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 256–7. Another influential critique of Burckhardt’s notion of Renaissance individualism is provided by Peter Burke, who demonstrates that Renaissance selves were strongly dependent on social ties. See Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 17–28, and Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also William J. Connell, “Introduction,” in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Burckhardt’s thesis was also attacked by medievalists such as Colin Morris, arguing that most of the traits he found in the Renaissance could already be detected in the twelfth century. See Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1987) (originally published in 1972). Morris’s own thesis was evaluated and delineated by Caroline Walker Bynum, who argued that what was new in the twelfth century was not so much the focus on the individual as “a quite self-conscious interest in the process of belonging to groups and filling roles.” Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 85. 28 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 59–60. 29 Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 4. For other recent works that focus on the fragmentary nature of Petrarch’s representation of the self see, Paul Colilli, Petrarch’s Allegories of Writing

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Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self

The present study, although granting that the notion of fragmentation dominated Petrarch’s representation and experience of self, will nevertheless strive to show that Petrarch’s writings – both in Latin and the vernacular – represent an ongoing attempt to overcome his sense of diachronic and synchronic dismemberment, to find – just like members of the reform movements of the later Middle Ages – a solution to his “modern” experience of self-in-time. In Petrarch’s attempt to cope with his experience of fragmentation, this book argues, he developed a new ethical program, a new philosophy of self – based primarily on a return to the ancient spiritual tradition – at the center of which is the assertion that “self ” is not a given presence but a state of mind from which we are exiled, or absent, and which we need to attain through constant cultivation and care, and particularly through the use of writing as a spiritual technique (which for him is always intertwined with that of reading).30 Petrarch’s awareness of the flux of time had a crucial impact on his conception of philosophy. Emphasizing that all things – including his own self – are subject to change, Petrarch rejects the possibility of acquiring certain knowledge: for him, the fact that both the perceiving subject and the perceived object are changing renders any such attempt both

(Naples: De Dominicis, 1988); Adelia Noferi, Frammenti per i fragmenta di Petrarca (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001); Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhymes,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–79; Marguerite Waller, Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). Albert R. Ascoli, in turn, has criticized the general historiographical tendency to represent Petrarch as the first modern man, arguing that Petrarch’s Ascent of Mount Ventoux in itself demonstrates the illusion behind any attempt to organize history according to distinct periods. See Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” Stanford Italian Review 10 (1991): 5–43. For another recent critique of the notion of Petrarch as “the first modern man,” see Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 303–30. 30 Petrarch refers most explicitly to his sense of exile from his own self (se ipso) and the need to overcome it in Book 3 of the Secretum, when the figure of Augustinus tells Franciscus: “For far too long, you have been in exile, both from your country and from yourself. It’s time to go back” (“Nimis diu iam et a patria et a te ipso exulasti. Tempus est revertendi” [Secretum 3.51; The Secret, 125]; Latin edition: Francesco Petrarca, Il mio segreto, ed. Ugo Dotti [Milan: Rizzoli, 2000]). The English translation is from Petrarch, The Secret, ed. with an introduction by Carol E. Quillen [Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003]). In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault argues that the notion of self as “the objective to be attained” was especially dominant in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. See Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 257.

Introduction

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impossible and futile.31 The true goal of philosophy, he therefore argues, is not to provide one with knowledge but to affect and transform the self, to take care of it: animi cura – the care of the soul – as he states in the opening of Fam.1.9, is the true goal of the philosopher.32 Petrarch’s concept of philosophy thus closely echoes Pierre Hadot’s definition of ancient philosophy as “spiritual exercises” – “an art of living . . . which engages the whole of existence . . . a progress which causes us to be more fully, and makes us better.”33 To fulfill the task of philosophy, to truly philosophize, therefore, we need to perform certain actions upon the self – “spiritual exercises” in Hadot’s terms – and for Petrarch it is achieved mainly by writing.34 Petrarch’s ethics of care of the self, as a result, are in a fundamental way an ethics of writing.35 A brief look at the two letters following Fam.6.2 with which I have started this introduction – written to the same correspondent and no doubt forming a thematic group together with it – provides us with an ample demonstration of the centrality of writing to Petrarch’s moral program. In letter 6.3, Petrarch attempts to alleviate his addressee’s anxieties and concerns over old age, poverty, and the gout, by documenting in writing a long list of examples taken from both ancient history and his own experience, examples that are to lead his addressee to the stronghold of 31 Timothy

Kircher has recently summed up the difference between Petrarchian and Aristotelian notions of knowledge in this regard particularly well: “The Dominicans typically base their conception of ontology and moral thought upon Aristotelian metaphysics. The security of their moral system is predicated upon attributes of Being as timeless, unchangeable, eternal, rational, and good. . . . To Petrarch and Boccaccio any ontology is conditioned by time. What is claimed as metaphysical truth – not truth itself – is reduced to the realm of ephemera, as a temporal phenomenon, since the reality of time’s flow conditions all human knowledge.” Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom, 30. 32 “The care of the soul calls for a philosopher, while the proper use of language requires an orator” (“Animi cura philosophum querit, eruditio lingue oratoris est propria” [Fam.1.9.1; Familiar Letters, 1:47]). 33 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 83. 34 It is in his emphasis on the need to care for the self that we can also say that Petrarch’s approach to the self is “individualistic,” given that it places the self at the center of attention. At the same time, as I show in Chapter 3, Petrarch’s notion is still far from Romantic notions of individualism, given that the aim of the cultivation of the self is not to discover and perfect one’s own unique and distinct nature but to fashion the self along the lines of ideal examples and models. 35 The term “ethics of writing” is taken from Mazzotta’s chapter “Ethics of Self ” in The Worlds of Petrarch, to which I am obviously indebted. However, whereas Mazzotta focuses in his discussion of Petrarch’s “ethics of writing” mostly on his practice of imitation, I will address Petrarch’s different uses of writing as a spiritual exercise. See Worlds of Petrarch, 92–101.

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Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self

virtue, to stop “excusing himself and accusing fortune” (excusare te ipsum, accusare fortunam). In the following letter, Fam.6.4, Petrarch provides a theoretical justification to his practice in the previous letter, defending his use of an abundance of ancient exempla in his writings. He declares, “besides experience itself which is the best teacher of things, I would wager there is no better way for the reader to learn than by being moved by my admonition to emulate these greats as closely as possible.”36 The recording of exempla in writing, he goes on to state a little later, is not only aimed at others but also at himself: “I hope that it will profit others as I know for certain it has profited me as a reader and writer.”37 Writing about the great men of the past therefore fills Petrarch with the desire to imitate “these greats” and shape himself in their image. At the same time, this act of writing, as Petrarch further declares, is useful not only for leading him to virtue but also as a meditative exercise that allows him to forget his present circumstances and go back in his mind to the Rome he admires: “while I write I become eagerly engaged with our greatest writers in whatever way I can and willingly forget those among whom my unlucky star destined me to live; and to flee from these I concentrate all my strength following the ancients instead.”38 The attempt to overcome his own – and his readers’ – experience of exile and flux in these letters is thus dominated by the practice of writing. Through writing, Petrarch leads himself and his addressee to the pursuit of virtue – the only state, as we have seen in Fam.24.1, in which the incessant passage of time is checked, and in which, as we shall see, every other form of fragmentation is overcome. In addition, it is through this practice that he can overcome his sense of exile and return in his mind to his beloved Rome. Both uses, in turn, complement the assertion we encountered in Fam.6.2 that the ability to write what he wishes serves for Petrarch as a source of presence, makes him feel that he “belongs to himself ” (meus sum [Fam.6.2.21]). Writing therefore emerges in this group of letters as a spiritual exercise or, in the words of Michel Foucault, a technology of the self, that allows him to take care of and cultivate the 36 “Id

sane, preter experientiam que certissima magistra rerum est, nullo melius modo fit, quam si eum his quibus simillimus esse cupit, admoveam” (Fam.6.4.4; Familiar Letters, 1:314 [translation modified]). 37 “Quod et aliis profutura spero, et michi scribenti ac legenti profuisse admodum certe scio” (Fam.6.4.7; Familiar Letters, 1:315). 38 “Inter scribendum cupide cum maioribus nostris versor uno quo possum modo; atque hos, cum quibus iniquo sidere datum erat ut viverem, libentissime obliviscor; inque hoc animi vires cuntas exerceo, ut hos fugiam, illos sequar” (Fam.6.4.5; Familiar Letters, 1:314–15).

Introduction

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self, to shape and transform it so as to overcome the experience of exile and fragmentation.39 Yet although asserting the crucial role of writing in caring for the self, Petrarch’s uses of writing as a spiritual exercise, as Fam.6.4 demonstrates, are far from one-dimensional. In seeking to make the writer virtuous, his use of writing emulates Roman Stoicism and particularly Seneca.40 In seeking to bring back memories of Rome and flee from his present condition, it corresponds with Ovid’s uses of writing in his Poems of Exile and largely contradicts the pursuit of virtue – which is above all the attempt to become indifferent to outer circumstances.41 This flexibility in his use of writing in this letter is in turn reflected in Petrarch’s entire corpus: throughout his works Petrarch uses writing in a variety of ways – aimed at attaining different types of “ports” – that are often at odds with each other. These uses, in turn, are dominated by different assertions regarding the relation between writing and self – assertions that are based on both Petrarch’s meticulous examination of his own experiences as a writer and the different traditions of writing that he follows. These different uses and assertions regarding the impact of writing on the self in his works, I argue, can be divided into three main categories, or types – “Stoic,” “Ovidian,” and “Augustinian” (with Dante’s uses also playing a significant role, particularly in the vernacular poems).42

39 Foucault

defines his notion of “technologies of the self ”: “[technologies] which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997), 225. 40 For the role of writing in Seneca’s moral program, see Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 207–22, and the discussion in Chapter 3. 41 For Ovid’s similar use of writing in his Poems of Exile, see, for example, his description of his aim in writing in Tristia 4.1.37–40: “Perhaps this obsession may be seen as madness; but the madness has some utility, it forbids / the mind to be always brooding over its troubles, / makes it oblivious of present ills” (“Forsitan hoc studium possit furor esse videri, / sed quiddam furor hic utilitatis habet: / semper in obtutu mentem vetat esse malorum, / praesentis casus immemoremque facit”). Latin quotations are taken from the Loeb edition: Ovid, Tristia and Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). English verse translation is from Ovid, The Poems of Exile, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 42 By using these categories, I do not mean to suggest that there is a definite and immutable set of views that define “Stoicism,” “Ovidianism,” or “Augustinianism.” Rather, these terms refer to the ways I think Petrarch understands and uses these sources.

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Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self

Thus, the Stoic stream in Petrarch’s works consists mainly of following Seneca’s model, using writing as a tool to ignite the writer’s desire to imitate exempla of virtue and as a vehicle for an examination of conscience (among other uses), asserting that these practices can lead to the overcoming of flux and fragmentation by leading us back to our “true self ” – reason and virtue – the state in which we have established full control over our passions.43 The Ovidian stream, in contrast, is dominated by the attempt to use writing as a means for the revival and intensification of the passions, allowing the poet to overcome the passage of time and attain self by bringing him back over and over again to a mythical state of wholeness and presence – the birth of his desire – and by keeping his hope for eternal and changeless poetic glory alive. This link between writing and desire, however, leads Petrarch to follow Ovid in asserting that the impact of writing on the self is inevitably ambiguous – making the poet both beyond time and subjected to it. The emphasis on this ambiguity, in turn, serves to reject in the vernacular poems the Dantesque and Augustinian attempt to overcome fragmentation by the reconstruction of the narrative – of the meaning underlying the poet’s experiences in time. Finally, the Augustinian stream in Petrarch’s works advances the notion that only writing that is based on sacred – rather than classical – texts and models can lead one to virtue and to the overcoming of the experience of fragmentation. These different uses of writing and assertions regarding the relation between writing and self thus come to define Petrarch’s ethical program and emerge in themselves as a crucial source of his experience of inner division. An examination of Petrarch’s humanist philosophy – his ethics of writing – will therefore require that we look at his different uses of writing as a practice of care of the self, the ways these uses affect him, and the ongoing tensions between these uses – themes with which Petrarch’s texts – not coincidentally – are particularly rich. Throughout his works, Petrarch is constantly analyzing his purpose in writing and the ways writing influences him, a form of self-reflection that cannot be dismissed as simply self-indulgent acts of an overtly self-conscious author. For given his awareness that this practice actively shapes and transforms 43 The identification of Stoic “reason” or “virtue” – the state of full control over the passions –

with our “true self ” is a prevalent theme throughout Petrarch’s works. See, for example, his statement in Fam.12.14.1 (Familiar Letters, 2:162): “I . . . request . . . O illustrious sir, that you subject your mind to your reason, or, to express it differently, you to yourself ” (“peto autem, vir insignis, ut animum rationi sive, ut aliter idem dicam, te tibi subicias”). For other examples, see Chapter 1, n. 27.

Introduction

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who he is, Petrarch’s persistent reflection on the effects of writing should rather be regarded as an attempt to gain insight into the only form of self-knowledge that is for him both morally edifying and feasible. The assumption that the early Italian humanists offered a new type of ethical program, a new philosophy of life, has been prevalent in the scholarship on humanism since the work of Eugenio Garin. In contrast to Paul Oskar Kristeller, who did not see in the humanists’ innovations in the field of rhetoric a contribution to the history of philosophy,44 Garin detected in the humanist practices of philology and rhetoric, rooted in an acute awareness of time and historical context, the kernel of a new approach to both philosophy and man: “This is in fact the very ‘philology’ which, as a historiography which is today only too easily despised had well understood, was of the essence of the ‘new’ philosophy. This philology is an altogether new method of looking at problems, and is therefore not, as some have believed, to be considered side by side with traditional philosophy, as a secondary aspect of the civilization of the Renaissance. It was essentially an effective philosophical method.”45 In the wake of Garin, several other prominent historians attempted to define the particular contribution of the humanists to a new vision of philosophy that is primarily poetic and rhetorical. Charles Trinkaus, for example, argued that Petrarch created in his writings a form of theologia rhetorica, establishing himself “as a moral counselor, as a poetic and rhetorical theologian, as a guide to the perplexed,”46 by combining the Stoic earthly ideal of moral autonomy (attained through the transformation 44 Kristeller

considered humanists as mainly teachers of rhetoric and grammar, or notaries and lawyers, who focused on the studia humanitatis – grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy – in their teachings and writings. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. M. Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 85–105 (originally published as “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” Byzantion 17 [1944–5]: 346–74). See also the discussion in Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–5, and Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 40–57. For a concise and useful review of the various interpretations of Renaissance humanism since the works of Voigt and Burckhardt in the nineteenth century, see Angelo Mazzocco, “Introduction,” in Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, ed. Angelo Mazzocco (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–18. 45 Garin, Italian Humanism, 4. For the Italian, see Garin, L’umanesimo italiano, 11. For an illuminating analysis of the debate between Garin and Kristeller, see Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, 16–58. 46 Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher, 112. See also his “In Our Image and Likness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 3–50.

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Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self

of the will) with Christian belief in salvation through grace.47 Through this new theological conception of poetry and rhetoric, according to Trinkaus, Petrarch was also able to overcome his own inner conflict between the alienating effect of human society and the peace promised by the pursuit of moral autonomy and holiness. William Bouwsma, in a similar fashion, attempted to elucidate the broad implications of the humanists’ emphasis on rhetoric. According to him, the writings of the humanists since Petrarch are divided between two polarities – “Stoicism” and “Augustinianism” – each representing a different “rhetorical” approach to philosophy and life.48 While the “Stoic” strand emphasizes the order governing the cosmos and the need to organize both self and society in accordance with this order, the Augustinian stream, in his view, focuses on humans’ ultimate inability to grasp this order and thus places the emphasis on ethics of faith. This division within the humanists’ appropriation of the ancient rhetorical tradition, according to Bouwsma, forms the very heart of European culture and intellectual life in the early modern period.49 These studies focus, however, on mapping the different influences on the humanists’ writings and the synthesis of ideas they ultimately attempted to attain, ignoring the ways in which the humanists implemented the ideas on which their rhetorical ideal depended – mostly through reading and writing. In recent years, scholars have turned more and more to the examination of the humanists’ uses of these practices. Anthony Grafton, for example, examined in numerous books and articles the humanists’ practices of reading ancient texts,50 arguing that 47 “Petrarch . . . [sees]

a link between the attainment of moral autonomy in this life and the desire, faith in, and hope for the grace that can lift the Christian out of his condition of despair and grant him the necessary justification for salvation. It is the role of the writer, the poet, the philosopher, the moral counselor, the rhetor to assist the ordinary man by exposition and exhortation to detach himself from his alienating and self destructive involvement in the affairs of the world.” Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher, 24–5. 48 William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19–73 (originally published in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, eds. Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brady, Jr. [Leiden: Brill, 1975], 3–60). 49 Bouwsma, The Two Faces, 19: “rhetoric, for reasons closely connected with the circumstances under which the rhetorical tradition was appropriated in the age of the Renaissance, was also the vehicle of a set of basic intellectual conflicts crucial to the development of European culture in the early modern period.” 50 See, in particular, “On the Scholarship of Politian and Its Context,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 150–88; Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); From Humanism to the Humanities:

Introduction

17

humanists’ readings are marked by an “interpretive schizophrenia” – divided between the purely scholarly attempt to put the ancient world back into its own historical context and the pedagogical and moral effort to make it relevant to the humanists’ own time.51 James Hankins, in his Plato in the Italian Renaissance, examined the ways the humanists read and interpreted Plato, arguing that to understand their translations and interpretations, we need to focus on the “hermeneutical context” of the time – “the history of teaching traditions, the development of interpretive principles and techniques, and the structure of interpretive communities such as schools and universities.”52 To facilitate his discussion, Hankins provides an elaborate “typology of reading in the fifteenth century” in the introduction, mapping the various ways Renaissance readers used texts. Among these he mentions “Meditative reading,” going back to the lectio divina of the monasteries; “Imitative” and “Critical” (philological) modes described also by Grafton; pleasure-oriented “Aesthetic reading”; and so forth.53 Yet both Grafton and Hankins refrain to a large extent from examining the moral and psychological effects the humanists’ readings had on them, and, as Kenneth Gouwens argued recently, often downplayed the overall cultural and philosophical significance of the humanists’ encounter with ancient texts.54 Alluding to some of the insights of recent research in cognitive psychology on the dialogical and intersubjective way in which the self is formed,55 Gouwens points to the need to complement Grafton’s and Hankins’s contributions by looking not only at “how humanists transformed texts” but also “the impact of texts on them.”56 A recent study that mostly fulfills this goal of looking at the ways the humanists’ encounter with antiquity transformed them and thus led them to develop a new approach to philosophy and life is Ronald G. Witt’s magisterial analysis of the origins of humanism. Defining humanism as a “stylistic ideal,” Witt attempts to show how “the humanists’ tireless study Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986) (with Lisa Jardine); “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 615–49. 51 Grafton, “Renaissance Readers,” 637. 52 James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 17. 53 Ibid., 18–26. 54 Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past,” 61. 55 Ibid., 55–7. 56 Ibid., 62. To fulfill this objective, Gouwens goes on to highlight some of the ways in which the encounter with antiquity through reading has affected the humanists, addressing particularly the construction of a new sense of historical perspective and the revival of ancient recreational activities.

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of ancient vocabulary and syntax and their struggle to capture the diction of the classical authors . . . nourished new linguistic patterns conditioning the humanists’ ways of feeling and thinking.”57 Arguing that the first humanists – Lovato and Mussato – turned to the literature of Classical Rome to find models appropriate to their own civic experience in northern Italy of the thirteenth century, Witt contends that their attempt to imitate the Latin style of Roman historians – with its elaborate attention to clausal constructions capturing complex temporal relationships – transformed their awareness of history and time. Not only did the humanists’ “consciousness of the historical process” deepen, Witt argues, but they also began to envisage their own lives as the “sum of a temporal series of memories of internal and external events.”58 Discussing the contribution of Petrarch, as a member of the third generation of humanists, Witt claims that Petrarch above all defined the ethical dimension of the movement. At the center of this new moral program, Witt argues, lay the notion of literary imitation – Petrarch’s belief that through capturing the Latin style of the ancients in his writings, he might lead both himself and his readers to virtue.59 The crucial role played by the practices of reading and writing in Petrarch’s formation of a new moral program was emphasized further in recent works by Christopher Celenza, Carol Quillen, and Timothy Kircher. Arguing that Petrarch’s concept of philosophy returned to what Pierre Hadot identified as the central traits of ancient philosophy – a philosophy for which the aim is not “the teaching of abstract principles to bodyless minds” but the development of a system of living based on “spiritual exercises”60 – Celenza claims that Petrarch’s revival of ancient Latin, with its elaborate structures requiring intense mental concentration, served in itself as a “spiritual exercise,” the aim of which was a reform 57 Witt,

In the Footsteps, 23. Witt acknowledges his debt to Michael Baxandall’s thesis in Giotto and the Orators: Humanists Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) that ancient Latin style effected a “reorganization of consciousness” in the humanists, but distances himself from what he perceives as Baxandall’s bent toward linguistic determinism. See Witt, In the Footsteps, 23, n. 49. 58 Ibid., 172. This transformation of the humanists’ historical conscience, Witt goes on to argue, contributed in turn to the emergence of spatial perspective in the fifteenth century (see 415–19). 59 Ibid., 260–75. 60 Christopher S. Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 509–36, at 512.

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of both self and society.61 Quillen, examining Petrarch’s humanism through an analysis of his “textual practices,” shows how Petrarch’s readings – or rather misreadings – of Augustine allowed him to advocate and authorize humanist ways of reading ancient sources, readings for which the aim was ultimately “self-transformation.”62 Timothy Kircher, focusing on the ways that Petrarch and Boccaccio’s awareness of the flux of time shaped their poetic conception of philosophy, argues that this awareness led them to transform the relation between reader and authority, shifting to the reader the weight of discerning the ethical message of the text and thus shaping his or her own life.63 Finally, Brian Stock, in his study of the tradition of meditative reading in medieval and early modern Europe, has emphasized as well the crucial part that the practices of reading and writing played in Petrarch’s conception of the self and his moral program. According to Stock, it is the impact of a literary tradition going back to Seneca, Augustine, and medieval monasticism that forms Petrarch’s emphasis on the value of reading and writing as tools for spiritual edification and transformation.64 At the same time, Stock also shows the tension dominating Petrarch’s uses of these 61 Ibid.,

513.

62 Carol E. Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Human-

ism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 7. Focusing on Petrarch’s textual practices in light of the “intellectual field” to which they entered, Quillen, however, largely refrains from examining Petrarch’s account of the ways these practices affected him and the tensions dominating these uses. 63 Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom, esp. 145–84. Another important interpretation of humanist moral philosophy that focuses on the humanists’ approach to authority and the textual practices emanating from it is Ricardo Fubini’s Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990) (translated as Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla, trans. Martha King [Durham: Duke University Press, 2003]). Nancy S. Struever, in addition, argues in her Theory as Practice that Petrarch’s practice of letter writing fashioned a new mode of ethical inquiry in the Renaissance, an alternative to the philosophical investigation common in the schools. According to her, it is the lived experience as revealed in letters to friends that serves for Petrarch as the basis of ethical inquiry and insight: “if the only serious enterprise is living, the necessary extension of the vivere program for Petrarch is the reconstitution of inquiry as life, as ethical practice” (29). However, given her focus on the way in which letter writing constituted a new form of inquiry, Struever is less interested in exploring Petrarch’s actual uses of letter writing as an ethical technique, a necessary component of his “art of living.” See Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3– 56. One further study that examines humanist moral practices – particularly the practice of consolation – and should be mentioned in this context is George W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 64 Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 71–85.

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practices – serving, according to him, as a form of both interior reflection and “aesthetic” outer expression, thus becoming “a primordial symbol of the conflict within himself.”65 Despite this recent scholarly attention to the role of the practices of reading and writing in Petrarch’s humanism and his overall moral program, we do not yet have a close examination of Petrarch’s uses of the practice of writing in his voluminous works as a part of his overall philosophical project of taking care of the self, a project that forms the very heart of his humanism. These studies, moreover, do not provide an account of the ways in which Petrarch’s uses of writing as a spiritual exercise both draw on and transform previous traditions and authors – from the ancient writings of Seneca, Ovid, and Augustine, to the more recent influences and challenges of Dante and the monastic reform movements of the later Middle Ages. Such an examination is therefore the goal of the following chapters. As mentioned, Petrarch’s uses of writing as a spiritual exercise dominate both his vernacular and Latin texts, and a comprehensive investigation of his ethics of writing will therefore require us to bridge the disciplinary gap that all too often divides Petrarchan scholarship between historians who concentrate on his “humanistic,” or Latin, texts and literary critics who are engaged mostly with the vernacular poetry and to look at his uses of writing in both languages. One of the main contentions of this book is that the two bodies of work represent two largely contradictory efforts to 65 Brian Stock, “Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners,” New Literary

History 26 (1995): 717–30, at 725. Victoria Kahn examines as well Petrarch’s practice of reading, showing through her analysis of the Secretum that the notion of an “active reader,” which according to scholars such as Cave and Bauschatz emerged only in the sixteenth century, can already be detected in Petrarch. What is mainly at stake in the Secretum, according to her, is the very Augustinian ideology of the possibility of a “passive reader” – one that is informed by grace and thus able to unveil the ultimate meaning inherent within the text. For Petrarch, she claims, the reader never “simply abdicates all responsibility for judgment.” See Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100 (1985): 154–66. Moreover, literary critics, engaged mostly with the vernacular poetry, have also emphasized recently the role of writing in Petrarch’s moral program, particularly through discussions of Petrarch’s notion of imitation and literary history. At the heart of Petrarch’s notion of imitation, according to these views, lay his acute awareness of the fact that his own identity and moral character, as revealed in his writings, is constituted by the echoes of the texts he meticulously read – a polyphony of ancient (and modern) voices that is at the same time unmistakably his own. See particularly Greene, The Light in Troy, chaps. 5–7; Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, 92–101; and Waller, Petrarch’s Poetics. For the place of modern works, especially of Dante, in his poetry, see Marco Santagata, Per moderne carte: la biblioteca volgare di Petrarca (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990).

Introduction

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overcome fragmentation through writing and that Petrarch established his use of writing in the Latin works to a large extent in direct opposition to the vernacular ones. However, as we shall see, even though Petrarch laboriously strived to keep the uses of writing in both corpora distinctly apart, unsettling overlaps proved both unavoidable and revealing. In the first chapter of the book, then, I focus on Petrarch’s uses of writing in his collection of vernacular poetry, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. In the poems, writing emerges as the steadfast and unchanging aspect of the poet’s existence, as well as a personal ritual and a meditative exercise that allow him to return over and over again to the beginning, to his golden age, the time “before time,” thus abolishing time’s constant passage. At the same time, Petrarch also introduces in the poems the notion – advanced as well by the figure of Franciscus in the Secretum – that by writing about his object of desire – both Laura and the laurel – he is transformed into it, becoming virtuous and steadfast just like it. The transcendence of time, and of his sense of exile in time, is therefore dependent from this perspective on a desire for (and writing about) an outside object functioning like an ideal mirror reflection of the self. And yet, this attempt in the poems to transcend the poet’s sense of fragmentation and exile in time through writing is undermined by the realization that writing – because of its intricate association with desire – is in fact also the source of the poet’s fall into the exile of fluctuation and change, leading him away from the citadel of reason and virtue. The impact of writing on the self thus emerges in the poems as essentially ambiguous, fashioning a self that is both within and beyond time, both in exile and at home. In emphasizing this ambiguity, Petrarch was rejecting both Dante’s claim that desire and writing can lead to the full transcendence of the self over time’s flow and the Augustinian assertion that their impact is essentially negative and hence that the two must be renounced. The second chapter examines, mainly through an analysis of canzone 23, Petrarch’s rejection of the solution of both Dante in the Vita nuova and Augustine to the problem of temporality and the experience of exile in time – the reconstruction in writing of the narrative underlying the flux and constant change. It is particularly through his use of Ovidian mythology, the chapter shows, that Petrarch emphasizes his inability to reach the authorial point from which he might fashion such a healing narrative, demonstrating that the attempt to reconstruct his past in writing can only reveal the ambiguity dominating his experience because of the impact of writing and desire.

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In the third chapter, I turn to discuss Petrarch’s return in his Latin writings to the Stoic notion of “care of the self,” focusing on the Stoic nature of his hermeneutics of self and uses of writing in these texts – particularly the collections of letters and the Secretum. This chapter, in addition, also shows the medieval – Augustinian and monastic – roots of Petrarch’s focus on the “care of the soul” through the practices of reading and writing, highlighting at the same time the ways in which Petrarch’s uses of writing, as well as of reading, depart from the medieval tradition. By drawing on Augustinian and monastic spiritual techniques, and yet transforming them in accordance with his Stoic understanding of the self, this chapter argues, Petrarch established humanism as a spiritual alternative to the monastic traditions of care of the soul of the later Middle Ages. The fourth and final chapter discusses the inherent tensions that undermine Petrarch’s use of writing as a spiritual exercise in the collections of letters and the Secretum. Although Petrarch attempts to establish his use of writing in these works in direct opposition to the “feminine,” “weak,” “Ovidian” uses in the vernacular poetry, the Latin texts themselves are plagued by the tension between “Stoic” and “Ovidian” uses of writing, particularly because writing, as the letters show, is always dominated for Petrarch by desire and emotions. The impact of writing on the self thus emerges in the Latin works – just as in the vernacular ones – as essentially ambiguous, and it is the realization of this ambiguity that is to a large extent responsible for the Augustinian-religious backlash in Petrarch’s texts against the value of the practice of writing for the purpose of care of the self. The tensions among the “Stoic,” “Ovidian,” and “Augustinian” uses of writing thus come to dominate Petrarch’s Latin works. In the final section of the chapter, I address the synthesis that Petrarch attempted to attain later in life between these streams and the implications that it had on his humanist project of caring for the self through writing. Although admitting the insurmountable limitations of his own project, Petrarch nevertheless argues that the cultivation of self through writing (which is always intertwined for him with reading) is the best means available to cope with the experience of exile and fragmentation that inevitably accompanies life in the world.

1 The Indeterminate Self Writing, Desire, and Temporality in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

It is difficult to overemphasize the role of time in Petrarch’s Rime sparse or, as he himself named his collection of vernacular poems, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.1 Throughout the poems, and indeed in the reference to fragments in the title of the collection, time is always present, manifesting the sense of absence and loss to which the poet is helplessly subjected.2 In fact, the introductory poem to the collection establishes time as a major preoccupation of the poems that follow: Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’ io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore, quand’ era in parte altr’ uom da quel ch’ i’ sono: del vario stile in ch’ io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar piet`a, non che perdono. Ma ben veggio or s`ı come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; 1 For

a concise discussion of Petrarch’s naming of the collection, see Teodolinda Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium Fragmenta,” MLN 104 (1989): 1–38, at 1. 2 For discussions of the theme of time in Petrarch’s Rime, see Gianfranco Folena, “L’orologio del Petrarca,” Libri e documenti 5 (1979): 1–12; Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 170–80; Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 106–71; and Edoardo Taddeo, “Petrarca e il tempo,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 27 (1983): 69–108. Two works to which this chapter is particularly indebted are Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), and Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence.”

23

24

Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self et del mio vaneggiar vergogna e` ’l frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo e` breve sogno.

You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now: for the varied style in which I weep and speak between vain hopes and vain sorrow, where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon. But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within; and of my raving, shame is the fruit, and repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream.3

The poem is written from the vantage point of an undefined present moment in which the poet is looking back at his past – his giovenile errore (youthful error) – as it is reflected in the poems he wrote through the years. His development in time – his history and change – that brought him to the present moment of writing is thus a major concern of the collection. Nonetheless, as the poet warns us, what we are about to hear is not a unified whole, a coherent narrative of his development in time, but rather rime sparse (scattered rhymes) – the fragments alluded to in the title of the work – that are gathered together to form a collection, a gathering that is apparently unable to transcend the scattered nature of its parts. His existence in time, the poet therefore implies, is fragmentary, dismembered, and thus in itself a source of anguish and suffering.4 In the final line of the sonnet, however, time emerges as a source of suffering in one further sense. As the poet laments, everything that is pleasing in the world is no more than breve sogno (a brief dream) – a mirage – and the use of the adjective breve indicates that it is the swift flight of time that renders all these delights – and indeed all existing objects – vain and worthless. This realization of the vanity of all worldly things – including the poems themselves and the very self that is writing them – is further emphasized in the poem through the rhyme scheme and the phonetic proximity of the words ending lines 1, 4, and 14 – suono, 3 All

texts and translations are taken from Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). 4 The question of the narrative, the attempt – and failure – of the poet to recollect the fragments of his past into a coherent whole in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, is discussed in the following chapter.

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sono, sogno: both the sounds the poet makes in his writing (suono) and he himself (sono) are like dreams (sogno), and even those are brief ones – lacking in any substance. Time, the poem thus ultimately shows, challenges the very existence of the self.5 Poem 272, one of the first in the second part of the collection – In morte di Laura – provides another ample demonstration of the poet’s bleak preoccupation with the passage of time: La vita fugge, et non s’arresta un’ora, et la Morte vien dietro a gran giornate; et le cose presenti et le passate mi d`anno guerra et le future ancora, e ’l rimembrare et l’aspettar m’accora or quinci or quindi; s`ı che ’n veritate, se non ch’ i’ o` di me stesso pietate, i’ sarei gi`a di questi pensier fora. (272.1–8) Life flees and does not stop an hour, and death comes after by great stages; and present and past things make war on me, and future things also, and remembering and expecting both weigh down my heart now on this side, now on that, so that in truth, except that I take pity on myself, I would already be beyond these thoughts.

Incessantly fleeing, stopping only at the dreadful moment of death, time is thus presented in this poem as the source of the poet’s suffering and distress. The reference to remembering and expecting in line 5 (’l rimembrare et l’aspettar) is an echo of Augustine’s great meditation on the nature of time in Book 11 of the Confessions, in which he asserts that time is the distention (distentio) of the mind, its division between the expectation of things to come and the remembrance of things past.6 For Augustine, it is 5 Mazzotta,

in his discussion of rhetoric and music in Petrarch’s works, argues that the rhyme scheme suono . . . sono of lines 1 and 4 suggests that “the self ’s being is in time and that being is sound.” He does not, however, mention the relation to sogno and the fact that the submission to time it indicates challenges the very existence of the self. See Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, 145. 6 “That is why I have come to think that time is simply a distention. But of what is it a distention? I do not know, but it would be surprising if it is not that of the mind itself ” (“Inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem; sed cuius rei, nescio, et mirum, si non ipsius animi” [Conf.11.26.33]). Later he adds, “For the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention to what it remembers” (“Nam et expectat et attendit et meminit, ut id quod expectat per id quod attendit transeat in id quod meminerit” [Conf.11.28.37]). The edition of the Confessions is Augustine, Confessions, ed. and commentary James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Translations are from Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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this distention of the mind – contrasted with the eternity and indivisibility of God – that is the source of the suffering that dominates the human condition: “Because your mercy is more than lives (Ps. 62:4), see how my life is a distention in several directions. ‘Your right hand upheld me’ (Ps. 17:36; 62:9) in my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things.”7 Petrarch therefore repeats in poem 272 the Augustinian notion that it is the subjection to time – the division, or distention, of the mind between past and future – that is the source of his agony.8 In Petrarch’s vernacular poems, as these examples demonstrate, time emerges as the main cause of the poet’s experience of fragmentation, fluctuation, and nonbeing. Yet, while persistently manifesting the ravages of time, the poems in the collection also constantly bring to the fore the poet’s attempt to overcome this fragmentation and attain “selfhood” – an attempt that is dominated by the act of writing poetry of desire.9 As this chapter shows, the act of writing poetry – always intertwined with the poet’s experience of desire – serves in the collection as the steadfast aspect of the poet’s existence, as a personal ritual and a meditative exercise, and as a vehicle for the attainment of virtue and poetic glory, thus allowing him to overcome the constant flux of time and attain being. At the same time, however, as the second section of this chapter demonstrates, this attempt to overcome the incessant passage of time through the act of writing is undermined in the collection by the counter-assertion that writing – dominated by desire – is in fact the source of the poet’s fall into temporality and change, leading him into exile from reason and 7 “Sed

quoniam melior est misericordia tua super vitas, ecce distentio est vita mea, et me suscepit dextera tua in domino meo, mediatore filio hominis inter te unum et nos multos, in multis per multa” (Conf.11.29.39). 8 In Paradiso 29.76–81, as Barolini points out, Dante, describing the beatific vision of the angels, also identifies by extension the human condition through the subjection to time, the need to divide the mind between future and past: “Queste sustanze, poi che fur gioconde / de la faccia di Dio, non volser viso / da essa, da cui nulla si nasconde: / per`o non hanno vedere interciso / da novo obietto, e per`o non bisogna / rememorar per concetto diviso” (“These substances, since they were gladdened by the face of God, have never turned their faces from it, from which nothing is hidden; therefore their sight is not intercepted by new objects, and therefore they have no need to remember by means of divided thought”). See Tedolinda Barolini, “Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine : Forging Anti-Narrative in the Vita nuova,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 174–92, at 175. 9 Barolini, in her article “The Making of a Lyric Sequence,” argues that Petrarch’s collection represents above all an attempt to overcome the linearity of time. Her discussion, however, focuses almost solely on the way that the formal structure of the poems allows Petrarch to challenge linearity.

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virtue, his “true self.” The impact of the act of writing on the self in the poems thus emerges as essentially ambiguous – making him both beyond time and subjected to time. In the final section of the chapter, I show how the focus on this ambiguous impact of writing and desire on the self separates Petrarch’s portrayal from the views of the relations among writing, desire, and self of both Dante and Augustine.

Writing, Desire, and Transcendence Poem 145 of the Rime sparse provides us with a good starting point to explore the role of writing in Petrarch’s attempt to overcome the sense of loss and nonbeing that accompanies the incessant passage of time: Ponmi in cielo od in terra od in abisso, in alto poggio, in valle ima et palustre, libero spirto od a’ suoi membri affisso; ponmi con fama oscura o con illustre: saro` qual fui, vivro` com’ io son visso, continuando il mio sospir trilustre. (145.9–14) Place me in Heaven or on earth or in the abyss, on a high mountain, in a deep and swampy valley; make me a free spirit or one fixed in his members; place me in obscurity or in illustrious fame: still I shall be what I have been, shall live as I have lived, continuing my trilustral sighing.

Whatever the outer circumstances might be, the poet declares, inwardly he will remain one and the same, steadfast in his sighing – a common metaphor for the writing of poetry in the work – and desire.10 In response to the unavoidable flux of time, indicated by the reference to the sospir trilustre – the passing of fifteen years since the day he first saw his lady at the church in Avignon on April 6, 132711 – the poet therefore posits the act of writing poetry about his desire – as well as desire itself – as the unchanging aspects of his being, sources of both constancy and steadfastness. 10 In

poem 1, for example, Petrarch uses the word sospiri to describe his writings: “Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / di quei sospiri ond’ io nudriva ’l core.” The description in sonnet 145, as Petrie pointed out, is modeled on Horace, Odes 1.22.17– 24. See Jennifer Petrie, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the Canzoniere (Dublin: Published for the Foundation for Italian Studies, University College, Dublin, 1983), 40. 11 Petrarch tells us the exact date on which he met his beloved in a note he inserted to his manuscript of Virgil after Laura’s death. See E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 77.

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Sestina 30, Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro, advances a similar notion regarding the role of writing in overcoming the flux: Dentro pur foco et for candida neve, sol con questi pensier, con altre chiome, sempre piangendo andr`o per ogni riva, per far forse piet`a venir ne gli occhi di tal che nascer`a dopo mill’ anni, se tanto viver po ben colto lauro. (30.31–6) Inwardly fire, though outwardly white snow, alone with these thoughts, with changed locks, always weeping I shall go along every shore, to make pity perhaps come into the eyes of someone who will be born a thousand years from now – if a well tended laurel can live so long.

In contrast to the unavoidable flux of time, represented in these lines by the reference to the altre chiome of line 32, Petrarch posits again the constancy – sempre (l. 33) – of his weeping, his unwavering practice of writing poetry about his desire. At the same time, these lines also allude to another sense in which the act of writing provides the poet with the means to transcend the flow of time – the promise of unchanging and eternal glory through his writings, embodied in the figure of the well-tended laurel (ben colto lauro [l. 36]). In a similar fashion to Ovid’s famous declaration at the end of his Metamorphoses, Petrarch thus hopes to overcome time through the eternity of his writings.12 The laurel signifying the eternal quality of poetic glory – and, by extension, writing itself – thus emerges as the poet’s ultimate object of desire in the poem.13 In addition to the unwavering nature of the poet’s writing and desire undermining the flux of time, throughout the collection, it is also the 12 “And

now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo. When it will, let that day come which has no power save over this mortal frame, and end the span of my uncertain years. Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and I shall have an undying name” (“Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. / cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi: / parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum” [Met.15.871–76]). Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols., trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). 13 For an illuminating discussion of this dual nature of the poet’s desire see, Adelia Noferi, “Il Canzoniere del Petrarca: scrittura del desiderio e desiderio della scrittura,” in Il gioco delle trace: studi su Dante, Petrarca, Bruno, il neo-classicismo, Leopardi, l’informale (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979), 43–67.

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memory of his lady – of the way she was the first time he saw her – that serves as a source of steadfastness. As Petrarch declares in poem 90: “uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole / fu quel ch’ i’ vidi, et se non fosse or tale, / piaga per allentar d’arco non sana” (90.12–14) (“a celestial spirit, a living sun was what I saw, and if she were not such now, a wound is not healed by the loosening of the bow”). Thus, even if objectively the lady is not the same now (se non fosse or tale), within him, as he states, nothing has changed – both the memory of the way she was at the time he first laid eyes on her and his desire remain just as intense (piaga per allentar d’arco non sana). Moreover, even after the lady’s death in the Black Death of 1348, as we learn from poem 336, the intensity of this memory did not fade: “Tornami a mente (anzi v’`e dentro quella / ch’ indi per Lete esser non po sbandita) / qual io la vidi in su l’et`a fiorita / tutta accesa de’ raggi di sua stella” (336.1–4) (“She comes to mind (rather she is within my mind, for she cannot be banished thence by Lethe) just as I saw her in her flowering, all burning with the rays of her star”). Both poem 145 and sestina 30 – and to an extent poems 90 and 336 (wherein we are also taken back to the scene of the poet’s innamoramento) – are among the anniversary poems that are spread throughout the collection, commemorating in writing the years that have elapsed since the first time the poet saw his lady.14 This repetitive return through the writing of poetry to the moment of falling in love facilitates the transcendence of the flow of time by creating in the collection a circular motion – an ongoing return to the “beginning” – that defies the linearity of time while paradoxically documenting its passing. In addition, by commemorating in the anniversary poems his innamoramento, over and over again, on the day it took place, the poet fashions in the collection a type of personal ritual – circular and repetitive – that elevates the event beyond the ordinary passage of time and thus allows him to arrest the flux – to endow it with meaning – just as in the case of the commemoration of the crucifixion of Christ that supposedly took place on the same day he saw his lady.15 14 On

the anniversary poems, see Dennis Dutschke, “The Anniversary Poems in Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” Italica 58 (1981): 83–101; Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence,” 16–20; and Robert M. Durling, “Petrarch’s Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,” MLN 86 (1971): 1–20. 15 Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence,” provides a wide-ranging discussion of the ways in which Petrarch uses circularity and repetition in the formal level of the collection to defy the passage of time. See especially her illuminating discussions of his use of the sestina on pp. 14–16 and canzoni 70 and 125–9, pp. 24–7.

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The poet’s innamoramento, moreover, is often represented in the collection as his golden age, the time of full bliss, his dolce tempo,16 which was inevitably lost due to the incessant passage of time: “onde s’ io veggio in giovenil figura / incominciarsi il mondo a vestir d’erba, / parmi veder in quella etate acerba / la bella giovenetta, ch’ ora e` donna” (127.19–22) (“wherefore if I see the world begin to clothe itself in green in youthful guise, I seem to see at that same unripe age the beautiful young girl who is now a lady”). The poet’s experience of fluctuation in time, as a result, is accompanied in the collection – just as in letter 6.2 of the Familiares discussed in the introduction – by a sense of exile from a lost golden age, a time in which he was fully himself. Nonetheless, while lamenting his inevitable exile, this written lamentation often becomes a meditative practice that allows the poet to return in his mind to his lost golden age, overcoming by that his exile and, in the process, abolishing the flux of time altogether. The celebrated group of canzoni 125–9 provides a perfect dramatization of this meditative use of writing – and the complex interchange among writing, desire, and memory that facilitates it.17 In the beginning of canzone 125, we encounter the poet in a state of disintegration and despair: his previous poems failed to conquer the lady’s heart, and, full of anguish, he is unable to pour himself forth through his writing as he used to. The poet, as we discover, is thus in exile from both Laura and the promise of glory through writing. Nevertheless, while describing in writing his “frozen” state and inability to write: “chi verr`a mai che squadre / questo mio cor di smalto, / ch’ almen com’ io solea possa sfogarme?” (125.30–2) (“who will ever come who can shatter the stone about my heart, so that at least I can pour myself forth as I used to do?”), the poet’s desire gradually grows, and with it his ability to compose more poetry: “Come fanciul ch’ a pena / volge la lingua et snoda, / che dir non sa ma ’l piu` tacer gli e` noia, / cos`ı ’l desir mi mena / a dire” (125.40–4) 16 In

poem 72, the poet writes, “N´e giamai lingua umana / contar poria quel che le due divine / luci sentir mi fanno / e quando ’l verno sparge le pruine, / et quando poi ringiovenisce l’anno / qual era al tempo del mio primo affanno” (72.10–15) (“Nor could any human tongue relate what the two divine lights make me feel, both when winter scatters frosts and when, later, the year becomes young again, as it was at the time of my first yearning”). Al tempo del mio primo affanno recalls the opening line of canzone 23, nel dolce tempo della prima etade, thus suggesting that the first time he laid his eyes on the divine luci of the lady is the time of his first bliss, his dolce tempo. See also canzone 70.45–50, and canzone 127 discussed subsequently. 17 My discussion of these canzoni is indebted to the analysis in Durling, “Introduction,” in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 21–6.

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(“Like a child who can hardly move and untangle his tongue, who is not able to speak but hates to be silent any longer, thus desire leads me to speak”). Writing, as these lines show, is both the result and the cause of desire, and this increase of both desire and writing in turn leads to the awakening of the memory of his lady in the poet’s mind: “Ben sai che s`ı bel piede / non tocc`o terra unquanco / come quel d`ı che gi`a segnata fosti” (125.53–5) (“You know well that so beautiful a foot never touched the earth as on that day when you were marked by hers”), he tells the shore of the river Sorgue after his frozen state has begun melt. At the end of poem 125, however, the possibility of renewal is still only implied; the poet can only imagine the lady’s “scattered footprints” in the landscape, not fully invoke her presence. It is in the next, related canzone 126 that the memory of the lady bursts forth in full: Da’ be’ rami scendea (dolce ne la memoria) una pioggia di fior sovra ’l suo grembo, et ella si sedea umile in tanta gloria, coverta gi`a de l’amoroso nembo. (126.40–5) From the lovely branches was descending (sweet in memory) a rain of flowers over her bosom, and she was sitting humble in such a glory, already covered with the loving cloud;

This emergence of the first memory in its full glory and spectacle, which echoes, as Robert Durling noted, the appearance of Beatrice in canto 30 of Dante’s Purgatorio, signifies not only the poet’s return to his golden age but also the attainment of complete forgetfulness (oblio) of his existence in time: Cos`ı carco d’oblio il divin portamento e ’l volto e le parole e ’l dolce riso m’aveano, et s`ı diviso da l’imagine vera, ch’ i’ dicea sospirando: “Qui come venn’ io o quando?” credendo esser in ciel, non l`a dov’ era. (126.56–63) Her divine bearing and her face and her words and her sweet smile had so laden me with forgetfulness and so divided me from the true image, that I

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was sighing: “How did I come here and when?” thinking I was in Heaven, not there where I was.

The full presence of the memory of the lady – emerging from the combined impact of writing and desire – thus takes control over his mind and makes him forget everything else, leading him to feel as if he is in cielo. Time is not only arrested but completely abolished in a type of meditative exercise comprising writing, desire, and concentration on memory. A similar process takes place in the following canzone, 127. As it begins, we again encounter the poet in a state of despair: the blissful forgetfulness attained at the end of canzone 126 was short-lived, and the poet is again overcome by grief, this time because of his physical absence from the lady. As the poem unfolds, however, this exile in space also becomes one in time, as the poet laments the insurmountable loss of his etate acerba (1. 21) (unripe age) – the age in which he first saw his lady, the bella giovenetta who is by now a donna, helplessly revealing the sign of the times: S`ı forte mi rimembra del portamento umile ch’ allor fioriva et poi crebbe anzi agli anni, cagion sola et riposo de’ miei affanni. (127.39–42) So strongly I remember her humble bearing which then was flowering and then grew before her years, sole cause and healing of my woes.

Nevertheless, while bewailing the unavoidable impact of time on his lady, the poet’s desire begins to grow, and he goes on to narrate how he often beholds, from his place of exile in time and space, the rays of the sun striking the snowy hilltops and how he is reminded by this image of the white and the gold of his lady’s face, a recollection that overcomes him with love, just as the snow is by the sun. With this renewed dominance of desire, the memory of the lady’s smile and its blissful effect is revived in full: Et del caldo desio che quando sospirando ella sorride m’infiamma s`ı che oblio niente aprezza, ma diventa eterno: n´e state il cangia n´e lo spegne il verno. (127.52–6) And of the hot desire that, when she sighing smiles, inflames me so that my forgetfulness prizes nothing but becomes eternal: nor does summer change it or winter put it out.

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Remembering the lady’s smile and the forgetfulness it brings him – both eternal and changeless – the poet thus returns to the time and place of his bliss, forgetting in the process the dual exile to which he is now subjected. Once again, it is the combined impact of writing, desire, and memory – functioning together as a type of meditative exercise – that leads the poet to the transcendence of his exile in time. Throughout this group of canzoni, in sum, the poet’s sense of exile and fragmentation leads him to lament his state in writing, a lamentation that in turn facilitates the revival of desire and with it a return to the first bliss – the time of full presence – and complete forgetfulness of the passage of time.18 While allowing the poet to overcome his sense of fragmentation and nonbeing by serving as the constant aspect of his existence and as a personal ritual and meditative exercise that take him back to his golden age, the act of writing functions as a source of being and as a means to transcend time in one more crucial sense: providing the poet with virtue. In canzone 71, Petrarch writes, Et chi di voi ragiona tien dal soggetto un abito gentile che con l’ale amorose levando, il parte d’ogni pensier vile. (71.10–13) And he who speaks of you receives from the subject a gentle habit, which, with amorous wings lifting him, parts him from every low thought.

The act of contemplating and speaking (ragiona) about the lady in itself provides him with abito gentile and raises him above ogni pensier vile. It is the act of writing about a noble outside object of desire, therefore, that provides him with virtue, the only way, as we have seen in Familiares 24.1 discussed in the Introduction, by which we might overcome the flux of time and truly exist in this life. Indeed, describing in poem 63 the impact of the lady’s eyes and voice on him, this gift of virtue directly becomes the gift of being: “da lor conosco l’esser ov’ io sono, / che, come suol 18 The

sense of the complete forgetfulness (oblio) of the poet’s existence in time through a meditation on the image of the lady in his mind returns in several other places in the collection, as, for example, in poem 193: “Pasco la mente d’un s`ı nobil cibo / ch’ ambrosia et nettar non invidio a Giove, / ch´e sol mirando, oblio ne l’alma piove / d’ogni altro dolce, et Lete al fondo bibo” (193.1–4) (“I nourish my mind with a food so noble that I do not envy Jove his ambrosia and nectar; for when I merely gaze, oblivion rains into my heart of all other sweetness, and I drink Lethe to the bottom”). And then again, after the lady’s death, in canzone 325: “cominciai a mirar con tal desio / che me stesso e ’l mio mal posi in oblio” (325.44–5) (“I began to gaze at her with such desire that I forgot myself and my misfortune”).

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pigro animal per verga, / cos`ı destaro in me l’anima grave” (63.8–10) (“I recognize that the being I have is from them, for they, as one rouses a lazy animal with a rod, so awakened in me my heavy soul”). The figure of Franciscus advances the exact same notion in Book 3 of the Secretum, defending his love for Laura in very similar words: Whatever worthiness you see in me I possess because of her, and I would never have attained whatever reputation or glory I now have if she had not nobly cultivated the fragile seed of virtue [virtutum tenuissimam sementem] that nature placed in my breast. She called my young soul back from all turpitude. She dragged it back, as they say, with a hook and compelled it to desire higher things. How could I not be transformed in accordance with the character of such a beloved? . . . And still you demand that I forget her or love her less, this woman who took me away from the common concerns of the crowd and who, as my leader in all things, goaded my sluggish mind and aroused my half-sleeping soul?19

The desire for Laura, according to Franciscus, wakened his half-sleeping soul (semisopitum animum, recalling l’anima grave of poem 63) and led him to the pursuit of virtue, transforming (transformarer) him into the character of his beloved. It is the desire for an outside object functioning as an ideal mirror reflection of the self that allows Franciscus to attain selfhood, and as we have seen in canzone 71, it is the act of writing about this ideal object of desire that facilitates the transformation.20 19 “Me,

quantulumcunque conspicis, per illam esse, nec unquam ad hoc, siquid est, nominis aut glorie fuisse venturum, nisi virtutum tenuissimam sementem, quam pectore in hoc natura locaverat, nobilissimis hec affectibus coluisset. Illa iuvenilem animum ab omni turpitudine revocavit, uncoque, ut aiunt, retraxit, atque alta compulit expectare. Quidni enim in amatos mores transformarer? . . . Et iubes illam oblivisci vel parcius amare, que me a vulgi consortio segregavit, que, dux viarum omnium, torpenti ingenio calcar admovit ac semisopitum animum excitavit?” (Secretum 3.16; The Secret, 110). 20 Petrarch’s desire for the lady, and the writing of poetry of desire in the vernacular about her, fulfill in this respect a similar role to the one dominating, as we shall see in Chapter 3, his Latin works – shaping the author and his readers in the image of the virtues of old. Poem 7 advances this notion explicitly: “La gola e ’l sonno et l’oziose piume / a` nno del mondo ogni vertu` sbandita, / ond’ e` dal corso suo quasi smarrita / nostra natura vinta dal costume; / et e` s`ı spento ogni benigno lume / del ciel per cui s’informa umana vita, / che per cosa mirabile s’addita / chi vol far d’Elicona nascer fiume. / Qual vaghezza di lauro, qual di mirto? / ‘Povera et nuda vai, Filosofia,’ / dice la turba al vil guadagno intesa” (7.1–11) (“Gluttony and sleep and the pillows of idleness have banished from the world all virtue, and our nature, conquered by custom, has almost ceased to function; and so spent is every benign light of heaven by which human life should be shaped, that whoever wishes to make a river flow from Helicon is pointed at as a strange thing. What desire for the laurel is there? Or for the myrtle? ‘Philosophy, you go poor and naked!’ says the mob, bent on low gain”). In poem 186, Petrarch states that Laura is an exemplum of virtue comparable to Scipio (the one about whom “Ennius sang”), adding that even Homer and Virgil would have “mixed the two styles” – the epic and the elegiac – to sing her praises: “Se Virgilio et Omero avessin visto / quel sole il qual vegg’ io con

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This emphasis on the transcendence of the flux of time and the attainment of self by becoming the outside object of desire is exactly the one portrayed in the description of the poet’s first metamorphosis into the laurel in canzone 23, La canzone delle metamorfosi: “ei duo mi trasformaro in quel ch’ i’ sono, / facendomi d’uom vivo un lauro verde / che per fredda stagion foglia non perde” (23.38–40) (“those two transformed me into what I am, making me of a living man a green laurel that loses no leaf for all the cold season”). In a clear inversion of the Ovidian myth of Apollo and Daphne, it is the poet himself who is transformed in these lines into the laurel, thus receiving his identity and being: from a living man, one subject to change, he becomes the emblem of constancy – che per fredda stagion foglia non perde. Transformed into the laurel, it is possible that Petrarch actually becomes his writings – as the adamant aspect of his existence and those through which he attains changeless and eternal poetic glory.21 In addition, the fact that in the Ovidian account it is the lady who becomes the laurel implies that in this transformation, Petrarch also becomes the beloved, thus perhaps alluding to his attainment of virtue (and hence being) by turning into Laura. Transformed into his object of desire through the dual impact of desire and writing, Petrarch manages to arrest completely the constant flux of time and attain self.

Writing, Desire, and the Fall The portrayal of the poet’s transformation into the laurel in canzone 23 also begins to direct our attention to the duality inherent in the poet’s sense of identity, and thus also in the impact of writing and desire on the self. For as the canzone shows, although desire and writing provide the poet with a stable and unchanging self, it is in fact the birth of desire – which is also the birth of writing as the ultimate object of desire – that is the cause of the poet’s fall into temporality and change in the first place. Petrarch opens canzone 23 with the famous line, “Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade,” a possible echo of the line with which Ovid starts his description of the golden age of humanity near the beginning of

gli occhi miei, / tutte lor forze in dar fama a costei / avrian posto et l’un stil coll’altro misto” (186.1–4) (“If Virgil and Homer had seen that sun which I see with my eyes, they would have exerted all their powers to give her fame and would have mixed together the two styles”). 21 The line foglia non perde, as Leonard Barkan points out, suggests that the poet is transformed into his writings, given that foglia was used in the Middle Ages to describe the pages of a book. See Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphoses and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 211.

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the Metamorphoses: “Aurea prima sata est aetas” (Met.1.89).22 Similarly to Ovid’s universal history, therefore, Petrarch’s personal one starts with a golden age, a time when “lagrima ancor non mi bagnava il petto / n´e rompea il sonno” (23.27–9) (“no tear yet bathed my breast nor broke my sleep”). Nonetheless, just as humanity’s golden age ended, as Ovid implies, with the birth of desire – the longing to see new places23 – so Petrarch’s golden age ends with the assault of Love, leading to the entry into desire, which is also the entry into writing as the main object of desire24 : “che nascer vide et ancor quasi in erba / la fera voglia che per mio mal crebbe” (23.2–3) (which saw born and still almost unripe the fierce desire which for my hurt grew). Thus, whereas in other poems in the collection, the dolce tempo refers to the first time the poet saw Laura,25 here it is evident that the innamoramento is also a form of loss – the loss of his first age of bliss and liberty: “cantero` com’ io vissi in libertade” (23.5) (“I shall sing how then I lived in liberty”).26 22 Dutschke,

following Cesareo, mentions the affinities between this canzone and Cino da Pistoia’s Nel tempo de la mia novella etade. See Dennis Dutschke, Francesco Petrarca Canzone XXIII from First to Final Version (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1977), 17. 23 “Nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem, / montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas, / nullaque mortales praeter sua litora norant” (Met.1.94–6) (“Not yet had the pine tree, felled on its native mountains, descended thence into the watery plain to visit other lands”). In the description of the fourth and last age, that of duro ferro (Met.1.127) (“hard iron”), Ovid will use the making of ships and the sailing into foreign lands the mark of this fallen age: “vela dabant ventis nec adhuc bene noverat illos / navita, quaeque prius steterant in montibus altis, / fluctibus ignotis insultavere carinae” (Met.1.132–4) (“Men now spread sails to the winds, though the sailor as yet scarce knew them; and keels of pine which long had stood upon high mountain-sides, now leaped insolently over unknown waves”). 24 That the entry into desire is also the entry into writing is evident in the poem from Petrarch’s portrayal in lines 7–9, stating that the assault of Love also made him an example for many people: “poi seguiro` s`ı come a lui ne ’ncrebbe / troppo altamente e che di cio` m’avenne, / di ch’ io son fatto a molta gente esempio” (23.7–9) (“then I shall pursue how that chagrined him too deeply, and what happened to me for that, by which I have become an example for many people”). In addition, the very fact that the first transformation in the poem is that into the laurel suggests that the true object of desire is the poetic glory embodied in the figure of the laurel, and thus writing in itself – providing the poet with this glory. 25 See n. 16 of this chapter. 26 The status of the prima etade is also ambiguous – and intentionally so – within this poem. As Marguerite Waller pointed out, the order of the words in the first stanza presents the fera voglia before the libertade, thus complicating the innocence of the age of liberty and raising serious doubts regarding its nature. These doubts are affirmed by line 44: “di che sperato avea gi`a lor corona,” suggesting that desire (for the laurel) was already part of the age of liberty. The notion of an age completely devoid of desire thus becomes illusory, and the meeting with the lady, satisfying the poet’s desire for the laurel, thus assumes the sense of a dolce tempo. I believe, however, that the poet intentionally created

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This loss of the age of liberty due to the entry into desire and writing, as the poem demonstrates, implies above all the poet’s fall into history and change, into the constant fluctuation of time and becoming. The portrayal of the birth of desire in lines 2 and 3 of the canzone directly associates desire with temporality and change: desire was born (nascer) and his hurt grew (crebbe), and later Petrarch will also lament the change brought about in him by it: “Lasso, che son? Che fui?” (23.30–1) (“Alas, what am I? what was I?”) In addition, the transformation into the laurel – into his own writings – celebrated as a source of steadfastness, is in the poem only the starting point of the process of constant flux and metamorphoses to which the poet will be subjected from this moment on and over which he will have no control: “ch’ e’ ten di me quel d’entro, et io la scorza” (23.20) (“for it holds what is within me, and I only the shell”). Looked at from this perspective, therefore, desire and writing lead the poet to exile and a loss of self rather than its attainment: “un penser che . . . mi face obliar me stesso a forza” (23.17–19) (“one thought . . . which makes me forget myself beyond resistance”). We know from as early as poem 2 that this lost self is that associated with Stoic reason and virtue. As Petrarch describes in the poem, to punish him for a thousand previous offenses, Amor took up his bow and conquered his “vital power” (la mia virtute). Having been overcome by Amor, his virtute could not lead him “al poggio faticoso et alto” (2.12) (“up the weary high mountain”) – a clear image of reason – and away from the “slaughter” and the impending exile. In Petrarch’s Latin writings, the association of reason and virtue with our “true self ” becomes almost a clich´e,27 and as we have seen in Fam.24.1 the confusion of the first stanza, which Waller discusses at length, to demonstrate the ambiguity that governs his experience of love – being unable to discern whether it is ultimately a blessing or a curse, the source of his being or his undoing. See Marguerite R. Waller, Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 86–9. 27 See, for example, the statement in Fam.12.14.1 (Familiar Letters, 2:162), mentioned also in the Introduction: “I . . . request . . . O illustrious sir, that you subject your mind to your reason, or, to express it differently, you to yourself ” (“peto autem, vir insignis, ut animum rationi sive, ut aliter idem dicam, te tibi subicias”). See also Fam.15.7.20–1 (Familiar Letters, 2:270) in which Petrarch advises Stefano Colonna the younger in the face of the tumultuous events around them: “return to your room and within yourself ” (“intra cubiculi tui limen et intra te ipsum redi”) and adds that the only way to return to himself is through virtue: “It is virtue alone that is powerful enough to accomplish it all” (“Virtus sola potens est hec omnia prestare”). Another example is given in Sen.10.5.5 (Letters of Old Age, 2:393): “therefore, consider how becoming it is, how worthy of a man,

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already mentioned, it is only through virtue that we can overcome the flux of time and attain a sense of existence and being. According to Seneca, however, this attainment of virtue and the transcendence of the flow of time is only possible when we attach ourselves to the things that are immortal, diverting our attention from the passable things of the world: “Let us turn our minds to the things that are everlasting. . . . Let us despise everything, that is so little an object of value that it makes us doubt whether it exists at all.”28 Identifying with bodies, our minds become subject to time – weak and watery (Inbecilli fluvidique) in Seneca’s terms – just like them. The desire for both Laura and writing in itself – as the means for the attainment of the laurel – thus cannot be a source of virtue and being, as Petrarch claimed in poems 63 and 71, but rather only the cause of his fall into the current, away from his true self and into the exile of temporality and change. It is exactly the same notion of loss of a virtuous golden age and a fall into constant fluctuation as a result of the entry into desire and writing that the figure of Augustinus advances in Book 3 of the Secretum: attempting to convince Franciscus of the harmful impact of his desire, Augustinus invites the poet to recall his youth (puerilium annorum) and how at that time he was filled with “fear of God . . . thought of death . . . love of the upright life” (“timor dei, . . . mortis cogitatio, . . . amor honestatis” [Secretum 3.22; my translation]). Franciscus agrees with the observation and concedes that this early uprightness, his “golden age,”’ ended at exactly the same time he met Laura. Attaching himself to an earthly and mortal creature, as Augustinus tells him earlier in words that closely echo both Seneca’s letter 58 and Augustine of the Confessions, can only lead his soul to constant fluctuation and longing, subjecting it to the great sea of nonbeing29 : that a little time has more power over him than reason, that which holds first place in man to such a degree that, if it is removed, by definition he can no longer be called a man” (“Videndum itaque quam decorum quamque conveniens viro sit plus tempus exiguum apud eum posse quam rationem, que primum usqueadeo in homine locum tenet ut, ea dempta, ne ipsa quidem diffinitio hominem dici sinat”). Latin edition of the Rerum senilium libri (Sen.): P´etrarque, Lettres de la vieillesse (Rerum senilium), 4 vols., ed. Elvira Nota (Paris: Les belles letters, 2002–6). Translations are taken from Petrarch, Letters of Old Age – Rerum senilium libri I-XVIII, 2 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta S. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 28 “Ad illa mittamus animum, quae aeterna sunt . . . contemnamus omnia, quae adeo pretiosa non sunt, ut an sint omnino, dubium sit” (Ad Lucilium 58.27–8). 29 In Confessions 4.10.15, a work Petrarch had received as a gift from Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro in 1333, Augustine writes, “Let these transient things be the ground on which

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Do you still not understand how demented it is to have entrusted your soul to mortal things that inflame it with the heat of passion, that will never bring it rest, and that are not able to endure forever? Mortal things that torture with endless distractions the one whom they promise to soothe?30

The attachment to earthly things bound to fluctuate with time, Augustinus states, can only lead to frustration, to the subjection of the poet to ever-mounting desire that cannot be put to rest. The act of writing poetry – insofar as it serves as an unquenchable earthly object of desire, and, as we have seen in canzoni 125–7, as a practice that revives and intensifies the poet’s earthly desire for the lady – thus cannot provide the poet with transcendence and being but will lead him to endless agitation and fluctuation. Poem 6, one of the first poems in the collection to establish the myth of Apollo and Daphne as the basis of the poet’s experience in the work, provides an ample demonstration of the inevitable sense of exile and flux that accompanies the writing of poetry of desire31: S`ı traviato e` ’l folle mi’ desio a seguitar costei che ’n fuga e` volta, et de’ lacci d’Amor leggiera et sciolta vola dinanzi al lento correr mio, my soul praises you (Ps. 145:2), ‘God creator of all’. But let it not become stuck in them and glued to them with love through the physical senses. For these things pass along the path of things that move towards non-existence. They rend the soul with pestilential desires; for the soul loves to be in them and take its repose among the objects of its love. But in these things there is no point of rest” (“laudet te ex illis anima mea, deus, creator omnium, sed non in eis figatur glutine amore per sensus corporis. eunt enim quo ibant, ut non sint, et conscindunt eam desideriis pestilentiosis, quoniam ipsa esse vult et requiescere amat in eis quae amat. in illis autem non est ubi, quia non stan” [Conf.4.10.15]). 30 “O cece, necdum intelligis quanta dementia est sic animum rebus subiecisse mortalibus, que eum et desiderii flammis accendant nec quietare noverint nec permanere valeant in finem et crebris motibus, quem demulcere pollicentur, excrucient?” (Secretum 3.13; The Secret, 108). 31 On Petrarch’s use of the myth of Apollo and Daphne in the collection, see Carlo Calcaterra, Nella selva del Petrarca (Bologna: L. Cappelli, 1942), 35–87; Peter Hainsworth, “The Myth of Daphne in the ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,’ ” Italian Studies 34 (1979): 28–44; Philip Hardie, “Ovid into Laura: Absent Presences in the Metamorphoses and Petrarch’s Rime sparse,” in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Its Reception, eds. P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S. Hinds (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 254–70; Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime sparse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 9–39, and Petrarch’s Laurels (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); and Ugo Dotti, “Petrarca: il mito dafneo,” Convivium 37 (1969): 9–21.

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Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self che quanto richiamando piu` l’envio per la secura strada men m’ascolta, n´e mi vale spronarlo o dargli volta ch’ Amor per sua natura il fa restio; et poi che ’l fren per forza a s´e raccoglie, i’ mi rimango in signoria di lui, che mal mio grado a morte mi trasporta; sol per venir al lauro onde si coglie acerbo frutto, che le piaghe altrui gustando affligge piu` che non conforta.

So far astray is my mad desire, in pursuing her who has turned in flight and, light and free of the snares of Love, flies ahead of my slow running, that when, calling him back, I most send him by the safe path, then he least obeys me, nor does it help to spur him or turn him, for Love makes him restive by nature; and when he takes the bit forcefully to himself, I remain in his power, as against my will he carries me off to death; only to come to the laurel, whence one gathers bitter fruit that, being tasted, afflicts one’s wounds more than it comforts them.

Pursuing the beloved in the manner of Apollo, Petrarch dramatizes here how the object of desire is always one step ahead, always fleeing, leaving desire constantly in expectation of fulfillment. This ongoing perpetuation of desire is in turn emphasized by the paradox of the restio, its restive nature (l. 8): the only steadfast aspect about the poet is his constant longing, his perpetual lack of rest. In fact, it is the attempt to rein in the desire, to lead it back to the right path of reason (la secura strada),32 that only intensifies it and leads the poet further into death and longing (ll. 9–11). This death, however, as the final tercet shows, is also the road to the laurel: sol per venir al lauro. As in the Ovidian myth, it is the failure of the pursuit of Daphne, her permanent absence, that leads to poetic sublimation: “ ‘at, quoniam coniunx mea non potes esse, arbor eris certe’ dixit ‘mea!’” (Met.1.557–8) (“Since thou canst not be my bride, thou shall at least be my tree”). The lady, as a result, must always run faster, must always be beyond grasp, to attain the other object of desire – the laurel. The act of writing poetry is thus necessarily built on lack, the failure of the pursuit of the lady. Yet even the sublimation granted to Apollo in the myth is denied the poet here: the fruits gathered from the tree are bitter 32 Adelia

199.

Noferi, “Note ad un sonetto del Petrarca,” Forum Italicum 2 (1968): 194–205, at

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(si coglie acerbo frutto), and “affligge piu` che non conforta” (6.14) (“afflicts one’s wounds more than it comforts them”). As a result, although the entire sonnet is read like one long sentence without stops, alluding to the poet’s breathless running after the object of desire – both Laura and the laurel – the end point of the sonnet and of the race, does not provide closure, the attainment of the object, but rather points to the perpetuation of the desire and to the beginning of a new race. Instead of rest and the transcendence of the flux of time, the poem thus shows, the writing of poetry only leads to further desire and writing. This sense of failure and fluctuation with which the poem ends is further intensified by the fact that the image of the bitter fruit of the tree that, being tasted, affligge piu` che non conforta (l. 14) recalls the description of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in canto 32 of Dante’s Purgatorio: “d’esto legno dolce al gusto, / poscia che mal si torce il ventre quindi” (32.44–5) (“the sweet-tasting fruit that is forbidden / and then afflicts the belly that has eaten!”).33 Alluding to Dante’s description of the outcome of the eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Petrarch is creating in these lines a striking correlation between the pursuit of the laurel in writing and the fall of mankind34 : in the same way that the eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil was responsible for the expulsion from Eden and the fall into the exile of time and change, so for Petrarch, the tasting from the fruit of the laurel, attained through writing, signifies his own personal exile from Eden, his own fall into time and perpetual longing that cannot be put to rest. One possible reason for the frustration the poet experiences after reaching the laurel might be implied by the use of the adjective acerbo (l. 13) to describe the gathered fruits – and by extension also the poems themselves.35 Petrarch uses this adjective in several instances in the collection, as in 119.4 and 127.21, to describe his own “unripe age.” In 119, the acerba alludes to the way that glory drew him to her ranks when he 33 Edition of the Commedia is Dante, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petroc-

chi (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). The translation is Dante, The Divine Comedy, 3 vols., trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 34 In the medieval tradition, moreover, as Sara Sturm-Maddox pointed out, the term “bitterness” is often used in characterizations of the fall. See Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels, 261. In Par. 32.122–3, Dante describes the forbidden fruit as amaro. 35 The image of the gathering of the fruits often serves in the collection as a metaphor to the writing of poetry. See, for example, poem 60: “ ‘N´e poeta ne colga mai, n´e Giove / la privilegi, et al sol venga in ira / tal che si secchi ogni sua foglia verde!’” (60.12–14) (“‘Let no poet ever gather from it, nor let Jove favour it, and let it receive the sun’s anger so that all its green leaves dry up!’”), and poem 114: “Qui mi sto solo, et come Amor m’invita / or rime et versi, or colgo erbette et fiori” (114.5–6) (“Here I am alone, and, as Love leads me, I gather now rhymes and verses, now herbs and flowers”).

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was still unripe, thus referring to his freshness in writing poetry. Seen in this light, the fruits gathered from the tree at the end of poem 6 afflict his wounds because his poems are not yet seasoned enough and hence cannot provide him with the glory he is seeking. Nevertheless, this uncertainty regarding his ability to gain immortality through writing is bound to remain constant, even when his poems will “ripen,” given that the success of his project depends on the reception of his poems by others. Petrarch manifests this anxiety in sestina 30, to which I alluded before: “per far forse piet`a venir ne gli occhi / di tal che nascer`a dopo mill’ anni, / se tanto viver po ben colto lauro” (30.34–36) (“to make pity perhaps come into the eyes of someone who will be born a thousand years from now – if a well-tended laurel can live so long”). The forse and the se display for us the uncertainty of the poet – he hopes to attain immortality, but this hope is uncertain, beyond his control. Under such circumstances, all that the poet can do is continue to hope and to write, forever insecure of the outcome of his project. As a result, just as the desire for the lady can never be fulfilled to allow the poet to pursue the laurel, so the desire for the laurel – and thus for the very act of writing poetry – is bound to leave the poet in a state of constant want. Writing and desire, poem 6 ultimately shows, cannot lead to the arrest of time but only generate endless longing and fluctuation. This notion that the act of writing cannot lead to rest but rather only increase the poet’s desire and hence submit him further to the flux of time is particularly dominant in the group of canzoni 71–3, the so-called canzoni degli occhi. As we have seen, in the opening of canzone 71, Petrarch declares that by writing about his noble object of desire he gains “a gentle habit” (un abito gentile), parting him from “every low thought” (d’ogni pensier vile). Nonetheless, by the end of the poem, we learn that the writing about the virtuous eyes of his lady did not provide him with virtue or rest as he claimed in the beginning but only ignited the desire further, leading in turn to more writing: Canzon, tu non m’acqueti, anzi m’infiammi a dir di quel ch’ a me stesso m’invola: pero` sia certa de non esser sola. (71.106–8) Song, you do not quiet me, rather you inflame me to tell of what steals me away from myself; therefore be sure not to be alone.

Instead of quieting his longing, and by that facilitating the arrest of time, the act of writing intensifies the poet’s desire – both for the lady and writing itself (m’infiammi a dir) – and leads to more writing, as is evident

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from the command to the canzone not to remain alone, implying that another canzone is about to follow. The poet’s desire, as we learn from the ending of the canzone, only leads to a loss of self – ch’ a me stesso m’invola – and the act of writing, igniting this desire, is that which facilitates the loss. Petrarch repeats this notion again in the last poem in the series, canzone 73. Declaring that he has taken up his pen in the hope of gaining some repose and truce from desire, the poet nonetheless confesses that the act of writing poetry does not give him peace but only inflames him more: Ch´e ’l dir m’infiamma et pugne n´e per mi’ ’ngegno (ond’ io pavento et tremo) ` s`ı come talor sole trovo ’l gran foco de la mente scemo, anzi mi struggo al suon de le parole pur com’ io fusse un uom di ghiaccio al sole. (73.10–15) For speaking inflames me and pricks me on, nor through my wit (whence I fear and tremble), as sometimes occurs, is the great fire of my mind lessened; rather I melt in the sound of the words, as if I were a man of ice in the sun.

Writing about his object of desire, the sweetness of his own words causes him to melt, igniting his desire rather than putting it to a halt. The act of writing poetry, as we learn once again, only intensifies the poet’s submission to a process of constant flux and becoming. In sum, serving in itself as an unquenchable object of desire, and at the same time constantly igniting the poet’s desire for the lady, the act of writing emerges from this perspective in the poems as the source of the poet’s exile from his own self, of his subjection to the endless flux of time and change. The impact of the act of writing on the self in the collection, we therefore discover, is essentially ambiguous: while allowing Petrarch to arrest the flux of time and attain a sense of being, as we have seen in the first section of this chapter, the act of writing – intrinsically related to the poet’s experience of desire – is also responsible for his fall into time and change in the first place. As Ovid said regarding Narcissus, these are his own riches that make him poor: “inopem me copia fecit” (Met.3.466).

Beyond Time, Within Time The attempt to overcome the malaise of temporality and attain a sense of being and presence through the act of writing poetry of desire, according to the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, is bound to lead to ambiguous and indeterminate results: writing and desire are the sources of both the

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transcendence of time and the subjection to it, of feelings of both absence and presence, of both exile and coming home. This duality governing the act of writing of poetry of desire, and the fact that the poet has no means to resolve it, is often emphasized in the collection through the indeterminate character of many of the poems, which both celebrate and repudiate the impact of writing and desire on the self. Both in cases in which the impact of writing and desire seems most negative and in those in which they are celebrated as a source of transcendence, the alternative effect often looms and undermines the main thrust of the poem. By asserting thus the essential ambiguity dominating the impact of writing and desire on the self, I now show that Petrarch is rejecting both the Dantesque notion that desire and the writing of poetry of desire can serve as a vehicle for the complete redemption of our exile in time and the Augustinian view that such writing is fundamentally negative and hence must be discarded. Poem 118, an anniversary poem commemorating the sixteenth year of the poet’s love, and clearly one of the “Augustinian” poems in the collection, provides a perfect example of the way the poems themselves manifest the inescapable ambiguity governing the impact of writing on the self-in-love: Rimansi a dietro il sestodecimo anno de’ miei sospiri, et io trapasso inanzi verso l’estremo; et parmi che pur dianzi fosse ’l principio di cotanto affanno. L’amar m’`e dolce, et util il mio danno, e ’l viver grave; et prego che gli avanzi l’empia fortuna; et temo no chiuda anzi Morte i begli occhi che parlar mi fanno. Or qui son, lasso, et voglio esser altrove, et vorrei piu` volere, et piu` non voglio, et per piu` non poter fo quant’ io posso; et d’antichi desir lagrime nove provan com’ io son pur quel ch’ i’ mi soglio, n´e per mille rivolte ancor son mosso. Now remains behind the sixteenth year of my sighs, and I move forward toward the last; yet it seems to me that all this suffering began only recently. The bitter is sweet to me, and my losses useful, and living heavy; and I pray that my life may outlast my cruel fortune; and I fear that before then Death may close the lovely eyes that make me speak.

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Now here I am, alas, and wish I were elsewhere, and wish I wished more, but wish no more, and, by being unable to do more, do all I can; and new tears for old desires show me to be still what I used to be, nor for a thousand turnings about have I yet moved.

The sonnet begins with the tension between circularity and linearity governing virtually all of the anniversary poems: in contrast to the awareness of the constant flux of time and the movement forward toward death, the poet posits the circular and steadfast nature of his desire and writing (miei sospiri) – taking him back once again to the beginning – ’l principio (l. 4), and making him feel as if nothing has changed since the first time he saw his lady.36 The second stanza is then filled with paradoxes and antitheses, all emphasizing the ambiguous nature of desire. The first of these antitheses is one Petrarch is especially fond of: L’amar m’`e dolce (l. 5) – the “bitter is sweet to me,” but also “loving is sweet” – thus showing that the ambiguity of love is already inherent within the linguistic sign. At the end of this second quatrain, the poet reaffirms again his awareness of the passage of time and the presence of death, focusing on the fact that the lady herself will die, a death which will probably put an end to the poetry as well: che parlar mi fanno (l. 8). The true object of his desire, we discover again, is writing in itself. Nonetheless, in contrast to the persistent emphasis on the passage of time in the poem, in the final tercet, we come back again to the theme of circularity with which the poem started: io son pur quel ch’i’ mi soglio, n´e per mille rivolte ancor son mosso, a line that closely echoes the penultimate line of sonnet 145, in which circularity and lack of change are celebrated as the overcoming of time: sar`o qual fui, vivr`o com’ io son visso. This reference to the redemptive circularity brought about by writing and desire is in turn strengthened by the fact that the theme of circularity appears at both the beginning and ending of the poem – creating a sense of circular repetition that intensifies the thematic emphasis on circularity within the text, both militating against the prevalence of linearity. Writing, desire, and the circular effect they entail, as a result, are introduced in the poem once again as the possible sources of transcendence and being in the face of constant flux. Nevertheless, although challenging the constant passage of time, the nature of this circularity is highly ambiguous, as the tone of the poem demonstrates. The focus on the poet’s awareness of his own death and 36 On

sospiri (sighs) as metaphor to the poems in the collection, see n. 10 of this chapter.

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that of the lady, one which will also put an end to the writing, points to the vanity of his hope to overcome time through objects that are in themselves subjected to constant flux: death will put an end to both the objects of desire and his hope. By perpetuating his attachment to these transient objects, therefore, the act of writing only deepens his subjection to the constant flux of time rather than leading him beyond it. This stress on the dangerous impact of writing and desire becomes even stronger when we consider the third stanza: et vorrei piu` volere, et piu` non voglio, / et per piu` non poter fo quant’ io posso, which closely echoes Augustine’s meditations in Book 8 of the Confessions, right before his conversion: “et non faciebam quod et incomparabili affectu amplius mihi placebat, et mox ut vellem possem, quia mox ut vellem, utique vellem” (Conf.8.8.20) (“Yet I was not doing what with an incomparably greater longing I yearned to do, and could have done the moment I so resolved. For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted will”). Following closely Augustine’s wordplay on will and power, Petrarch thus implies that the solution to his state resides in a similar conversion, renouncing his earthly desires – both for the lady and for writing in itself – just like his saintly mentor.37 Nevertheless, such a conversion, as Petrarch’s deviations from Augustine’s account demonstrate, is beyond his power: whereas Augustine emphasizes his great longing to renounce his desires – et non faciebam quod et incomparabili affectu amplius mihi placebat – and is confident of his ability eventually to achieve his longing – et mox ut vellem possem, quia mox ut vellem, utique vellem – Petrarch demonstrates his reluctance to change – et vorrei piu` volere, et piu` non voglio (he would have liked to wish more, but the fact is that he does not) – and hence declares that he does only what he can, an action that obviously falls short of his model – et per piu` non poter fo quant’ io posso. Unable – or unwilling – to renounce his desire like Augustine, the poet is bound to remain trapped, according to this Augustinian perspective, within endless cycles of lack and longing. Rather than a mark of virtuous constancy and transcendence, the allusion to circularity in the next stanza – n´e per mille rivolte ancor son mosso – thus becomes the emblem of his failure to 37 As

Augustine states at the end of Book 8, the outcome of his conversion was mainly leaving behind his desires for women and glory through writing: “The effect of your converting me to yourself was that I did not now seek a wife and had no ambition for success in this world. I stood firm upon that rule of faith” (“Convertisti enim me ad te, ut nec uxorem quaererem nec aliquam spem saeculi huius, stans in ea regula fidei” [Conf.8.12.30]).

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convert, of his ongoing entrapment within the aimless circularity of his desire.38 Poem 118 therefore demonstrates that the meaning of the circularity brought about by writing and desire is in itself highly ambiguous, the mark of both the transcendence of time and entrapment within it. The impact of writing and desire on the self, we discover yet again, is essentially indefinite, making the poet both beyond time and within time, both absent and present to himself. Yet, as the allusion to Augustine in the poem makes clear, it is precisely the positive aspect of his writing and desire, the fact that they provide him with at least some form of transcendence through the circularity and steadfastness inherent in them, that makes it impossible for Petrarch to part from them altogether. The indeterminate nature of the impact of writing and desire on the self receives another ample demonstration in the group of canzoni 125–9, in which, as we have seen, the poet’s attainment of oblio is celebrated at first as the mark of his complete abolition of time through the combined impact of writing, memory, and desire. As shown in the discussion of canzoni 125–7, it was the act of writing about his “stoniness” that allowed the poet to overcome the despair and frozenness to which he was subdued, leading to the gradual reawakening of his desire and the full recollection of the first falling in love. The revival of this first memory in turn brought the poet back to his golden age, and with it to the blissful forgetfulness of his existence in time. This notion of blissful oblio also dominates the next canzone relating to love in this celebrated group, 129; in it the ambiguity inherent in this forgetfulness – and the impact of writing and desire leading to it – emerges to the surface. Following the political canzone, Italia mia, which not coincidentally laments the lack of peace and virtue in Petrarch’s beloved Italy – thus 38 The

fact that Petrarch dates the poem to 1343, the time period (1342–3) in which he implied to have written the Secretum – one of his most evident confrontations with the Augustinian challenge of conversion – alludes as well to the underlying presence of Augustine in the poem. For Petrarch’s dating of the Secretum to 1342–3, see Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna: il Mulino, 1992), 59–61. Moreover, the reference to circularity as the mark of entrapment and meaningless stasis is one of Augustine’s major criticisms of pagan culture, as he emphasizes in the City of God. See Aldo S. Bernardo, “Petrarch’s Autobiography: Circularity Revisited,” Annali d’Italianistica 4 (1986): 45–72, at 57–9, and John Freccero, “Dante’s Ulysses: From Epic to Novel,” in Dante: the Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 101–19, at 101.

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echoing his own personal strife – canzone 129 focuses from its onset on the poet’s own wavering, wondering Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte, unable to find the ultimate purpose of his desire: “Forse anco ti serva Amore ad un tempo migliore; forse a te stesso vile, altrui se’ caro”; et in questa trapasso sospirando: “Or porrebbe esser ver? or come? or quando?” (129.22–6) “Perhaps Love keeps you for a better time; perhaps, though vile to yourself, you are dear to someone else.” And I go over to this thought, sighing: “Now could it be true? But how? But when?”

Trapped within this labyrinthine soliloquy, the poet’s only way out is once again the meditation on the memory of his beloved – facilitated through the act of writing in which he is engaged – and the complete forgetfulness that ensues: Ma mentre tener fiso posso al primo pensier la mente vaga, et mirar lei et obliar me stesso, sento Amor s`ı da presso che del suo proprio error l’alma s’appaga; in tante parti et s`ı bella la veggio che se l’error durasse, altro non cheggio. (129.33–9) But as long as I can hold my yearning mind fixed on the first thought, and look at her and forget myself, I feel love so close by that my soul is satisfied by its own deception; in so many places and so beautiful I see her, that, if the deception should last, I ask for no more.

The same remedy that allowed him to transcend his exile in time and space in canzoni 126 and 127 now allows the poet to overcome the constant flux of his thoughts: as long as he can hold his mind fixed on the first thought of love, as he tells us, he can completely forget his own existence in time and put his wavering mind to a halt. Nevertheless, although celebrating again his blissful forgetfulness, this portrayal of the poet’s oblio in canzone 129 also begins to direct our attention to the danger and ambiguity inherent in it, one we could sense all along. As the use of error in line 37 and the reference to the dependence of this error on temporality – se l’error durasse (l. 39) – demonstrate, the poet is constantly aware of the illusory nature of his presence, of the fact that it is built on an absence, a phantasm, a memory of an image that does not exist

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anymore and that hence might dissolve at any given moment and lead to complete disintegration: Poi quando il vero sgombra quel dolce error, pur l`ı medesmo assido me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva, in guisa d’uom che pensi et pianga et scriva. (129.49–52) Then, when the truth dispels that sweet deception, right there in the same place I sit down, cold, a dead stone on the living rock, like a man who thinks and weeps and writes.

The attempt to establish his being on the memory of an earthly object, the poem thus demonstrates, is bound to lead to frustration. As time – indicated by the temporal adverbs Poi quando that open line 49 – passes by, the poet is bound to wake up from the illusion and to realize that in the process of “weeping, thinking, writing” (pensi et pianga et scriva) that led to this blissful forgetfulness he in fact was transformed into the object of his meditation – became an empty and lifeless image – in guisa d’uom – just like it. Rather than leading him to heaven, the self-forgetfulness attained through writing, memory, and desire leads him to hell, making him nothing but a pale reflection of himself. The phrase et obliar me stesso in line 35 of the canzone thus receives new meaning: if at first it signified the transcendence of time and his wavering, now it comes to reflect the complete loss of self and the subjection to constant fluctuation and wavering. This recognition of the ambiguity inherent in the poet’s oblio and its sources is not the end of canzone 129 and the sequence, however. In the envoi of 129, Petrarch declares his intention to come back to the valley of Vaucluse, where the breeze of the laurel is felt (“ove l’aura si sente / d’un fresco et odorifero laureto” [129.69–70]) and where his heart is: “ivi e` ’l mio cor et quella che ’l m’invola: / qui veder poi l’imagine mia sola” (129.71–2) (“there is my heart, and she who steals it from me; here you can see only my image”). At the end of the poem, therefore, the poet asserts that the problem is nothing but the physical exile from the lady and that the return to her presence, and to that of the laurel, will in fact bring him back to himself – will allow him above all to compose more poetry. Nonetheless, the return to the presence of the lady, we might assume, will probably bring him back to the attempt to soften her heart by the poems, and thus to the danger of renewing her harshness and his all-too-accustomed failure and despair, to which the remedy again will be the renewal of desire through writing and the

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self-forgetfulness that ensues. We have thus completed a full circle and returned exactly to where we began in canzone 125: the realization of the dangers of his oblio did not change anything in the poet’s state. Having no other choice, no other source of salvation, all that the poet can do is to keep desiring and writing, moving in cycles of momentary satisfaction and frustration, dependent on a forgetfulness that is essentially ambiguous: holding within it both salvation and destruction, both heaven and hell. This emphasis on the ambiguity of writing and desire and the forgetfulness to which they lead is further intensified when we consider the source lying behind much of the description in these canzoni – the final cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. I have already mentioned Durling’s insight that the appearance of Laura amid the flowers in lines 40–5 of canzone 126 is a clear allusion to the appearance of Beatrice in Purgatorio 30. However, this appearance of Beatrice, we should remember, also started a process that eventually led to Dante’s open confession of his sins: “Le presenti cose col falso lor piacer volser miei passi” (Purg.31.34– 5) (“Mere appearances turned me aside with their false loveliness”) and to his baptism by Matilda in the water of Lethe (Purg.31.94–6), the river that “con virtu` discende / che toglie altrui memoria del peccato” (Purg.28.127–8) (“descends with power to end one’s memory of sin”). In both Dante’s and Petrarch’s descriptions, therefore, the appearance of the lady – attained through the mutual act of writing and memory – is followed by the achievement of a blissful forgetfulness, with the crucial difference that in Petrarch’s case, it is the memory of the first innamoramento that fulfills the role of Dante’s Christianized Lethe as the agent of forgetfulness.39 Thus, although imitating Dante, this difference in the source of forgetfulness also directs our attention to Petrarch’s crucial departure from his predecessor: whereas Dante’s portrayal focuses on the forgetfulness of the sinful past, of the “old man” in the Pauline and Augustinian fashion – giving up the attachment to all “mere appearances” – Petrarch’s description suggests a forgetfulness of self achieved by clinging to the past, by constantly reliving and rekindling the memory of the first falling in love. And whereas Dante’s forgetfulness, as a result, is unambiguously the final step before reaching heaven, in Petrarch’s 39 Moreover,

it is significant that in other instances in the collection, Petrarch directly associates his oblio with drinking from Lethe, as in the example cited earlier from poem 193: “ch´e sol mirando, oblio ne l’alma piove / d’ogni altro dolce, et Lete al fondo bibo” (193.3–4) (“for when I merely gaze, oblivion rains into my heart of all other sweetness, and I drink Lethe to the bottom”).

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case, forgetfulness is a momentary heaven that is also a descent into hell. Petrarch’s departure from Dante’s view of the relations among desire, writing, and self in this group of canzoni comes explicitly to the fore also in the opening lines of canzone 127 of the sequence: In quella parte dove Amor mi sprona conven ch’ io volga le dogliose rime che son seguaci de la mente afflitta: quai fien ultime, lasso, et qua’ fien prime? Collui che del mio mal meco ragiona mi lascia in dubbio, s`ı confuso ditta. (127.1–6) Toward where love spurs me I must turn my sorrowful rhymes, which follow my afflicted mind. Which shall be last, alas, and which first? He who speaks with me about my ills leaves me in doubt, so confusedly he dictates.

These lines are a direct allusion to Dante’s discourse on poetry with the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca in canto 24 of the Purgatorio.40 Describing his meeting with the poet, Dante narrates how Bonagiunta asked him whether he is the one who brought the new rhymes forth: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, to which he replied: “E io a lui: ‘I’ mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando’” (Purg.24.52–4) (“I answered: ‘I am one who, when love breathes / in me, takes note: what he, within, dictates, / I, in that way, without, would speak and shape’”). These lines from the Purgatorio are in turn an allusion to Dante’s depiction of himself as the scribe of Love in the third chapter of the Vita nuova. Portraying a chance encounter he had with Beatrice, in which she deigned to greet him for the first time, Dante describes how he went back to his room and there experienced a vision in which he saw, among other things, the lady eating his heart. Waking up from the vision, Dante wrote a poem about it, and sent it to the leading poets of the time asking them to interpret its obscure meaning. Nonetheless, while at that time, as he states, “Lo verace giudicio del detto sogno non fue veduto allora per alcuno” (Vita nuova 3.15) (“the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone”), by now the confusion has been resolved, for the meaning of the poem is “manifestissimo a li piu` semplici” (Vita nuova 3.15) (“completely clear 40 The

relation between these two passages is also discussed in Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Metamorphoses, 91–2. See also the discussion in Peter Hainsworth, “Rhetorics of Autobiography in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio,” Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 3 (1994–5): 53–63.

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even to the least sophisticated”).41 Both in the Purgatorio and the Vita nuova, therefore, Dante claims that it is desire that leads him to write poetry, stating in the Vita nuova that even if the meaning of the words “Love dictates” might seem at first obscure, he has no doubt that their significance will eventually be discovered. His desire, Dante asserts in both texts, has an undeniable meaning and purpose – ultimately leading him to heaven – and the act of writing poetry of desire not only captures this meaning but also provides him with the pregnant signs through which this meaning might be revealed. While following in canzone 127 Dante’s self-portrayal as the scribe of Love, Petrarch nevertheless laments that the dictates of Love are essentially confused (s`ı confuso ditta) and that they only leave him in doubt (mi lascia in dubbio). In direct opposition to his predecessor, Petrarch thus claims that his experience of desire is essentially ambiguous and uncertain – functioning, as we have seen, as a source of both the transcendence of time and the fall into it – and that the act of writing poetry, rather than supplying him with the means to discover the truth about his experience, only contributes to his overall sense of confusion and doubt. In this group of canzoni, Petrarch therefore asserts, in contrast to Dante, that desire and the writing of poetry of desire cannot lead to the complete transcendence of the flux of time42 but rather, as we have seen, only provide moments of presence that are bound to pass away in the blink of an eye and to perpetuate the very subjection to time he is trying to overcome through them. At the same time, however, it is the fact that writing and desire provide him with at least moments of bliss that leads him to reject the precepts of Augustine and the Stoics regarding the need to discard fully both desire and the writing that is dominated by it. Even as late in the collection as poem 360, written and revised probably in the 1350s,43 the figure of reason, judging whether Amor was ultimately a source of blessing or a curse for Petrarch, declares, “ma piu` tempo 41 The

Italian edition is taken from Le opere di Dante, ed. Michele Barbi (Florence: Societ`a Dantesca Italiana, 1960). English translation: Dante, Dante’s Vita Nuova, trans. Mark L. Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). 42 Dante’s assertion that through his desire for Beatrice he attains the complete transcendence of the passage of time receives its ultimate portrayal in the description of the beatific vision in the final canto of the Paradiso: “Un punto solo m’`e maggior letargo / che venticinque secoli a la ’mpresa / che f´e Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’ Argo” (Par.33.94–6) (That one moment / brings more forgetfulness to me than twenty- / five centuries have brought to the endeavor / that startled Neptune with the Argo’s shadow!) 43 See Ernest Hatch Wilkins, The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Studies, (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1951), 354.

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bisogna a tanta lite” (360.157) (“but more time is needed for so great a lawsuit”). The self who attempts to overcome the flux of time by writing poetry of desire, Petrarch ultimately demonstrates in the collection, is bound to remain in exile, to continue to rush along with the current, able to reach out and touch the banks for only some brief moments of grace – moments that perhaps make it all worthwhile.

2 The Crisis of the Narrative Self

In the previous chapter, I discussed Petrarch’s attempt to overcome his sense of flux and exile in time through the writing of poetry of desire, an attempt intrinsically intertwined with his experience of desire. The act of writing such poetry, as we have seen, serves for Petrarch as the constant aspect of his existence, as well as a personal ritual and a meditative exercise that allow him to return over and over again to the moment of falling in love, his golden age, and thus to abolish the incessant passage of time. In addition, Petrarch also claims that by writing poetry about his noble object of desire, he is transformed into it, becoming virtuous and steadfast. Nonetheless, this attempt to overcome time through the writing of poetry, as the previous chapter demonstrated, could provide the poet with only limited and ambiguous results, making him both beyond time and subjected to time, both present and absent to himself at once. In his portrayal of this essential ambiguity governing the impact of writing and desire on the self, Petrarch was rejecting both Dante’s assertion in the Commedia that desire and the writing of poetry of desire can lead to the complete transcendence of the flow of time and the Augustinian claim that the impact of desire and writing on the self is essentially negative and hence that the two must be discarded. While portraying the ambiguous outcome of the poet’s attempt to abolish time completely through the dual impact of desire and writing, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta also brings to the fore another solution to the malaise of temporality: the reconstruction in writing of the narrative of the poet’s vicissitudes and fluctuations in time, or, in other words, of the meaning underlying the constant change. Rather than defying time completely – as was the goal of the attempts described in the previous chapter – this alternative solution accepts change as inevitable but 54

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argues that the self’s constant fluctuations in time have an underlying meaning and purpose, the revelation of which could redeem the sense of loss and nonbeing to which the poet is helplessly subjected. This alternative solution to the experience of flux and exile in time is the one offered by both Augustine and the Dante of the Vita nuova. The examination of Petrarch’s attempt – and ultimate failure – to structure such a healing narrative therefore allows us also to explore further the significance of Petrarch’s rejection of his two predecessors in his collection of poems.1 Readers of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta have often debated the extent to which Petrarch’s collection of poems represents an attempt to impose order and meaning on the fragments of his past, and, indeed, the extent to which the sequence can be regarded as a narrative. Marco Santagata, for example, has argued that the organization of the poems 1 This

notion of the narrative self, extremely influential in contemporary approaches to the self, originated in the thought of Augustine. For the bishop of Hippo, while our “true selves,” our eternal souls created in the image and likeness of God, are beyond the vicissitudes of time and change, our embodied existence in time subjects our selfknowledge to the dictates of temporality, and allows us to know ourselves only as a process, a continuum. It is therefore the act of imposing order and coherence upon our scattered and formless memories – the creation of the narrative – that defines to a large extent who we are. According to Augustine, however, in order to be able to structure the narrative, to guarantee that the story being told is the true and objective one, the narrator has to undergo first a religious conversion that will allow him or her to realize the working of God’s grace within his or her personal history. Secular autobiography, which is not grounded in the authority of divine revelation, is bound to be subjective and misleading in his view. In the Confessions, moreover, this ability to structure the narrative also entails a crucial ethical and therapeutic value, as it allows Augustine to transcend as far as possible in this life the sense of fragmentation to which he is subjected: “You are my eternal father, but I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my soul, the inmost entrails of my thoughts” (“et tu solacium meum, domine, pater meus aeternus es. At ego in tempora dissilui quorum ordinem nescio, et tumultuosis varietatibus dilaniantur cogitationes meae, intima viscera animae meae” [Conf.11.29.39]) as he declares at the end of his meditation on time. The ability to discern and narrate the order and meaning underlying his experiences is thus crucial in allowing him to overcome this experience of fragmentation. On the Augustinian notion of the narrative self, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5–30; Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 21–121; and Eugene Vance, “Augustine’s Confessions and the Grammar of Selfhood,” Genre 6 (1973): 1–28. For contemporary narrative approaches to the self, see, in addition to Ricoeur, Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002); James Olney, Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 47–52.

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in a sequence that reflects the linear passage of time clearly represents the poet’s effort to create an ideal autobiography that will allow him to cope with the ravages of the Black Death of 1348 and the crisis that ensued.2 By gathering his poems into a collection, according to Santagata, Petrarch attempted to impose a sense of moral order, of a linear advancement from earthly to divine love in the fashion of Dante, on the scattered poems of his past and the image of himself emerging from them.3 Other critics, in contrast, in what has become of late the dominant approach, emphasize the sense of fragmentation and lack of order dominating the collection, reflected in the title Petrarch chose for it, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.4 The fact that Petrarch refrained from the use of prose to link together his poems as Dante did in the Vita nuova, and the evident lack of a clear religious conversion in the fashion of Augustine, turn Petrarch’s poetics, in the words of Giuseppe Mazzotta, to a “poetics of fragmentation,” emphasizing the inability of the self to reach an authorial point from which the order of the events of the past might be revealed. Rather than an attempt to impose order, therefore, the collection, according to these views, only demonstrates Petrarch’s sense of the essential decenteredness and fragmentation of the self.5 2 Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna:

il Mulino, 1992), 9. nonetheless acknowledges that this attempt to impose a clear linear development on the fragments of his past have brought only limited results. See Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 217–52. Kenelm Foster, in Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), also detects in the collection a linear motion reflecting the gradual transformation of Laura from Medusa to Beatrice, a transformation that is nevertheless undermined by the eventual Augustinian repudiation of the beloved: “Petrarch, having chosen to end the Canzoniere with Mary replacing Laura, sacrificed one side of his artist’s nature to another, his instinct for unity and continuity to the claims of dramatic contrast” (89). The notion of a creation of linear continuum in the collection that reflects the poet’s moral development is also advanced by Bortolo Martinelli, “L’ordinamento morale del Canzoniere del Petrarca,” in Petrarca e il Ventoso (Bergamo: Minerva Italica, 1977), 217–300. 4 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 58–60. An influential statement regarding the nonnarrative nature of the collection is provided by Umberto Bosco: “il vero e` che non possiamo in alcun modo ravvisare una linea di sviluppo, uno svolgimento, non solo nel canzoniere, ma in tutto il Petrarca. Egli e` senza storia, se lo si considera, come si deve, nel concreto di tutta l’opera sua.” Bosco, Francesco Petrarca (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 7. See also Nicholas Mann, Petrarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 46–67, and the discussion in Robert M. Durling, “Introduction,” in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 24–6. 5 Scholars highlighting the fragmentary nature of the collection raise different explanations to account for Petrarch’s scattered self-representation. Natalino Sapegno attributes 3 Santagata

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The aim of this chapter is to show that the contemporary debate between those who view the collection as a counterpart to Augustine’s Confessions and those who see it as a precursor to the postmodern emphasis on the fragmentation of the self is a question inherent to the collection itself. Although representing the poet’s longing to follow both Dante’s attempt in the Vita nuova and Augustine’s Confessions to attain unity and order through the construction of a meaningful narrative of his past, the collection also persistently highlights the poet’s failure to reach the authorial point from which such a narrative might be revealed. The source of this failure, this chapter argues, is precisely the poet’s opposite effort to abolish time completely by means of his desire and writing and the circularity embedded in them, creating in the collection a constant and irresolvable tension between narrativity and circularity.6 Examining Petrarch’s approach to the narrative mainly through his attempt to provide the history of his desire in canzone 23 – the so-called canzone della metamorfosi, which in many respects serves as a reflection of the entire collection – this chapter shows that for Petrarch, in direct opposition to Dante, the attachment to an earthly desire – and the act of writing poetry of desire – necessarily prevent the construction of the narrative. Whereas the fragmentary nature of the collection to the general turn in the period to a “modern” focus on the subjective experience, prizing a “free” and “immediate” “illuminazione della coscienza.” See Natalino Sapegno, Storia della Letteratura Italiana: Il Trecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1974), 264. Mazzotta, in turn, focuses on the inner mechanisms of Petrarch’s poetic language, and attributes fragmentation to the essential failure of language to capture the self in writing. Adelia Noferi, in a similar fashion, emphasizes the essential alterity of language, its inherent failure to represent the thing in itself – especially the beloved Laura – as the source of the sense of void and decenterdness dominating the collection. See Noferi, “Il Canzoniere del Petrarca: scrittura del desiderio e desiderio della scrittura,” In Il gioco delle trace: studi su Dante, Petrarca, Bruno, il neo-classicismo, Leopardi, l’informale (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979), 53. John Freccero, finally, places the onus on Petrarch’s “idolatry,” his desire for originality and individuality that leads him to reject the traditional Augustinian “Logos.” See Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40. 6 In emphasizing Petrarch’s ambiguous attitude to the narrative, this chapter is indebted again to Teodolinda Barolini’s article “The Making of the Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” MLN, 104.1 (1989): 1–38, which argues that Petrarch’s longing to overcome time leads him to undermine the narrativity of the sequence by “calling [its parts] – and to a lesser extent by making them – fragments” (7). However, by identifying time and narrative as one and the same thing, Barolini claims that Petrarch’s attitude to the narrative is solely negative, thus ignoring the redemptive aspect of the narrative in its Augustinian and Dantesque guise. It is precisely the dialectic between the attempt to structure a healing narrative of the past on one hand and the longing to abolish time altogether through the matrix of writing and desire on the other that I explore in this chapter.

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for Dante both desire and writing serve as sources of meaning – the revelation of which allows him to realize and convey the overall significance of his experience in time – Petrarch shows by means of his use of Ovidian language of myth that his experience of desire in time is essentially ambiguous, essentially meaningless, thus undermining any possibility of structuring a coherent narrative of his past. At the same time, however, it is the poet’s inability to give up his desire – both for Laura and for writing itself – and his persistent attempt to overcome time by means of his desire, that stands in the way of a true change of heart in the manner of Augustine, a leap of faith – rather than an acquisition of knowledge as in the case of Dante – that will allow him to renounce his earthly desire and realize the narrative. This emphasis on the ambiguous nature of his experience of desire in time, and his inability to reject this desire, in turn dominates the entire collection, demonstrating the poet’s ultimate failure to resolve the conflict between circularity and narrativity governing his experience. Under such circumstances, as Petrarch ultimately shows, the authorial point from which to structure a meaningful narrative of his past will continue to elude him; all that he can do is place the fragments together in a sequence, in a continuum that is bound only to convey the ambiguity, the perpetual and insurmountable tensions governing his experience in time.

Desire and the Crisis of Meaning Canzone 23, described by Petrarch himself in a note added to one of its manuscripts as “est de primis inventionibus nostris” (“one of our earliest inventions”) and believed by scholars to have been written in 1333–4 and then much revised until its final transcription7 in 1356, provides one of Petrarch’s earliest attempts to describe his life in a continuous narrative form. Although his “duro scempio” (23.9) (“harsh undoing”) by desire, as he states, is already written elsewhere and exhausted many a pen, Petrarch tells us that he intends to repeat on this occasion the story of his “undoing” from the perspective of the present moment. The attempt to provide an account of his history of desire through the mutual act of memory and writing immediately brings to mind Dante’s project in the Vita nuova, and in the middle of the canzone, Petrarch indeed alludes directly to the work of his predecessor: 7 See

discussion in Dennis Dutschke, Francesco Petrarca Canzone XXIII: From First to Final Version (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 10–31.

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Ma perch´e ’l tempo e` corto la penna al buon voler non po gir presso, onde piu` cose ne la mente scritte vo trapassando, et sol d’alcune parlo che meraviglia fanno a chi l’ascolta. (23.90–4) But because time is short, my pen cannot follow closely my good will; wherefore I pass over many things written in my mind and speak only of some, which make those who hear them marvel.

The reference in these lines to the events of his past as “written” in his mind – ne la mente scritte – echoes Dante’s allusion to his memory as a book in the opening pages of the Vita nuova, in which he also declares his intention to document in writing everything that is “written” there.8 Moreover, Petrarch’s allusion to his inability to convey everything that is written in his mind recalls Dante’s reference to his own need of selection, a reference which he concludes with the authorial assertion that even if he would not be able to document all of the events, he will at least convey their “meaning”: “e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia” (Vita nuova 1.1) (“if not all of them, at least the essence of their meaning”). Alluding thus to Dante’s project of conveying the order and meaning of his overall experience of desire in time, Petrarch manifests that his own canzone corresponds at least in part to such an urge for order and meaning.9 Nonetheless, although echoing Dante’s opening remarks in the Vita nuova, these lines from canzone 23 also represent Petrarch’s evident departure from Dante’s authoritative assertions in his libello. The emphasis in 8 “In

quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali e` mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia” (Vita nuova 1.1) (“In my Book of Memory, in the early part where there is little to be read, there comes a chapter with the rubric: Incipit vita nova. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading – if not all of them, at least the essence of their meaning”). On Petrarch’s allusions to Dante in these lines, see also Bettarini’s commentary in Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere [Rerum vulgarium fragmenta], 2 vols., ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 118–19. 9 On the Vita nuova as Dante’s attempt to convey the meaning of his experience of desire in time, see Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), 55: “The way in which the death of Beatrice appears (and reappears) at its center, the manner in which this Book becomes a book with a multiple gloss revealing the true meaning of her life and death (and the causes and the meaning of the poems) – these are all so many indications of a construction which is ever aware of the inner principle of its own being, which is a principle of becoming toward an end.” See also Giuseppe Mazzotta’s comments in Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 261–2.

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these lines on the need of selection and on the poet’s decision, as a result, to focus only on the outstanding aspects of his experience that make others “marvel” – meraviglia fanno – also recalls his words in the preface he wrote to his major work of biographies, De viris illustribus: Now, if anyone who really wants to know all of history will say that I have left out entirely too much and have neglected the law of history which as I know was recorded by Cicero, I will defend myself by calling attention to my diligence and to the infinite quantity of events. Since it is virtually impossible to satisfy the curiosity to know everything, I have instead taken the position that I shall treat only those things which acquire splendor in the treatment. Hence, I shall observe the rule I have read in Horace’s Ars Poetica.10

Unable to discuss everything, Petrarch writes (as in canzone 23), he had to leave aside Cicero’s “law of history” – the need to tell “the truth and the whole truth”11 – and to follow instead the suggestion of Horace, to tell only about things that acquire splendor (nitescere), recalling the meraviglia fanno of 23.94.12 Every biography (and history), Petrarch thus claims, shares some aspects with the art of poetry, with the creation of poetic fiction, of fabula.13 This reference to life-writing as a poetic creation 10 “Siquis

vero fuerit cognoscende omnis historie cupidissimus, qui multa nimis pretermisisse me dixerit legemque historie derelictam esse, quam a Cicerone commemoratam scio, diligentie atque animadversioni illius infinitam rerum magnitudinem obiciam, cuius amplectende quoniam inextricabilis curiositas visa est, eo potius consilium flexi, ut que desperarem tractata nitescere non attingenda censerem, et quod in Poetica legeram in historia servarem.” The Latin edition is taken from Petrarca, Prose, eds. G. Martellotti et al. (Milan: Ricciardi Editore, 1955), 222. The translation is from Benjamin G. Kohl, “Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus,” History and Theory 13 (1974): 132–44, at 140. 11 The reference is to Cicero, De oratore 2.15.62 (“Nam quis nescit primam esse historiae legem, ne quid falsi dicere audeat? Deinde ne quid veri non audeat?”). See note in Petrarca, Prose, 222. 12 “Semper ad euentum festinat et in medias res / Non secus ac notas auditorem rapit, et quae / Desperat tractata nitescere posse relinquit; / Atque ita mentitur, sic ueris falsa remiscet, / Primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum” (Ars poetica, 148–52) (“Always he hurries to the outcome and rushes his hearer into the midst of a subject with which he is already familiar, and if there are parts of the matter that he knows for sure cannot be treated interestingly, he abandons them, and his lies have the quality, his mixture of falsehood and truth the effect, that the middle is not discordant with the beginning, nor the end with the middle”). Edition: Horatii Flacci, Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891). English translation: Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. Burton Raffel, with a prose trans. by James Hynd (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974). 13 The juxtaposition of the terms historia and fabula, and the association of history with truth and fabula with fiction, is prevalent in medieval rhetoric. In the Etymologies (Etym.), Isidore of Seville defines fabula as poetic fiction: “Fabulas poetae a fando nominaverunt,

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rather than objective history appears also in a letter Petrarch wrote to Lelius (Angelo di Pietro Stefano dei Tosetti), in which he tells him about his meeting with the emperor Charles IV. Recalling the emperor’s request that he narrate for him the story of his life – “he wished to hear the entire events of my life in order from the day I was born to the present age” (“a die ortus usque ad hanc etatem totam vite mee . . . ex ordine voluit audire” [Fam.19.3.16]) – Petrarch adds that he does not know whether he should call such an account “fiction or history” (“fabulam dicam an historiam?” [Fam.19.3.16]).14 The writing of both biographies and autobiographies therefore resides for him in the shadowy realm between history and fiction, and the mutual act of memory and writing, as we discover, cannot be trusted to provide him with a certain account of the past: a subjective element of creation and fiction necessarily intervenes. The parallel between Petrarch’s account in canzone 23 and the De viris illustribus thus creates a striking contrast between the canzone and the opening lines of Dante’s Vita nuova: whereas Dante’s reference to the need of selection leads him to assert his ability to provide the objective meaning of his history, Petrarch alludes to the essential element of fiction that accompanies his portrayal, and hence to his inability to provide such a definitive meaning. This contrast is further emphasized by the two poets’ actual use of fabula in their respective works: in the second chapter of the Vita nuova, Dante goes on to describe his first meeting with his glorious lady, when they were both just nine years old. Recalling the color of the dress she wore at the time, the awakening of the “spirit of life” within him, his submission to the god of love, and so on, Dante nevertheless breaks off the recollection abruptly in the middle, declaring that because things written about such an early age have the air of fiction to them – “para alcuno parlare fabuloso” (Vita nuova 2.10) – he will leave quia non sunt res factae, sed tantum loquendo fictae” (Etym.1.40), whereas Historia, in contrast, is defined as the narration of true events: “Historia est narratio rei gestae, per quam ea, quae in praeterito facta sunt, dinoscuntur” (Etym.1.41). The edition is Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Hugh of St. Victor, as Giuseppe Mazzotta has shown following M.-D. Chenu, mitigates Isidore’s view of history and differentiates between secular history, belonging to the realm of grammar alongside fables, and the realm of Christian sacred history. For Hugh, therefore, secular history unaided by the authority of divine revelation belongs to the same category as poetic fiction. Petrarch, in this sense, follows Hugh’s categories and applies them to the writing of personal history, claiming that secular autobiography essentially belongs to the realm of fables. See discussion in Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 66–7. 14 This line does not appear in Bernardo’s translation.

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behind this part of his life and will move on to narrate what is written under “maggiori paragrafi” (Vita nuova 2.10) – more important and certain headings. However, whereas Dante leaves behind the “fabulous” aspects of his past to narrate only of what he is certain, Petrarch, in contrast, chooses to narrate in canzone 23 his entire life as a fabula – using a series of Ovidian myths of metamorphosis to portray his experience of desire in time – thus highlighting his sense that the ultimate objective meaning of his experience necessarily eludes him. At the same time, while the use of fabulae in canzone 23 demonstrates the poet’s sense of the essential failure of every secular autobiography to narrate the definitive meaning of the past, it also serves to show – and again in direct opposition to Dante – that the source of this failure resides in the very nature of the impact of both writing and desire on the self. Whereas Dante emphasizes, as we have seen, the meaningful nature of his experience of desire and his ability to discern and convey this meaning,15 Petrarch demonstrates in canzone 23 through his use of Ovid that his experience of desire is essentially ambiguous and that as a result the attempt to portray in writing the history of his desire in time is bound to fail. In all the metamorphoses the poet undergoes in the poem, as I show in the following pages, desire and writing are portrayed as sources of exile and loss – of either the golden age of the poet’s youth or his poetic voice; simultaneously, these losses are always sublimated into further writing in commemoration of the loss and thus into a renewed hope of overcoming it through the attainment of the laurel, the emblem of poetic glory. Thus, while desire and writing are the causes of the poet’s fall from the golden age of his youth into time and constant flux – always leading him toward new forms – they are also the source of the transcendence of the flux through the circularity and repetitiveness embedded in them, bringing the poet persistently back to the first laurel.16 15 For

Dante, moreover, as shown at the end of the previous chapter, the act of writing poetry of desire plays a crucial role in allowing him to discern the overall meaning of his experience of desire. As he describes, it is desire that leads him to write, and it is the gradual revelation of the meaning of his poems that allows him in turn to realize the overall significance of his experience of desire in time. 16 Metamorphosis, inaugurated by desire, is thus for Petrarch the process through which identity and being are either attained or lost. In the following analysis, references to “transcendence” and “presence” allude to the sense of being the poet attains through the return to the laurel and to the hope of overcoming time that it entails, whereas references to “exile” and “absence” allude to the sense of loss of self – the fall into time – that accompanies in the poem either the loss of the first golden age of bliss or of the poet’s poetic voice and thus the laurel itself.

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Serving thus as sources of both the fall into time and the overcoming of time – both absence and presence – the impact of desire and writing on the self, according to Petrarch, is essentially ambiguous, and it is precisely this ambiguity that prevents him from discerning and conveying the meaning of his experience in time. Dominated by desire, as the canzone shows, the poet is bound to fluctuate endlessly amid the same experiences in different guises over and over again, unable to break the cycles and realize a certain meaning underlying the constant repetition. For Petrarch, as the poem demonstrates further, it is the Ovidian language of myth – standing in stark contrast to Dante’s authorial language of desire – that is the perfect medium by which to capture this ambiguity and meaninglessness governing the impact of writing and desire on the self, undermining the possibility of structuring the narrative of his past.

Circularity and Narrativity in Canzone 23 The ambiguous nature of the poet’s experience in time, undermining his attempt to structure the narrative, comes to the fore, as shown in the previous chapter, already in the poet’s first transformation into the laurel in canzone 23. Representing on the one hand the endpoint of his golden age and his fall into constant fluctuation with the entry into desire and writing, this metamorphosis also celebrates, on the other hand, the transcendence of the flux through this same desire, providing the poet with both constancy and immortality.17 The first transformation, in this sense, represents both the ultimate loss – that of the primal bliss – and the definitive sublimation – the attainment of being and immortality through desire and writing, through becoming the laurel.18 In all the ensuing transformations, however, the focus is on the loss and attainment of the 17 See

discussion at the beginning of the second section of Chapter 1 (“Writing, Desire, and the Fall”). 18 The first metamorphosis into the laurel reflects the ambiguity governing the self in love in one more sense: by alluding to the immortality he attains through the laurel, Petrarch represents himself as Apollo, as the agent-poet who manages to become immortal like the god of poetry through his writings. Nonetheless, this transformation into the laurel is at the same time also a transformation into the beloved – Laura/Daphne, given that in the original myth, it is the lady who becomes the laurel while being pursued by Apollo. By transforming the myth and representing himself as the one undergoing the metamorphosis into the laurel, the poet thus intentionally breaks down accepted categories of male and female, lover and beloved, hunter and hunted: he is in fact both Apollo and Daphne, both man and woman, both the hunter and the hunted. The identity of the self-in-love, he thus emphasizes, is never fixed and unitary but always ambiguous and shifting.

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laurel itself, of the poet’s poetic voice, rather than that of his golden age, thus implying that the loss of the primary bliss is beyond recovery. The age of reason, the one before the poet’s submission to the flux of time, canzone 23 implies, is forever lost. The second metamorphosis of the poet, appearing at the end of the third strophe, reflects this new emphasis: raising his hopes for poetic glory too high following his transformation into the laurel, the poet fell thunderstruck into ruin like Phaeton: “allor che folminato et morto giacque / il mio sperar che tropp’ alto montava” (23.52–3) (“when thunderstruck and dead lay my hope that was mounting too high”). Nevertheless, after this fall, the poet was transformed into a swan – recalling the myth of Phaeton’s mournful friend Cygnus – incessantly singing about his evil fate: “et giamai poi la mia lingua non tacque / mentre poteo del suo cader maligno” (23.58) (“and from then on my tongue was never silent about its evil fall, as long as it had power”).19 Grouping together the myths of Phaeton and Cygnus (as in Ovid), Petrarch thus emphasizes the twofold impact of his desire and writing undermining his ability to discern the ultimate meaning of his experience and structure the narrative: although desire and writing lead to destruction and loss of hope, they are also the source of further writing in commemoration of the loss and thus of the renewed hope of transcendence of the flux of time through the attainment of poetic glory, the return to the desired laurel. In the next transformation, recalling the myth of Battus (Met.2.676– 707), the language of desire serves again as a source of both transgression and possible redemption: represented first as Apollo, the one whose belongings (in this case, his heart) were stolen, the poet then, like Battus, breaks his promise not to tell about the theft he witnessed. In response, he is transformed by the lady into a stone. The poet’s identity is thus doubled here between the arch-poet Apollo and the petty liar Battus, and his Battus-like transgression leads to the loss of his ability to speak – the farthest point from his object of desire. In the next stanza, however, this destructive desire and transgression also become a source of renewed writing and possible presence, as the poet, unable to keep silent any longer about the loss of his heart and wishing to aid his afflicted powers, pours himself out in writing: Morte mi s’era intorno al cor avolta n´e tacendo potea di sua man trarlo o dar soccorso a le vertuti afflitte; 19 For

both myths, see Met.1.747–2.380.

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le vive voci m’erano interditte, ond’ io gridai con carta et con incostro: “Non son mio, no; s’ io moro il danno e` vostro.” (23.95–100) Death was wrapped about my heart, nor by being silent could I draw it from her hand or give any aid to my afflicted powers. Words spoken aloud were forbidden me; so I cried out with paper and ink: “I am not my own, no; if I die, yours is the loss.”

The theft of the heart and the loss of the living voice, therefore, lead to sublimation in writing. However, while alluding to the possible resolution of his Battus-like transgression, these lines closing the fifth strophe also prepare the way for the coming transformation into a fountain, recalling the myth of Byblis. In the Ovidian rendition of the myth, Byblis decides to reveal in writing what she cannot in spoken words – her illicit love for her brother: “coget amor, potero! vel, si pudor ora tenebit, / littera celatos arcana fatebitur ignes” (Met.9.515–6) (“Love will compel me: I can! or if shame holds my lips, a private letter shall confess my secret love”).20 This allusion to Byblis’ decision to let the writings do what speech could not thus doubles the meaning of the lines closing the strophe: for while as the closure of the Battus episode they provide the hope for sublimation, as the opening of the Byblis sequence, they represent the dangers of writing. It was Byblis’ decision to reveal her desire in writing that led to her brother’s furious response and her ensuing exile and tearful transformation into a fountain, and it is the same fate that again awaits the poet: his written prayers only inflamed the lady’s disdain, and unable to find even a trace of her feet, he was transformed into a fountain out of grief (23.101–20). The poet’s transformation into a fountain, however, also has its positive aspects: after all, the ability to pour himself out in grief is the opposite of his previous Battus-like stoniness, and his ongoing lamentations will raise Laura’s pity in the next stanza, transforming him back in response to his primo stato (23.135) – the first transformation into the laurel. Once again, although leading to a loss of voice and exile, the transgression of desire and writing always brings forth a renewed hope for sublimation and presence through further writing and desire. Nonetheless, this happy state does not last long, and once he prays again to the lady (ripregando), she quickly transforms him into “dura selce” (23.138) (“hard flint”), “et cos`ı scossa / voce rimasi de l’antiche some, / chiamando Morte, et lei 20 This

proto-allusion to the myth of Byblis is pointed out by Albert J. Rivero, “Petrarch’s ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade,’” MLN 94 (1979): 92–112, at 101.

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sola per nome” (23.138–40) (“and thus I remained a voice shaken from my former burden, calling Death and only her by name”). This last transformation, as critics have observed, recalls the myth of Echo:21 in the Ovidian account, Juno punished Echo for her garrulous speech by making her able to speak only by echoing the words of others. Having fallen for Narcissus, Echo disclosed her love by repeating his last words, but his harsh rejection turned her into a disembodied voice, her body becoming a stone out of grief (Met.3.359–98). Petrarch’s ripregando thus alludes to his similar attempt to woo the lady through his words, leading to the same disastrous results. At the same time, the words concluding the transformation: chiamando Morte, et lei sola per nome, evoke again the notion of the commemoration of the loss in language – and with it the possibility of sublimated presence through the attainment of the poetic laurel. The allusion to the myth of Echo thus captures in one figure the two opposite effects of desire and writing that we have seen throughout the poem: loss and exile on the one hand, and commemoration of the loss in language and the hope for renewed presence through the laurel on the other. This ending of the Echo episode, however, also indicates the decline in the poet’s confidence in his ability to attain the transcendence he is seeking through the poetry of loss: the sense of exile and disintegration of self due to desire becomes much stronger than the hope for poetic presence. Whereas in the previous transformations, the figure representing the loss was replaced by a new figure or a new state in which a new hope was dominant – Cygnus replaced Phaeton, new writings replaced the speech of Battus, the return to the primo stato followed Byblis’ destructive writing – here the figure of Echo represents both the outcome of the transgression and the attempt to transcend it, and this fact points to the poet’s growing uncertainty of the redemptive value of writing. For given that in the myth Echo’s speech is no more than a hollow voice pointing to its emptiness – to her inability to speak – the poet’s decision to portray his words of loss through her figure indicates his growing sense of the emptiness and the impending failure of his own poetry of loss and exile. In addition, the line closing the stanza, chiamando Morte, et lei sola per nome, might also be an allusion to the myth of Orpheus and his laments over Eurydice following his death, especially in Virgil’s rendition of the myth in the Georgics. Following his violent dismemberment 21 See

Durling’s note in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 66, and Bettarini’s in Canzoniere, 123.

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by the Ciconian women who resented his devotion to Eurydice,22 the dismembered head of Orpheus kept repeating the name of his beloved: “Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, / a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat: / Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae” (4.525–7) (“the disembodied voice and the tongue, now cold for ever, called with departing breath on Eurydice – ah, poor Eurydice! ‘Eurydice’ the banks re-echoed, all along the stream”). Petrarch’s voce and chiamando, portraying his helpless repeating of the name of the beloved, thus might be an echo of Virgil’s vox and vocabat and Orpheus’ own unaided calls for Eurydice. Comparing himself to the arch-poet Orpheus, Petrarch thus hopes that his voice of loss will achieve a similar resonance – re-echo in a similar fashion through space and time. At the same time, however, the fact that Orpheus’ repetitive calling of his beloved’s name takes place following his complete dismemberment might be another indication of Petrarch’s growing awareness of the danger inherent in his desire and poetry of loss and of his mistrust in its power to save the self from the state of loss and exile that it caused. The sense of disillusionment and hopelessness governing the poem following this ending of the seventh strophe reaches its zenith in the next and closing strophe before the envoi, recalling the myth of Actaeon – the ultimate exemplum of desire as a source of a complete loss of voice and dissolution. The stanza starts with a play on the relation between memory and dismemberment: Spirto doglioso errante mi rimembra per spelunche deserte et pellegrine piansi molt’ anni il mio sfrenato ardire, et ancor poi trovai di quel mal fine et ritornai ne le terrene membra, credo per piu` dolore ivi sentire. (23.141–6) A wandering sorrowful spirit, I remember, through desert ravines and strange, I bewailed for many years my unleashed boldness, and still later found release from that ill, and returned again to my earthly members, in order, I believe, to feel more pain there.

The allusions to memory – mi rimembra – and members – membra, as Leonard Barkan points out, prepare the way for the coming reference 22 “Discerptum

latos iuvenem sparsere per agros” (4.522) (“tore the youth limb from limb and flung him over the far spread plains”). Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. R. Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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to the myth of Actaeon, the main emphasis of which is the dismemberment of the protagonist resulting from desire.23 In addition, the reference to the poet’s return to his earthly members (membra), and hence to his previous “dismemberment,” might serve as another indication of the underlying presence of Orpheus in the text – an obvious counterpart to the story of Actaeon. However, in transcending the fates of both Echo and Orpheus and returning to his earthly members, the poet only subjects himself to a worse evil – the dismemberment of Actaeon, one that ends without leaving anything behind, not even a lament (Met.3.131–265). Moreover, the juxtaposition of memory – mi rimembra – and the return to the earthly members – membra – recalls the previous reference to memory in the poem (23.15) and redirects our attention to the project we are witnessing – the attempt to re-member the fragments of the poet’s experience through the mutual act of memory and writing. The physical members, in this sense, become a metaphor for the fragments of the poet’s memory, scattered in the wide ocean of time, and the act of remembrance is allegorized as the physical gathering of these fragments. The impending revocation of the dismemberment of Actaeon in the following lines thus becomes an allusion to the failure of the poetic project to recollect the fragments, to find the thread that connects together the scattered memories of the poet’s past. The actual reference to the myth of Actaeon in the remaining verses of the strophe again plays on the theme of desire and writing as sources of both absence and presence, both fragmentation and redemption, with the threat of complete absence and dissolution now becoming more acute than ever: pursuing one day his mad desire into the woods (in contrast to the Ovidian description in which it is mere chance that brings Actaeon to the spring), the poet gazes at his lady bathing naked in the spring. In response, the lady sprinkles water in his face and transforms him into a stag, depriving him completely of his human voice. In Ovid’s tale, this loss of the human form and ability to speak leads to the total dismemberment of Actaeon by his rabid dogs. In Petrarch’s case, however – even though undergoing a similar transformation – the poet somehow manages to find a way to run faster than his dogs and to keep fragmentation at bay: “et ancor de’ miei can fuggo lo stormo” (23.160) (“and still I flee the belling of my hounds”). 23 See

Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 212.

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The dogs of Actaeon have often been interpreted in the medieval tradition as passions,24 and in the complementary poem to 23, canzone 323, Petrarch refers to the hounds as a possible metaphor for time: “cacciata da duo veltri, un nero, un bianco, / che l’un et l’altro fianco / de la fera gentil mordean s`ı forte” (323.6–8) (“pursued by two hounds, one black, one white, who at both sides of the noble creature were tearing so fiercely”). The black and white hounds, as Robert Durling suggests, may represent night and day, thus implying that the passage of time is responsible for tearing apart the beloved.25 Portraying himself as Actaeon, transformed into a stag and frantically escaping his mad dogs, Petrarch thus implies that he is well aware of the destructive nature of his desire and his continuing subjection to the all-devouring passage of time as a result of it. At the same time, the fact that he manages to somehow flee fragmentation, as the ancor fuggo suggests, also shows us the positive aspect of this desire: as long as he can keep desiring and writing, the poet implies, he might be able to continue to flee the belling of the dogs, to overcome the passage of time – keeping the hope for the laurel, and with it for both immortality and being, alive. With this reference to the ancor fuggo, the poet also turns for the first time in the poem from the past to the present tense,26 thus suggesting that we have arrived at the end of the recollection and into the present moment. Nevertheless, the fact that he is still fleeing reveals the uncertainty of this present state. Rather than narrating the story of his past misfortunes from the safe and secure vantage point of the present, the poet is still part of the current, still in flight, still wavering between the destructive and redemptive powers of his desire and writing, subjected to a threat of total dismemberment that continues to hang over his head and that might take place at any moment. After 160 lines and at least seven transformations, we discover that nothing has really changed in the poet’s state and the ambiguity that dominates it. This allusion to the myth of Actaeon, nevertheless, is not the end of the canzone, and in the ensuing envoi, the downward slope of the poet seems to be reversed: although he was never able, as he states, to quench 24 See

Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 340 n. 101. In addition, Petrarch often describes the impact of the passions in words echoing the myth of Actaeon, as, for example, in Fam.8.9.22 (Familiar Letters, 1:426): “I am distracted and torn to pieces in an extraordinary and wretched manner by raging and contradictory anxieties and messengers” (“fluctuantibus atque inter se certantibus curis ac nuntiis distrahor ac discerpor”). 25 See note in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 502. 26 See John Brenkman, “Writing, Desire, Dialectic in Petrarch’s Rime 23,” Pacific Coast Philology 9 (1974): 12–19, at 15.

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his desire as Jove did (if only partly) in the myth of Danae, he was still able to rise high like a flame (a reference to the myth of Semele) and a bird (probably referring to the eagle from the myth of Ganymede), “alzando lei che ne’ miei detti onoro” (23.166) (“raising her whom in my words I honor”). This renewed confidence in the triumph of his poetry, providing immortality both to its author and its object, also leads us back in the final lines to the laurel: N´e per nova figura il primo alloro seppi lassar, ch´e pur la sua dolce ombra ogni men bel piacer del cor mi sgombra. (23.167–9) Nor for any new shape could I leave the first laurel, for still its sweet shade turns away from my heart any less beautiful pleasure.

The final note of the poem therefore renews with full force the hope of attaining transcendence – the overcoming of the flux of time – through desire and the writing of poetry of desire: his longing for the laurel, the poet stresses, is never-changing, and even while he underwent all the transformations described in the poem, he always remained the primo alloro, was always one and the same because of his desire. This allusion to the primo alloro thus closes the cycle that opened in the beginning of the canzone, taking us back to the first transformation into the laurel – an all-encompassing cycle that encloses within itself all the smaller ones within the poem, all representing the poet’s persistent return to the first laurel – and with it to his desired triumph over the passage of time. However, although this return closes the cycle and takes us back to the beginning, we should note that it does not take the poet back to the prima etade of the first line of the canzone, the age of full bliss, but rather to the primo alloro: the primal state of bliss, the age of full presence not plagued by desire, fluctuation, and change is thus forever lost, forever beyond the poet’s grasp, as was already evident from the fact that all the transformations in the poem dealt with the loss and regaining of the laurel, not of the golden age. Although celebrating the poetic triumph over time, the ending of the poem therefore emphasizes yet again the duality inherent in the poet’s desire and writing, reminding us that writing is always done from exile, from the state of longing, an attempt to overcome the loss to which it is in itself the cause. The same ambiguity that dominated the first transformation of the poem thus emerges again at the end of the work, highlighting the irresolvable uncertainty that governs the poet’s experience. In contrast to

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Dante’s insistence on the meaningful nature of his desire – the revelation of which allows him to reconstruct the overall significance of his experience in time – Petrarch asserts through his use of Ovidian mythology in the canzone the ambiguous and duplicitous nature of the impact of desire and writing on the self, preventing any possibility of discerning and conveying the coherent narrative of his past. Dominated by desire, the poet is bound to waver endlessly amid the same cycles of loss and attainment of voice, cycles that come to represent both the poet’s passing triumphs over the passage of time through his repetitive return to the laurel, and his ultimate inability to discern the meaning of his desire and structure a coherent narrative of his past. Under such circumstances, as the poem shows, all that an attempt to structure the narrative can do is document the ambiguity, the endless cycles of absence and presence undermining the linear motion the poem attempts to convey.

Desire and the Crisis of the Will This rejection in canzone 23 of the Dantesque claim that the self dominated by desire can discern and convey the meaning of his or her experience in time in turn suggests that the road to the revelation of the narrative resides in giving up this desire, the very source of ambiguity and confusion. Indeed, in the first strophe of the canzone, Petrarch alludes to the Augustinian notion that as long as he is dominated by earthly desire, he cannot trust his memory to reconstruct his history faithfully: E se qui la memoria non m’aita come suol fare, iscusilla i martiri et un penser che solo angoscia d`alle, tal ch’ ad ogni altro fa voltar le spalle e mi face obliar me stesso a forza, ch’ e’ ten di me quel d’entro, et io la scorza. (23.15–20) And if here my memory does not aid me as it is wont to do, let my torments excuse it and one thought which alone gives it such anguish that it makes me turn my back on every other and makes me forget myself beyond resistance, for it holds what is within me, and I only the shell.

The poet confesses from the onset of the poem that the attempt to remember through the mutual act of memory and writing the history of his “undoing” by desire is bound to fail because of the memory of this very same desire. Playing on the dichotomy of remembering and forgetting – the same forgetfulness (obliar) caused by the memory of love that we

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encountered in the previous chapter – the poet states that as long as he continues to forget himself because of his desire, he cannot trust his memory to aid him in the recollection of his past. It is thus only through the disavowal of desire, these lines imply, that he might be able to confide in his memory to discern and convey the meaning of his past vicissitudes. In his highly Augustinian letter describing his ascent up Mount Ventoux in Provence, Petrarch introduces exactly the same notion: as long as he is dominated by desire, he will not be able to trust his memory to reconstruct his past faithfully.27 In this celebrated letter, addressed to the Augustinian friar Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, from whom Petrarch received his copy of the Confessions, Petrarch contrasts his “circuitous” (anfractus) and “weaker” (mollior) ascent up the mountain with the straight climb to the top of his brother and companion, the Carthusian monk Gherardo. The brothers’ conflicting paths to the top soon become in Petrarch’s description an allegory of the spiritual life, and having finally reached the summit of the mountain, Petrarch turns to reflect on the time that elapsed since he left his “youthful studies” at Bologna: My mind thus was overcome by a new thought and was transferred from those places to these times. And I began saying to myself: “Today completes the tenth year since you departed from Bologna after completion of your youthful studies.” Oh, immortal God, oh immutable wisdom, how extensive and how many changes within me during this interim! I shall skip an infinitude of them since not yet being in port I cannot recall in security the storms through which I have passed. The time will perhaps come when I shall enumerate all of these storms that beset my life in their appropriate order, prefacing it with those words of your Augustine: “I wish to recall all my past foulness and the carnal corruption of my soul not because I love them but so that I might love you, my God.” As for me, there still remains indeed a great deal that is uncertain and troublesome.28 27 Although

Petrarch claimed to have written the letter in 1336, recent scholarship dates it rather to the early 1350s – a period in which Petrarch was also engaged in an extensive revision of canzone 23. In 1336, Petrarch was thirty-two years old, the age in which Augustine experienced his conversion. The dating of the letter to 1336 thus serves to emphasize further the parallels between it and the Confessions. On the dating of Fam.4.1, see Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato: I. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1947), 193–8. On the revision of canzone 23 in the early 1350s, see Dutchke, Francesco Petrarca Canzone XXIII, 33–4. 28 “Occupavit inde animum nova cogitatio atque a locis traduxit ad tempora. Dicebam enim ad me ipsum: Hodie decimus annus completur, ex quo, puerilibus studiis dimissis, Bononia excessisti; et, o Deus immortalis, o immutabilis Sapientia, quot et quantas morum tuorum mutationes hoc medium tempus vidit! Infinita pretereo; nondum enim in portu sum, ut securus preteritarum meminerim procellarum. Tempus forsan veniet,

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This striking paragraph provides us with one of Petrarch’s most evident allusions to his longing to follow Augustine in structuring a healing narrative of his past. The solution to his endless fluctuations and wavering in time, allegorized in his circuitous ascent up the mountain, these lines suggest, resides in the linearity of the Augustinian narrative. Nonetheless, as in canzone 23.15–19, Petrarch states in these lines that as long as he is away from the port, governed by his earthly desires – that which is ambigui molestique (“ambiguous and foul”) – he cannot trust his memory to recollect securely his past experiences – securus preteritarum meminerim procellarum. It is thus only by following Augustine in undergoing a true change of heart and leaving behind his earthly desires that Petrarch will be able to end his sense of flux and exile, to redeem the aimless circularity of his passions through the purposeful linearity of the Christian narrative.29 In a similar fashion to Fam.4.1, canzone 23 therefore implies that only an Augustinian change of will, leading to the complete disavowal of earthly desires, will allow Petrarch to reach the authorial point from which he might trust his memory to reconstruct the narrative of his past. Yet it is precisely Petrarch’s repetitive return to the primo alloro in the canzone, demonstrating his insurmountable longing to abolish time completely by means of his earthly desire and the circularity embedded in it, that stands in the way of a true change of will in the Augustinian fashion. Celebrating his triumphant return to the laurel at the end of the canzone – even while realizing the necessary sense of exile and alienation inherent in this return, the fact that it can never take him back to the prima etade – Petrarch professes his unwavering loyalty to his earthly desire and his ultimate inability to reach the authorial point from which he might redeem the flux through the construction of the narrative. The endless cycles of desire that dominate the canzone and that represent, as shown, both the poet’s passing triumphs over the linearity of time and his inability to discern a meaning underlying them, thus also come to signify the poet’s weakness of will, his inability to overcome the cycles and realize the narrative through an Augustinian leap of faith. As he declares at the end of poem 118: “n´e per mille rivolte quando eodem quo gesta sunt ordine universa percurram, prefatus illud Augustini tui: ‘Recordari volo transactas feditates meas et carnales corruptiones anime mee, non quod eas amem, sed ut amem te, Deus meus.’ Michi quidem multum adhuc ambigui molestique negotii superest” (Fam.4.1.19–21; Familiar Letters, 1:176). 29 On Augustine’s emphasis on the need to renounce his earthly desires, see Chapter 1, n. 37.

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ancor son mosso” (118.14) (“nor for a thousand turnings about have I yet moved”).30 From this perspective as well, therefore, the attempt to structure the narrative in canzone 23 can only portray the ambiguity dominating the poet’s experience, the perpetual tension between his longing to structure the narrative and give meaning and order to his past, and the cycles of desire that persistently militate against and undermine this same effort.

Circularity, Narrativity, and Fragmentation The constant tension in canzone 23 between the poet’s attempt to structure the narrative of his past and the cycles of desire undermining it is reflected in the entire collection of poems. Petrarch’s attempt to organize the poems into a collection that mirrors the linear passage of time, as well as the fact that he chose to gather his “scattered poems” into a definitive collection at the same time he declared his longing to fashion a healing narrative of his past in Fam.4.1,31 show that the collection answers at least in part to a desire to structure such a narrative, to impose a sense of order and meaning on the fragments of his past. Nonetheless, just as in canzone 23, this attempt to organize the poems linearly is persistently plagued by contradictions and oxymora, circularity and repetition. Ultimately, this reveals the poet’s sense of the essential ambiguity dominating his experience of desire and preventing him from structuring such a narrative. At the same time, it reveals his reluctance to leave behind his desire to facilitate such a construction. The previous chapter demonstrated the collection’s emphasis on the duality governing the impact of desire and writing on the self as it comes to the fore, for example, in the portrayal of the forgetfulness (oblio) to which it leads – serving as an emblem of both the complete forgetfulness of the passage of time, and the poet’s continuing entrapment within it.32 To these examples of the ambiguity dominating his experience of desire and writing in the sequence we should add the Petrarchan conceit 30 In the same fashion, the allusion to the conversion scene from Book 8 of the Confessions in

poem 118 discussed in the previous chapter indicates that the alternative offered by the poem to the aimless circularity and the dangerous stasis imposed by the poet’s desire – “n´e per mille rivolte ancor son mosso”(118.14) – is an Augustinian change of heart that will facilitate the revelation of the narrative of the poet’s past. 31 On the possible dating of Petrarch’s decision to create the collection, see Santagata, I frammenti, 105–91. 32 See the discussion in third section of Chapter 1 (“Beyond Time, Within Time”).

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of purposefully placing contradictory poems next to each other, creating – exactly as in canzone 23 – a constant oscillation between presence and absence, between ecstatic joy and engulfing despair, between the celebration of desire at one moment as a source of transcendence and being, and then on its repudiation as the cause of destruction and ruin. Thus, whereas poem 13 celebrates love as that which leads the poet to heaven, “‘da lei vien l’animosa leggiadria / ch’ al ciel ti scorge’” (13.12– 13) (“‘from her comes the courageous joy that leads you to heaven’”), the next poem is governed by loss and sorrow, portraying love as the very source of the poet’s ruin: “Occhi miei lassi, mentre ch’ io vi giro / nel bel viso di quella che v’`a morti, / pregovi siate accorti, / che gi`a vi sfida Amore, ond’ io sospiro” (14.1–4) (“My weary eyes, while I turn you toward the lovely face that has slain you, I beg you, be cautious, for already Love defies you, for which I sigh”). In the next poem, nonetheless, we come back again to the celebration of the positive value of love: “‘Non ti rimembra / che questo e` privilegio degli amanti, / sciolti da tutte qualitati umane?” (15.12–14) (“Do you not remember that this is a privilege of lovers, released from all human qualities?”). This wavering continues throughout the collection, seeming only to intensify near the end: whereas in poem 361, the poet alludes to his awareness of the passage of time and the vanity of his earthly pursuits – “et veggio ben che ’l nostro viver vola / et ch’ esser non si po piu` d’una volta” (361.9–10) (“and I see well that our life flies and that one cannot be alive more than once”) – the next poem celebrates the lady as the guide leading him to God, and with it to full transcendence of the passage of time: “Menami al suo Signor” (362.9) (“She leads me to her Lord”). In poem 363, however, the poet returns again to lament the lady’s death, which threatens his ability to attain the eternal life embodied in the figure of the poetic laurel: “spenti son i miei lauri, or querce et olmi” (363.4) (“my laurels are faded, are oaks and elms”), and in the following poem, 364 (the final anniversary poem in the collection), the emphasis on the vanity and error of loving an earthly creature bound to die reaches its zenith: “Omai son stanco, et mia vita reprendo / di tanto error che di vertute il seme / a` quasi spento” (364.5–7) (“Now I am weary and I reproach my life for so much error, which has almost extinguished the seed of virtue”). These cycles of absence and presence that permeate the collection emphasize, in a similar fashion to canzone 23, the ambiguity and lack of meaning that dominate the poet’s experience because of both his desire

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and his writing, undermining any possibility of reaching an authorial point from which he might reconstruct a narrative of his past. Overcome by desire, as the collection demonstrates, the poet is bound to fluctuate amid the same experiences over and over again, without ever penetrating the surface and discerning a possible meaning underlying the endless cycles. In direct opposition to Dante, therefore, Petrarch emphasizes throughout the collection that as long as he is dominated by his earthly desire for both Laura and writing, a meaningful construction of his past will elude him. Nonetheless, despite fully realizing the harmful implications of his earthly desire, Petrarch cannot bring himself to renounce it. Returning over and over again to the praise of his earthly desire as a source of being and transcendence, Petrarch reveals his ultimate inability to follow Augustine in leaving behind his desire and his hope to overcome time completely through the circularity and constancy embedded in it – taking him back persistently to the beginning. As Petrarch declares at the end of his palinodic canzone 264, realizing the need to leave behind his desire and yet unable to act on this realization, “et veggio ’l meglio et al peggior m’appiglio” (264.136) (“and I see the better but I lay hold on the worse”). This entrapment of the poet within the endless cycles of desire receives its definitive portrayal in the final canzone of the collection, poem 366 – the days of a year plus one. This concluding poem marks the beginning of a new year and a new cycle with a prayer for peace that recalls the shame and repentance of the introductory poem. The closing poem of the collection therefore takes us back both thematically and formally to the beginning, demonstrating that even at the end of the collection, Petrarch cannot bring himself to abandon fully his hope to overcome time through his earthly desire, to accept the inevitability of time and change.33 It is, in sum, the poet’s insurmountable longing to abolish time altogether, through the circularity embedded in the impact of both writing and desire, that prevents him from redeeming his sense of flux and exile in time by structuring the coherent narrative of his past. As shown throughout the collection, as long as he is dominated by desire, the poet is removed from the authorial point from which he might structure the narrative; yet the disavowal of this desire resides beyond his powers. In 33 See

also Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, 58–9.

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such a state, as Petrarch demonstrates, all that the self plagued by love and subjected to time can do is place the poems – each one a reflection of his state, mood, and thoughts in a specific moment in time – in a sequence, without giving any of these states the right of place, an authorial status over the others. As Roland Barthes declared six centuries later, capturing Petrarch’s realization without sharing in the agony, “Quel droit mon pr´esent a-t-il de parler de mon pass´e? Mon pr´esent a-t-il barre sur mon pass´e? Quelle ‘grace’ m’aurait e´ clair´e?”34 And although the placing of the fragments in a linear sequence does allude to Petrarch’s longing for order and meaning, this organization is bound only to betray the ambiguity governing his mind, the irresolvable conflict between the longing to structure the narrative and his attachment to the endless cycles of desire that constantly militate against it. Both of the poet’s attempts to overcome time in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta – abolishing time altogether through writing and desire and the inherently contradicting effort of constructing the healing narrative of his past – thus end up in failure. The overcoming of time and exile and the full attainment of self – either in the form of a steadfast and unchanging self or in that of a purposeful narrative defining it – are beyond his reach. The experience of inner exile and alienation is therefore, according to the collection, an insurmountable aspect of human existence in time. Yet alongside these efforts to overcome time and attain selfhood in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Petrarch was simultaneously engaged throughout his life in the attempt to end his experience of exile and fragmentation through his writings in Latin, writings that return above all to the Stoic assertion that it is the exile from virtue – the submission to the rule of desire and passions – that is the true source of the experience of fragmentation and fluctuation. The road to transcend the experience of flux, the Latin writings argue, is through the cultivation of virtue, a cultivation in which the practice of writing – always intertwined with that of reading – again plays the pivotal role. Nonetheless, whereas in the vernacular poems the goal of writing was constantly to revive and intensify the poet’s desire, in the Latin works, its aim was the exact opposite: the complete abolition of desire. It is therefore to this attempt in Petrarch’s Latin works – particularly the collections of letters and the Secretum – to 34 “What

right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What ‘grace’ might have enlightened me?” Roland Barthes, par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 110. Translation is from Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: The Noonday Press, 1989), 121.

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care for the self through the act of writing that I turn in the following chapter. Therein I examine his uses of writing as a spiritual exercise and the ways in which these uses define the humanistic nature of his ethics of “care of the self,” establishing humanism as an alternative to the late medieval monastic traditions of “care of the soul.”

3 Petrarch’s Humanism and the Ethics of Care of the Self

In the letter De studio eloquentie, probably written in 1345 to his friend the poet Tommaso da Messina, Petrarch writes: The care of the soul calls for a philosopher, while the proper use of language requires an orator. We must neglect neither one, if, as they say, we are to return to the earth and be led about on the mouths of men. But I shall speak of the care of the soul elsewhere; for it is a great undertaking and an enormous labor, though very rich in harvest. At this time in order to avoid slipping into a subject other than the one that I set out to treat, I urge and admonish that we correct not only our life and conduct, which is the primary concern of virtue, but our language usage as well. This we will do by the cultivation of eloquence.1

Starting his discussion of eloquence with the traditional division between the realms of rhetoric and philosophy,2 Petrarch’s definition of philosophy in this statement is nonetheless significant. Animi cura – the care of the soul, the purpose of which is the correction of life and conduct 1 “Animi

cura philosophum querit, eruditio lingue oratoris est propria; neutra nobis negligenda, si nos, ut aiunt, ‘humo tollere et per ora virum volitare’ propositum est. Sed de priore alibi; magna enim res est et labor ingens, sed messis uberrima; hoc loco, ne in aliud exeam quam quod me ad calamum traxit, exhortor ac moneo ut non vitam tantum et mores, quod primum virtutis est opus, sed sermonis etiam nostri consuetudinem corrigamus, quod artificiose nobis eloquentie cura prestabit” (Fam.1.9.1; Familiar Letters, 1:47; translation slightly modified). The masculine noun animus which is used by Petrarch in the phrase cura animi in this passage usually referred in Latin Stoicism to the rational part of the soul. See, for example, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.13.38. Quotations from the Tusculan Disputations are taken from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 2 See Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 47. Charles Trinkaus traces this division back to Plato’s Theaetetus in The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 33–44.

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(vitam et mores) through the cultivation of virtue, is the true aim of philosophy. For Petrarch, then, the true domain of philosophy is not the pursuit of abstract knowledge but rather the practical goal of the attainment of the appropriate way of life. This definition of philosophy as a pursuit of a form of living, of a right disposition to action (bene disposita mens [Fam.1.9.3]), blurs the distinction between the realms of philosophy and rhetoric that Petrarch advocated in this opening statement.3 Providing incentive and guidance for action has traditionally been the domain of rhetoric and hence makes it, according to the Petrarchian definition, inseparable from philosophy. It is not a coincidence that in the course of the letter we discover that the division between the two arts advocated in the beginning is untenable and that they are in fact interchangeable: just as the true orator needs to be first a philosopher to speak “seriously, austerely, judiciously and, most importantly, uniformly,”4 so the true philosopher requires eloquence to fulfill the task of philosophy – taking care of the soul: Finally, if no sense of charity toward our fellow men drives us, I would still consider the study of eloquence of the greatest aid to ourselves . . . . I cannot tell you of what worth are to me in solitude certain familiar and famous words not only grasped in the mind but actually spoken orally, words with which I am accustomed to rouse my sleepy thoughts. Furthermore, how much delight I get from repeating the written words either of others or sometimes even my own! How much I feel myself freed from serious and bitter burdens by such readings! Meantime I feel my own writings assisted me even more since they are more suited to my ailments, just as the sensitive hand of a doctor who is himself ill is placed more readily where he feels the pain to be. Such cure I shall certainly never accomplish unless the salutary words themselves fell tenderly upon my ears. When through the power of an unusual sweet temptation I am moved to read them again, they gradually take effect and transfix my insides with hidden powers.5 3 See

also Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, 48.

4 “Graviter, severe sapienterque et, quod super omnia est, uniformiter” (Fam.1.9.3; Familiar

Letters, 1:47). si ceterorum hominum caritas nulla nos cogeret, optimum tamen et nobis ipsis fructuosissimum arbitrarer eloquentie studium non in ultimis habere . . . de me autem, quid mereantur in solitudine quedam voces familiares ac note, non modo corde concepte, sed etiam ore prolate, quibus dormitantem animum excitare soleo; quam preterea delectet vel aliorum vel mea nonnunquam scripta revolvere; quantum ve ex ea lectione exhonerari me sentiam gravissimis acerbissimisque molestiis, non facile dicturum me speraverim. Eoque magis propriis adiuvor interdum, quo illa langoribus meis aptiora sunt, que conscia manus medici languentis et ubi dolor esset sentientis, apposuit. Quod nunquam profecto consequerer, nisi verba ipsa salutaria demulcerent aures,

5 “Postremo,

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Eloquent writings, according to Petrarch, are necessary to “transfix his insides” (interiora transfigerent) – words that recall Seneca’s description of the impact his recent readings had on him in letter 6 of his Moral Letters to Lucilius – and awake his thoughts to the pursuit of virtue, removing the many cares that distract his mind.6 In blurring the boundaries of philosophy and rhetoric, Petrarch was following the model of Cicero, who declares in the De oratore that moral philosophy, that which is concerned with “life and conduct” (vitam atque mores) is properly the responsibility of rhetoric.7 Nonetheless, whereas Cicero emphasizes the relevance of rhetoric to a moral philosophy that is civic in nature, dealing with “duty, equity, and good, moral worth and utility,”8 Petrarch specifically focuses – like Seneca – on the relevance of eloquence to a philosophy that deals with the inward “care of the soul.”9 And in this process of caring for the soul, as Petrarch states, the texts he writes are especially effective, providing him with remedies that are geared specifically to his own particular ailments.

et me ad sepius relegendum vi quadam insite dulcedinis excitantia sensim illaberentur atque abditis aculeis interiora transfigerent” (Fam.1.9.11–12; Familiar Letters, 1:49; slightly modified). 6 “I feel, my dear Lucilius, that I am being not only reformed, but transformed” (“Intellego, Lucili, non emendari me tantum sed transfigurari” [Ad Lucilium 6.1]). The stylistic ideal we should imitate to make our writings eloquent and hence morally effective, according to Petrarch in this letter, is mainly that of Cicero. As he tells Tommaso, both of them are drinking from the “Ciceronian springs” (“ciceronianis . . . fontibus” [Fam.1.9.3; Familiar Letters, 1:47]). 7 De oratore 1.15.68. The text and translation are from Cicero, De oratore, 2 vols., trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948). 8 “De virtute enim, de officio, de aequo et bono, de dignitate, utilitate, honore, ignominia, praemio, poena” (De oratore 3.27.107). 9 Emphasizing the crucial role Petrarch gives to eloquence in fulfilling the task of philosophy in this letter, Ronald G. Witt also alludes to Petrarch’s departure from Cicero in his view of eloquence. Whereas for Cicero eloquence belonged to the orator and was wedded to public life, Petrarch, according to Witt, approached eloquence as a grammarian and held that the task of rhetoric was “more likely to be achieved in the scholar’s study.” See Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 240–4. Witt, in addition, argues that Petrarch’s correpondence in general is much closer in nature to that of Seneca than of Cicero, even though his decision to create the collection was probably influenced by his discovery of Cicero’s letters: “the attitudes and sententious tone of Petrarch’s letters shows the overwhelming influence of Seneca’s Ad Lucilium epistulae morales” (274). On the respective influences of Cicero and Seneca on Petrarch’s letters, see also John M. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25–30.

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The practices of reading and writing eloquent texts, we therefore learn from Fam.1.9, play for Petrarch a crucial role in fulfilling the philosophical task of taking care of his own soul and that of his readers. Earlier on in the letter, we also learn of the benefits of such care; explaining why it is crucial that the orator should also be a philosopher, Petrarch states, “The reason for this is that unless our desires first order themselves (and you must know that no one can achieve this except a wise man) it is inevitable that such disorder will be reflected in our conduct (mores) and in our words (verba). The well-ordered mind is the image of an undisturbed serenity and is always quiet and peaceful. It knows what it wants, and does not cease wanting what it desires.”10 The end result of the philosophical project of taking care of ourselves, therefore, is becoming wise (sapiens), wisdom that for Petrarch means above all the ordering of our desires – attaining full authority and control over them: scit quid velit, et quod semel voluit, velle non desinit.11 As a result, in response to the experience of fluctuation, fragmentation, and exile dominating his poetry, portraying him over and over again as a shipwreck tossed at sea by the winds of misleading and conflicting desires, the philosophy of “care of the soul” promises to bring him back to the port of reason and virtue – his “true self.”12 This return from exile, as the quotation suggests, also entails for Petrarch the attainment of full control over language: it is once our mind is fully ordered, fully in control of desire, that our words become one with our thoughts – reflect our intention perfectly: “Even lacking the ornaments of oratorical skill, it is able to call forth most significant and serious words harmonious with itself.”13 It is also in such a state of wisdom and virtue, as we saw in Fam.24.1 and as we also 10 “Quoniam

nisi primum desideria invicem nostra conveniant, quod preter sapientem scito nemini posse contingere, illud necesse est ut, dissidentibus curis, et mores et verba dissideant. At bene disposita mens instar immote serenitatis placida semper ac tranquilla est: scit quid velit, et quod semel voluit, velle non desinit” (Fam.1.9.3; Familiar Letters, 1:47). 11 This portrayal of the wise man is closely based on letter 20 of Seneca’s Moral Letters. Seneca defines wisdom in this letter as “always desiring the same things, and always refusing the same things” (“Quid est sapientia? Semper idem velle atque idem nolle” [Ad Lucilium 20.5]). 12 On the sense of fragmentation and fluctuation dominating Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, see the discussion in the second section of Chapter 1 (“Writing, Desire, and the Fall”). For the association of reason and virtue with our “true self ” in Petrarch’s Latin writings, see Chapter 1, n. 27. 13 “Itaque, tametsi oratorie artis ornamenta non suppetant, ex se ipsa magnificentissimas voces atque gravissimas et certe sibi consonas elicit” (Fam.1.9.3; Familiar Letters, 1:47–8). Petrarch is following here letter 115 of Seneca’s Moral Letters: “The really great man speaks informally and easily; whatever he says, he speaks with assurance rather than

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learn from a letter Petrarch wrote to Francesco Nelli in 1353, that we are able to control the incessant slippage of time: “At present I am truly beginning to value time, not yet as I must, but as I can; I recognize its incredible flight and its precipitous course which no reins can restrain except those of a growing and diligent virtue.”14 Petrarch’s assertion in this letter that the goal of philosophy is not to provide us with knowledge but rather to care for the soul – leading us back from the state of exile and fragmentation into the port of reason and virtue – and that this care should be conducted through practices such as reading and writing, complement closely what Michel Foucault, following the work of Pierre Hadot, described as the defining traits of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman philosophy: “Plato gave priority to the Delphic maxim ‘know yourself.’ The privileged position of ‘know yourself ’ is characteristic of all Platonists. Later, in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods, this is reversed: the accent was not on the knowledge of self but on the concern with oneself. The latter was given an autonomy and even a preeminence as a philosophical issue.”15 This concern with oneself, according to Foucault, was to be accomplished through a set of practices, or “spiritual exercises,” such as meditation, memorization of the past, examination of conscience, self-writing, and so on, the ultimate goal of which was to allow one to attain a “certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”16 In the Care of the Self, Foucault also describes the goal of these practices in the Senecan sense of attaining full authority over ourselves through the “conversion to self ” (conversio ad se) – the recourse to the citadel of reason – detaching ourselves from external things and thus becoming fully independent of Fortune and the passions that depend on it: “the conversio ad se is also a path by which, escaping all the dependences and enslavements, one ultimately rejoins oneself, like a harbored shelter or a citadel protected by its ramparts: ‘the soul stands on unassailable grounds, if it has abandoned external things; with pains” (“Magnus ille remissius loquitur et securius; quaecumque dicit, plus habent fiduciae quam curae” [Ad Lucilium 115.2]). 14 “Certe ego iam hinc extimare tempus incipio, nondum tamen qua debeo sed qua possum; agnosco fugam incredibilem lapsumque precipitem nullis nisi ardentis atque impigre virtutis arcendum frenis” (Fam.16.11.6; Familiar Letters, 2:318). On Fam.24.1, see the Introduction. 15 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997), 223–51, at 231. 16 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 225. On the ancient spiritual exercises, see also Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold L. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 81–125.

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it is independent in its own fortress; and every weapon that is hurled falls short of the mark. Fortune has not the long reach with which we credit her; she can seize none except him that clings to her. Let us then recoil from her as far as we are able.”17 The focus on the “care of the self” in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods represented for Foucault a new way to relate to oneself, to “constitute oneself as the subject of one’s acts,” overshadowing the previous Platonic emphasis on knowledge as the basis of human reflexivity.18 Petrarch’s humanism – both with respect to its approach to the self and to philosophy in general – as Fam.1.9 demonstrates and as I show in the remainder of this chapter, is largely defined and dominated by a return to this Imperial, and mainly Stoic, mode of subjectivity. The framework through which Petrarch relates to himself, attempts to constitute himself as a subject, is overwhelmingly dependent on this Stoic, and particularly Senecan, notion of care: it is through Stoic precepts, as the first section of this chapter shows, that he understands and portrays his experience of self, and it is through the ethics of “care of the self ” – based on the practices of reading and particularly writing, as the second section of this chapter demonstrates – that he attempts to overcome his experience of fragmentation and attain “selfhood.” As a result, whereas the vernacular 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley

(New York: Vintage, 1988), 65. The quotation is taken from Seneca, Ad Lucilium 82.5. In his letters, Seneca also portrays the goal of this process of self-cultivation as overcoming the constant fluctuation to which we are all subjected because of our wavering desires. As he declares, for example, in letter 120: “The men I speak of are of this stamp; they are like the man whom Horatius Flaccus describes – a man never the same, never even like himself; to such an extent does he wander off into opposites. Did I say many are so? It is the case with almost all. Everyone changes his plans and prayers day by day. . . . We continually change our characters and play a part contrary to that which we have discarded” (. . . Mutamus subinde personam et contrariam ei sumimus quam exuimus” [Ad Lucilium 120.21–2]). The cure to this condition, as Seneca maintains in the letter, resides in the attainment of virtue – becoming like the sage who is “always the same, consistent in all his actions, not only sound in his judgment but trained by habit to such an extent that he not only can act rightly, but cannot help acting rightly” (“idem erat semper et in omni actu par sibi, iam non consilio bonus, sed more eo perductus, ut non tantum recte facere posset, sed nisi recte facere non posset” [Ad Lucilium, 120.10]). For the variety of phrases Seneca employs in his works to emphasize the need to care for oneself, see Foucault, The Care of the Self, 46. 18 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 41. The focus on “care of the self ” as the center of one’s relation to oneself serves for Foucault as a possible explanation for the rise of new forms of sexual austerity in the period. In addition, it also provides him with an alternative from within the Western tradition to modern philosophy’s focus on knowledge as the basis of one’s relation to oneself. See Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 17–18.

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poetry, as we have seen, was dominated by an attempt to allow him to attain self – to constitute his subjectivity in the face of a continuous sense of exile and flux – through writing that evoked desire and the emotions, aimed at bringing him back over and over again to an emotional state of wholeness, the blissful moment of his falling in love, the writings in Latin represent the complete opposite effort: to overcome the exile by curbing desire and the emotions altogether, using the practices of reading and writing to gain full control over fortune and the passions that depend on it.19 Although returning in his Latin works to the Stoic notion of care as the basis of philosophy and one’s relation to self, the importance Petrarch attributes to self-care in his works and his assertion that this care should be conducted through the practices of reading and writing have strong affinities also to the Augustinian-monastic tradition of the Middle Ages, which in itself draws on these classical sources. The emphasis on care of soul through spiritual exercises such as reading and writing is central to the thought of Augustine, and starting from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we detect a growing stress on the value of these techniques in monastic and lay devotional circles. Petrarch’s focus on the “care of the soul” and the role of reading and writing in such care should thus also be considered in the context of this medieval tradition, and I discuss this context in the final section of this chapter. As we shall see, although 19 Discussions

of humanist philosophy have often emphasized the crucial role played by Roman Stoicism – and particularly its emphasis on rhetoric and the transformation of the will – in Petrarch’s writings and in humanist thought in general. These discussions nonetheless tend to focus almost solely on Petrarch’s appropriation and synthesis of ideas, rather than on the actual practices through which he attempts to undertake this transformation of will or, in other words, take care of the self. See, in particular, Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher, and “In Our Image and Likness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 3–50; William Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19–73; and Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, 31–62. Giuseppe Mazzotta emphasizes as well the Stoic nature of Petrarch’s ethics of self, alluding to the centrality of spiritual practices to this ethics: “The idea shaping the Familiares, that ethics is fundamentally a question of self-government or self-control and that the self becomes the exemplary model for the larger world, is refracted and represented in a variety of aspects. The scope the letters give to ethics is large: it appears as a politics of self, as dietetics, as an inner economics, as etiquette or stylistics, and what I would call thanatetics (as the conduct of self before death, as it emerges from the letters of ‘Senecan’ consolation). All these various aspects belong to and can be brought within the parameters of Stoic ethics.” Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press), 90. Mazzotta’s excellent analysis does not elaborate on the actual uses of these practices in the letters, however.

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Petrarch’s efforts to cultivate the self through reading and writing share central aspects, and in some instances directly draw on, this medieval tradition, he also departs from it in significant ways, a departure that underscores the humanistic nature of his ethics of care of the self. By reviving ancient spiritual techniques and at the same time transforming practices that were commonly used in the Middle Ages in accordance with his Stoic understanding of the self, Petrarch established his humanism as a spiritual alternative to the monastic traditions of “care of the soul” of the later Middle Ages.

The Humanist Hermeneutics of Self The Stoic nature of Petrarch’s hermeneutics of self in his Latin letters comes to the fore in a series of letters on the theme of exile in Book 2 of the Familiares (Fam.2.3–4). Addressing an exile named Severo Apenninicola, Petrarch attempts to console his addressee’s grief and alleviate his desolation and misfortune through his letter, modeled to a large extent on Seneca’s letter of consolation to his mother from his own place of exile (De consolatione ad Helviam).20 “What is exile?” Petrarch rhetorically asks Severo following the opening paragraphs of the letter. “Is it the very nature of the situation, the absence of a dear one, or rather the indignation and impatient desire of a languishing mind that is irritating?”21 Exile, Petrarch thus implies, is above all a state of mind, a lack of control over our passions and desires. For the person who is governed by reason and virtue, as the exempla he uses in the remainder of the letter demonstrate, outward misfortunes such as exile have no impact whatsoever: “I believe that death was no more difficult for him than his exile for there is only one virtue that arms and teaches men’s heart to bear misfortunes,” he says of Marcellus.22 The true remedy to Severo’s physical exile is thus to end his spiritual one – attaining the right disposition of mind or, in other words, virtue: “I shall instead return to the more stable assistance of the virtues which neither the decrees of your citizens nor the power 20 Quotations

from De consolatione ad Helviam are taken from Seneca, Moral Essays, 2 vols., trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 21 “Ut enim ceptum persequar, quid exilium, queso? ipsa ne rei natura aut intermissio dilectarum personarum, an indignatio potius et impatiens desiderium animi languentis exasperat?” (Fam.2.3.5; Familiar Letters, 1:71 [translation slightly modified]). 22 “Cui mortem tamen illam nunquam exilio difficiliorem fuisse crediderim; una est enim virtus, que variis licet asperitatibus perferendis animos armat atque instruit” (Fam.2.3.10; Familiar Letters, 1:72). Seneca also provides the exemplum of Marcellus in his Ad Helviam 9.4–6.

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of tyrants nor the violence of plunderers nor nocturnal thefts can snatch away from you. If you did bring these along with you, no one could call you an exile without lying.”23 Despite these stern assertions in Fam.2.3–4, in the following letter in the collection, Fam.2.5, Petrarch reveals in his usual ironic fashion that his state is in fact not very different from that of the exiled Severo whom he has just reproached. Addressing Giovanni Colonna, the uncle of cardinal Giovanni Colonna and one of his patrons, Petrarch describes the restlessness and distress that are his share because of the absence of his addressee: “I was distressed and my heart was restless because I had learned that you were disturbed when you departed . . . whatever the philosophers discuss and whatever others feel within themselves about the stilling or acceptance of the blows of passion, I myself have been thus far strongly subject to them.”24 Petrarch himself, we learn from this letter, is in exile – removed from the benevolent state of virtue he exalted in the two previous letters. Further, notwithstanding the practical and political needs that such a supplication to a patron might fulfill, we receive in this letter another ample demonstration of the Stoic nature of Petrarch’s hermeneutics of self: it is the exile from virtue – his “true self ” – that makes him dependent on the fluctuations of fortune, and this dependence is in turn responsible for the passions and anxieties that dominate him, his experience of fragmentation and restlessness. Like Severo, Petrarch needs to reach the port of virtue, “return to himself,” to overcome the restlessness and agitation that dominate him – a notion he expresses at the end of the letter by using his favorite Senecan metaphor of the sailor: “I, being entangled in the web of my sins, have not yet been able to take refuge in a port, but am being cast about by that same storm in which you left me still battered by the waves.”25 23 “Redeo

ad virtutum stabiliora presidia, quas tibi nec civium tuorum decreta nec imperia tyrannorum nec predonum violentia nec nocturni fures eripient. Hec si tecum detulisti, mentietur quisquis te exulem dixerit” (Fam.2.3.34; Familiar Letters, 1:77–8). 24 “Angebar autem et turbatum erat cor meum, quoniam et turbatum te discessisse noveram . . . passionum insultibus, quicquid de his aut sedandis aut tollendis philosophi disputent, quicquid in se alii sentiant, adhuc valde sum obnoxius” (Fam.2.5.1–3; Familiar Letters, 1:87). 25 “Me scilicet, peccatorum meorum nodis implicitum, nondum in portum potuisse confugere, sed in eadem tempestate, qua me discedens reliquisti iactatum, fluctibus herere” (Fam.2.5.6; Familiar Letters, 1:88). “Sin,” for him, is thus the attachment to earthly things that cause him to be dependent on the blows of fortune. For other references to the sailor metaphor in Petrarch’s writings, see, for example, Fam.4.12.32 and Fam.8.4.23, quoted in the following section of this chapter (“Ethics of Writing”) and in which Petrarch refers directly to Seneca as his source.

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While emphasizing in Fam.2.3–5 that the exile from virtue is the source of Severo’s and his own distress, Petrarch also alludes in these letters to the possible causes of this exile – an explication that provides a slightly different picture from that given in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Whereas in the collection of vernacular poems the cause of his exile from virtue is the birth of his desire, leading him away from the dolce tempo de la prima etade, in Fam.2.4 we encounter another possible cause of this exile and subjection to the vicissitudes of fortune, one that is central to his Latin writings – the corrupting impact of society: “What I fear is that you behold the wound that has been inflicted upon you with the eyes of others rather than with your own, and that you measure your situation with another’s judgment. . . . There is almost nothing which a continuous concourse with others cannot accomplish in the hearts of men.”26 It is therefore the twisted view of the multitude, convincing him that exile is a terrible misfortune, that clouds Severo’s judgment and leads him away from virtue and into the domination of the passions.27 This emphasis on the role of society in one’s exile from virtue is in turn central also to the Secretum: criticizing in Book 2 Franciscus’ avarice, Augustinus directly attributes this malaise to the impact of society: “If you measure your life by your own standards, you have been rich for a long time. If you accept the standards of the majority, you can never be rich. Something will always be missing, and as you strive to attain it, you will be taken over by the dangerous ways of desire.”28 The false notions of the multitude are therefore the source of the endless pangs of desire, the sense of lack and longing that dominates Franciscus’ heart. In the following letter (Fam.2.5), however, when describing his own restlessness due to Colonna’s absence, Petrarch alludes to another possible source of his exile from virtue, one which is more Platonic in nature 26 “Illud

enim vereor ne alienis potius quam tuis oculis susceptum vulnus aspicias, et casum tuum alieno metiaris arbitrio; . . . Nichil enim fere est quod convictus assiduus in hominum ingeniis non possit” (Fam.2.4.20–3; Familiar Letters, 1:83–4). 27 Seneca brings forth this notion as well in his letter of consolation to his mother: “The very name of exile, by reason of a sort of persuasion and general consent, falls by now upon the ears very harshly, and strikes the hearer as something gloomy and accursed. For so the people have decreed, but decrees of the people wise men in large measure annul” (“Verbum quidem ipsum persuasione quadam et consensu iam asperius ad aures venit et audientis tamquam triste et execrabile ferit. Ita enim populus iussit; sed populi scita ex magna parte sapientes abrogant” [Ad Helviam 5.6]). 28 “Si ad naturam tuam te metiris, iampridem dives eras; si ad populi plausum, dives esse nunquam poteris semperque aliud restabit quod sequens per cupiditatum abrupta rapiaris” (Secretum 2.23; The Secret, 79).

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and resides within the domain of the individual rather than the impact of society – the fall of the soul into the body: A law was imposed on me together with my body when I was born, that from its association with me I must suffer many things which I would not suffer otherwise. The poet, aware of the secrets of nature, when he ascribed to human souls a certain burning force which he called of heavenly origin, added the following by way of exception: “Insofar as mortal bodies don’t slow them down and earthly organs and mortal members do not weaken them. This is why they fear and desire and suffer and rejoice but cannot recognize the heavens since they are enclosed in the darkness of a blind prison.”29

It is the impact of the body, as Petrarch states, that leads to his attachment to earthly objects – in this case, his beloved friend and patron – and subjects him to the vicissitudes of fortune and the passions that depend on them: “they fear and desire and suffer and rejoice” (metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque).30 Petrarch used the exact same words of Virgil that he quotes in this passage, taken from Aeneid 6.730–4, in the closing of the first dialogue of the Secretum, when Augustinus declares in a similar fashion that the fall of the soul into the body is responsible for the passions that torment Franciscus and for his inability to overcome them: Do not doubt that your soul, although it originated in heaven, has degenerated significantly from its original nobility because of the contamination caused by contact with the body in which it is enclosed. . . . Certainly Virgil, inspired from above, seemed to refer to the passions that arise as the soul melds with the body and forgets its better nature when he said: “Fiery energy and a heavenly origin dwell within those generative seeds [of living creatures], to the degree that they are not impeded by poisonous bodies or dulled by limbs of flesh.”31 29 “Secretorum nature conscius poeta, ubi animabus humanis inesse quendam ‘igneum vig-

orem et celestem’ dixit ‘originem’, excipiendo subiunxit: quantum non noxia corpora tardant / Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra; / Hinc metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque neque auras / Respiciunt clause tenebris et carcere ceco” (Fam.2.5.4; Familiar Letters, 1:87). 30 For this Stoic division of the passions, see also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.11.24–5 and 4.6.11–12. 31 “Animam quidem tuam, sicut celitus bene institutam esse non negaverim, sic ex contagio corporis huius, ubi circumsepta est, multum a primeva nobilitate sua degenerasse ne dubites; . . . Nempe passiones ex corporea commistione subortas oblivionemque nature melioris, divinitus videtur attigisse Virgilius, ubi ait: Igneus est illis vigor et celestis origo / seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant / terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra” (Secretum 1.34; The Secret, 68).

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Nonetheless, although using the figure of Augustinus in this passage from the Secretum to portray the role of the body in his experience of exile, Petrarch’s focus on the corrupting impact of the body in both Fam.2.5 and the Secretum in fact represents a crucial break from the thought of the historical Augustine and some popular views of his own day. In Book 14 of the City of God, referring to these same lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine specifically refutes the notion that the source of sin – and thus also its inevitable punishment of exile from God – is the body32 : However, those who imagine that all the ills of the soul derive from the body are mistaken. True, Virgil is apparently expounding Platonic teaching in glorious poetry when he says, “Of those seeds heaven is the source, and fiery / The energy within them, did not bodies / Hamper and thwart them, and these earthly limbs / And dying members dull them.” And he will have it that the body is to be taken as the source of all four of the most familiar emotional disturbances of the mind: desire and fear, joy and grief, which may be called the origins of all sins and moral failings. . . . However, our belief is something very different. For the corruption of the body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause of the first sin, but its punishment. And it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible.33

The soul, rather than the body, is the source of corruption and exile from God according to Augustine, a notion he often repeats in the Confessions as well, as, for example, in the description of the inherent wickedness of infants, preventing from their siblings the breast milk required for their survival, even though they have more than enough to sustain themselves: 32 Petrarch’s

Augustinus’ departure from the historical Augustine’s use of these lines of Virgil is pointed out by Carol Quillen in her discussion of the ways Petrarch intentionally “misreads” Augustine in the work to authorize his own humanistic project. See Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 191–6. 33 “Verum tamen quia omnia mala animae ex corpore putant accidisse, in errore sunt. Quamvis enim Vergilius Platonicam videatur luculentis versibus explicare sententiam dicens: Igneus est ollis vigor et caelestis origo / Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant / Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra, omnesque illas notissimas quattuor animi perturbationes, cupiditatem timorem, laetitiam tristitiam, quasi origines omnium peccatorum atque vitiorum volens intellegi ex corpore accidere . . . tamen aliter se habet fides nostra. Nam corruptio corporis, quae adgravat animam, non peccati primi est causa, sed poena; nec caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed anima peccatrix fecit esse corruptibilem carnem” (De civitate Dei 14.3). Edition: Aurelius Augustinus, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL) 48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955). The translation is from St. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972).

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“the feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant’s mind.”34 Similarly, in the portrayal in Book 8 of the inner turmoil within his soul right before his conversion, Augustine laments that when the will commands the body, the latter concurs instantly, but when commanding itself, no change is taking place, attributing this monstrosity to original sin dwelling within the soul: “And so it was ‘not I’ that brought this about ‘but sin which dwelt in me’ (Rom.7:17.20), sin resulting from the punishment of a more freely chosen sin, because I was a son of Adam.”35 For Augustine, therefore, it is the evil inherent within the soul, rather than the corrupting impact of the body (or society), that is responsible for sin and the ensuing punishment of exile. This Augustinian notion was also prevalent in the later Middle Ages. In his penitential manual Mirror of True Penitence, for example, the fourteenth-century Dominican preacher Jacopo Passavanti emphasizes that the “guilty will” is “the root and cause of sin” (la volont`a rea, ch’´e cagione e radice del peccato), calling this will “evil” (la mala volont`a).36 In a similar fashion, in late medieval dialogues that personify a debate between the Body and the Soul, the figure of the Body often defends its position by stating that all sin originates in the will.37 This emphasis on the soul’s responsibility for sin is in turn 34 “Ita

inbecillitas membrorum infantilium innocens est, non animus infantium” (Conf.1.7.11). 35 “Et ideo non iam ego operabar illam, sed quod habitabat in me peccatum de supplicio liberioris peccati, quia eram filius Adam” (Conf.8.10.22). At the same time, it should be noted that in several passages in the De vera religione, Augustine provides an account that is much closer to the Platonic and Stoic view of Virgil to which Petrarch adheres: “Suppose Plato were alive and would not spurn a question I would put to him; or rather suppose one of his own disciples, who lived at the same time as he did, had addressed him thus: ‘You have persuaded me that truth is seen not with the bodily eyes but by the pure mind, and that any soul that cleaves to the truth is thereby made happy and perfect. Nothing hinders the perception of truth more than a life devoted to lusts, and the false images of sensible things, derived from the sensible world and impressed on us by the agency of the body, which beget various opinions and errors” (“Si enim Plato ipse uiueret et me interrogantem non aspernaretur, uel potius, si quis eius discipulus eo ipso tempore quo uiuebat cum sibi ab illo persuaderetur non corporeis oculis sed pura mente ueritatem uideri, cui quaecumque anima inhaesisset eam beatam fieri atque perfectam, ad quam percipiendam nihil magis impedire quam uitam libidinibus deditam et falsas imagines rerum sensibilium quae nobis ab hoc sensibili mundo per corpus impressae uarias opiniones erroresque generarent” [De vera religione 3.3]). The edition cited is Augustinus, De vera religione, ed. G. M. Green (Vindobonae: Hoelder-PichlerTempsky, 1961). The translation is from Augustine, Of True Religion, trans. J. H. S Burleigh (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1959). 36 Jacopo Passavanti, Lo specchio della vera penitenza, ed. F.-L. Polidori (Florence: Le monnier, 1856), 96. 37 See Robert W. Ackerman, “The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity,” Speculum 37 (1962): 541–56, at 552.

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part of a larger rejection in the later Middle Ages of strict soul–body dualism, which regards the body as the prison of the soul. As Caroline Bynum has shown, theological and mystical discussions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tended to emphasize the unassailable knot of body and soul in the formation of the person, regarding self as a “psychosomatic unity”: “The idea of person, bequeathed by the Middle Ages to the modern world, was not a concept of soul escaping body or soul using body; it was a concept of self in which physicality was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity – and finally to whatever one means by salvation.”38 In contrast to these contemporary tendencies, therefore, Petrarch returns in his writings to a Platonic-Stoic notion of strict soul–body dualism and portrays the body as the cause of the soul’s destructive attachment to worldly objects. Attributing in his group of letters on exile, Fam.2.3–5, the source of the soul’s exile from virtue to the outside impact of the body and society (and not to an evil inherent within the soul), Petrarch goes on to assert that training oneself to ignore the false assumptions of society and to eradicate the impact of the body are the necessary steps to overcoming one’s exile, ending the experience of restlessness and disquietude. “Returning to oneself,” he tells Severo – leaving behind the harmful impact of society and turning to judge one’s condition according to one’s own counsel and standards – is the way to the cure: But if you choose to consult yourself (te ipsum consulere) and to speak with yourself rather than with others, I would never stop expecting great things from you and would call you most happy since you serve as your own judge, and I would consider you worthy of envy rather than of pity.39

“Speaking with himself,” weighing his situation according to his own standards rather than those of society – or, in other words, replacing the gaze of society with that of his own self – is the way to the port.40 Nonetheless, 38 Caroline

Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 11. 39 “Quodsi te ipsum consulere tecumque quam cum aliis loqui malueris, nunquam desinam de te grandia sperare, teque felicissimum, iudice te, dicere et invidiosum magis extimare quam miserum” (Fam.2.4.22–3; Familiar Letters, 1:84). 40 According to Shadi Bartsch, the stress on the need to renounce the gaze of society and replace it with the gaze of oneself is a defining feature of Seneca’s writings, representing a decisive break from the emphasis on the communal gaze in the Republican period: “Seneca’s concern is not so much with the traditional sources of this gaze at Rome: the censors, the officeholders, and the fellow elite; the imagines of one’s noble house; the people who flocked to funerals, triumphs, and law-cases. It is no longer they who will provide a mirror to the self, but the individual himself. . . . Indeed, the community, in

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this “turning inward,” for Petrarch, it is important to emphasize, is not a Romantic excursion into the hidden depths of the soul, a quest for one’s own unique individuality and inner truth; in addition – and perhaps more important – this turning inward is also not a Platonic or Augustinian attempt at reminiscence, the uncovering of the inner truth printed on the soul and forgotten due to either the fall into the body (Plato) or original sin (Augustine).41 Rather, in leaving society behind and turning to converse with himself, Severo should find the guiding light of the wisdom of the ancients and the virtues of bygone times, provided by means of material texts: You should rather turn to those studies to which you had dedicated your youth and which would have made your advanced years certainly tranquil except that your homeland which you now desire had forbidden them. However, they will certainly make your old age peaceful and venerable if it remains a despiser not only of your exile but of all casual things. I speak of liberal studies and especially of that part of philosophy which is the teacher of life. You had never removed these entirely from your mind although for a little while involvement in civic matters kept you from them. Now devote yourself to them completely since nothing prevents it, and give yourself over to the better auspices of a new life by keeping your mind busy with such activities. Read again the history of antiquity.42 Seneca’s day, can actively be the source of negative models.” Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 196. 41 As Augustine states, for example, at the end of the De magistro, “When the teachers have explained by means of words all the disciplines they profess to teach, even the disciplines of virtue and of wisdom, then those who are called ‘students’ consider within themselves whether truths have been stated. They do so by looking upon the inner Truth, according to their abilities” (“At istas omnes disciplinas, quas se docere profitentur, ipsiusque virtutis atque sapientiae cum verbis explicaverint, tum illi, qui discipuli vocantur, utrum vera dicta sint, apud semetipsos considerant interiorem scilicet illam veritatem pro viribus intuentes” [De magistro 45.14]). Augustinus, De magistro, eds. Peter Schulthess and Rudolf Rohrbach (Paderborn: Sch¨oningh, 2002). The translation is from Augustine, Against the Academicians and The Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995). On Petrarch’s departure from Augustine in this respect, see also Brian Stock, “Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 717–30, at 722. 42 “Ad illa potius te converte quibus adolescentiam dedicaveras, que robustiores annos tuos fecissent utique tranquillos, nisi, quam adhuc desideras, patria vetuisset; facient autem profecto placidissimam et venerabilem senectutem, nec exilii modo sed fortuitarum rerum omnium contemptricem. De studiis liberalibus loquor et presertim de illa parte philosophie que vite magistra est. Hec tu nunquam animo prorsus intermiseras, etsi parumper ab eis te civilium negotiorum impetus arceret. Nunc vero his, quoniam nichil obstat, totus incumbe, teque melioribus auspiciis nove vite offer et talibus animum exerce muneribus. Relege veterum historias” (Fam.2.4.27–9; Familiar Letters, 1:84–5).

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Turning to himself, Severo is thus replacing the misleading mirror of society with the benevolent one of ancient texts – with the precepts acquired through his readings in the liberal arts (studiis liberalibus), and particularly moral philosophy (de illa parte philosophie que vite magistra est) and history (Relege veterum historias). Reading these precepts and making them his own, Severo will be able not only to bear his physical exile but also to detach himself from all “casual things,” from all the bodily desires for earthly objects that lead him away from his “true self” – reason and virtue.43 The practice of reading, in sum, is for Petrarch that which should come to constitute our inner self along the lines of universal precepts of virtue, providing us with a shield against the twisted ways of the outside world. The importance Petrarch attributes in this letter to the practice of reading in the formation of the self is a dominant theme throughout his works and comes to the fore especially in the Secretum, interestingly enough in speeches made by the figure of Augustinus. For example, discussing near the end of the second dialogue Franciscus’ experience of inquietude, aversion, and inability to write because of his sojourn at the busy city of Avignon, Augustinus advises him to recall the texts of Cicero and Seneca he has often read, texts that have taught him that “if the internal turmoil of your mind were quiet, this relentless din around you, though it would assail your senses, would not unsettle your soul.”44 Franciscus answers that he has indeed read these works often and with careful attention (haud negligenter), and yet, once the books left his hands, their impact also faded.45 Augustinus, in response, accuses him of suffering from the common malaise of many superficial readers of the time, who do not turn what they read into part of themselves. While reading, Augustinus states, Franciscus should take notes of any “salutary ideas” that come up in the text,46 thus making sure that these ideas will 43 Seneca

gives similar advice to his mother near the end of his letter of consolation: “And so I guide you to that in which all who fly from Fortune must take refuge – to philosophic studies. They will heal your wound, they will uproot all your sadness” (“Itaque illo te duco, quo omnibus, qui fortunam fugiunt, confugiendum est, ad liberalia studia. Illa sanabunt vulnus tuum, illa omnem tristitiam tibi evellent” [Ad Helviam 17.3]). 44 “Quod si unquam intestinus tumultus tue mentis conquiesceret, fragor iste circumtonans, michi crede, sensus quidem pulsaret, sed animum non moveret” (Secretum 2.66; The Secret, 98). 45 “Imo vero inter legendo plurimum; libro autem e manibus elapso assensio simul omnis intercidit” (Secretum 2.66; The Secret, 98). 46 “Quotiens legenti salutares se se offerunt sententie” (Secretum 2.67; The Secret, 98).

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become an inherent part of his soul, arming him against the fluctuations of fortune and the onslaught of passions: Hide them deep in your memory and make them most familiar to you through diligent study, so that just like experienced doctors, no matter when or where some urgent illness strikes, you have the cure, as it were, written in your soul. . . . Who does not know, for example, that certain impulses are so sudden and strong that, unless reason checks them at the outset, they destroy the soul, the body, and the whole person, no matter what remedy is later applied?47

In animo conscripta remedia: the ancient texts should become like remedies written in the soul, forming the reader’s interior self and thus securing the control of reason. Augustinus’ reference in these lines to Franciscus’ need to “hide” (absconde) deep in his memory the salutary precepts contained in his readings is closely modeled on Seneca’s emphasis in letter 84 on our need to “hide away” (abscondat) the materials by which “[our soul] has been aided,” shaping who we are through the assimilation of the salutary precepts contained in our readings.48 The fact that it is the figure of Augustinus who advances the notion that we should fashion our interior self through the appropriation of ancient texts – “write” them on our soul – is all the more striking when we consider Augustine’s admonition in Book 1 of the Confessions that knowledge of letters should not take precedence over our moral conscience (conscientia), which is the Word of God written in the soul: “surely the knowledge of letters is not as 47 “Sed

illas in memorie penetralibus absconde multoque studio tibi familiares effice ut, quod experti solent medici, quocunque loco vel tempore dilationis impatiens morbus invaserit, habeas velut in animo conscripta remedia. . . . Quis enim ignorat, exempli gratia, esse quosdam motus tam precipites ut, nisi eos in ipsis exordiis ratio frenaverit, animum corpusque et totum hominem perdant et serum sit quicquid post tempus apponitur?” (Secretum 2.67; The Secret, 98–9, slightly modified). 48 “Hoc faciat animus noster: omnia, quibus est adiutus, abscondat . . . ” (Ad Lucilium 84.7). Seneca also refers in the letter to the need to “digest” (Concoquamus illa) and “make our own” (nostra faciamus) these texts, ultimately declaring, “I would have my mind of such a quality as this; it should be equipped with many arts, many precepts, and patterns of conduct taken from many epochs of history” (“Talem animum esse nostrum volo: multae in illo artes, multa praecepta sint, multarum aetatum exempla” [Ad Lucilium 84.10]). Seneca’s stress on the need to shape the self by means of salutary precepts attained through reading comes to the fore also in letter 2 of his Moral Letters, in which he admonishes Lucilius of the need to “digest” and make his own the works of a limited number of authors: “You must linger among a limited number of master authors, and digest their works, if you wish their ideas to gain a firm hold in your mind” (“Certis ingeniis immorari et innutriri oportet, si velis aliquid trahere, quod in animo fideliter sedeat” [Ad Lucilium 2.2; translation modified]).

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deep-seated as that of written conscience, that he is doing to another what he would not wish done to himself (Matt.7:12)” (“et certe non est interior litterarum scientia quam scripta conscientia, id se alteri facere quod nolit pati”; Conf.1.18.29). Thus, whereas the historical Augustine warns against the dangers of the study of classical letters and asserts that our inner self is constituted by the Word of God inscribed upon our soul – preceding anything we might learn from reading – Petrarch uses the figure of Augustinus to express the Senecan and un-Augustinian idea that it is the appropriation of precepts of conduct phrased by pagan authors and attained from the outside through reading that should form our inner self, thus securing our virtuosity and steadfastness.49 Petrarch’s hermeneutics of self in Latin works such as the collections of letters and the Secretum, in sum, is based on the notion that “self” is ultimately a state of mind from which we are exiled, or absent, because of the impact of both the body and society. The overcoming of this exile, or the attainment of selfhood – identified with one’s reason and virtue – depends for Petrarch, as it had for Seneca, on replacing the alienating impact of the body and society with that of ancient texts, shaping who we are inwardly through the assimilation of the beneficial precepts and examples contained in them, and thus assuring our virtuous disposition of mind. In this process of shaping the self, however, for Petrarch it is not only the practice of reading that plays a crucial role, but also – and no less important – that of writing.

Ethics of Writing Near the beginning of his work De otio religioso, written in 1347 as a letter to the monks of the Carthusian monastery of his brother Gherardo at Montrieux, Petrarch, as is often his habit, provides a justification for writing: If it is not important to you to hear me write that long ago you made a deeply-rooted habit of conduct for yourself, it is nevertheless important to me to say such things, if it can be done, so that I may hear myself speaking and heed what I say and not be talkative and deaf at the same time, which is a sickness common to preachers. Indeed, I shall control my pen so that my letter to those who are distant may be for me something like a conversation 49 According to Foucault, the notion that we need to shape the self through the assimilation

and appropriation of precepts of conduct attained from the outside is one of the defining traits of the Stoic “care of the self ”: “In the philosophical tradition inaugurated by Stoicism, ask¯esis means not renunciation but the progressive consideration of self, or mastery over oneself, obtained . . . through the acquisition and assimilation of truth.” Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 238.

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with those who are present, although (to confess the truth) I may be present only in both the nobler and better part of myself.50

The text he composes, as Petrarch states, is important to himself more than to his readers: unlike the preachers who speak and do not listen to what they themselves preach, he hopes to listen to himself and be inspired and moved by his topic. Through the act of writing about noble matters, he therefore argues, the author himself is transformed, becoming like the object of his meditation. This assertion of the value of the act of writing as a practice of care of the self – allowing the author to advance on the road to virtue – is central to Petrarch’s Latin writings. I have already mentioned Petrarch’s statement in Fam.1.9 – following his declaration that “the care of the soul” (cura animi) is the true goal of the philosopher – that his own eloquent writings assist him more than anything else in caring for his own self, providing him with remedies that are geared specifically to his own ailments.51 Moreover, in the discussion mentioned earlier from Book 2 of the Secretum in which Augustinus admonishes Franciscus of the need to shape the inner self by means of the salutary precepts contained in his readings, it is in fact the act of writing that facilitates, according to Augustinus, the metaphorical inscription of such precepts on the soul. As he states, to be able to retain what he reads, Franciscus should not trust his mnemonic powers but rather take notes while reading and in turn meditate diligently on them: “if you would make notes of important points, you would benefit from your reading.”52 The meticulous notes 50 “Et

si vestra non intersit id ex me ceu novum aliquid audire, unde iampridem radicatum vobis habitum comparastis, mea tamen interest si fieri possit talia loqui, si forte loquentem ipse me audiam exaudiamque, neque, qui comunis predicantium morbus est, loquax simul et surdus sim. Ita vero moderabor stilum, ut quasi ad presentes sermo michi sit ad absentes epystola, quamvis, ut quod est fatear, et maiore et meliore mei parte sim presens.” Latin edition is taken from Petrarca, Opere latine, eds. Antonietta Bufano, Basile Acari, Clara Kraus Reggiani, and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Torino: UTET, 1975). The translation is from Petrarch, On Religious Leisure, ed. and trans. Susan S. Schearer; introduction by Ronald G. Witt (New York: Italica Press, 2002), 5. 51 “Meantime I feel my own writings assisted me even more since they are more suited to my ailments, just as the sensitive hand of a doctor who is himself ill is placed more readily where he feels the pain to be” (“Eoque magis propriis adiuvor interdum, quo illa langoribus meis aptiora sunt, que conscia manus medici languentis et ubi dolor esset sentientis, apposuit” [Fam.1.9.12; Familiar Letters, 1:47]). As shown at the beginning of this chapter, for Petrarch the fact that his writings display Ciceronian eloquence contributes greatly to their transformative effect. See n. 6 of this chapter. On the classicizing aspects of Petrarch’s Latin style, see Witt, In the Footsteps, 264–75. 52 “Si suis locis notas certas impresseris, fructum ex lectione percipies” (Secretum 2.67; The Secret, 98).

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covering Petrarch’s extant manuscripts attest that he took this advice especially to heart.53 The practice of writing notes on salutary precepts contained in his readings is one of several ways that Petrarch used writing as a technology of the self, a means to cultivate his inner virtue. In the following pages, I explore some of the central uses of writing that emerge from his collections of Latin letters and the Secretum – uses that are often based on the revival of ancient – and mainly Senecan – spiritual techniques. As we shall see, the variety of ways in which Petrarch employed the practice of writing as a spiritual exercise, as well as the dominant role he gave to these uses in his overall project of caring for the self, turn his ethics of care of the self in a fundamental way into an ethics of writing. One central way in which Petrarch uses writing as a spiritual technique in his letters is the composing of “Senecan” letters of consolation to friends, the aim of which is to train both the author and his addressee (as well as his other readers) to accept the blows of fortune with equanimity.54 In the previous section of this chapter, we encountered Petrarch’s letters of consolation to the exiled Severo (Fam.2.3–4), which are modeled on Seneca’s De consolatione ad Helviam and in which he attempts to persuade Severo that the true remedy to his physical exile resides in ending his spiritual exile from virtue, replacing the twisted views of the multitude that dominate his mind with the rational precepts contained in ancient texts. Nonetheless, in the following letter, as we have seen, Petrarch ironically goes on to describe his own exile from virtue, his own inability to control his grief and distress because of the absence of his friend and patron Giovanni Colonna. His attempts to console Severo and train him to endure his exile virtuously, we therefore learn, are aimed to cure his own malaise as well, to cultivate his own inner virtue. The fact that through the writing of the numerous letters of consolation that are spread throughout his collections of letters Petrarch 53 On

this aspect, see Armando Petrucci, La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1967), 38–57. 54 Seneca alludes to the value of writing letters of consolation for both the writer and his readers in letter 99 of his Moral Letters. The letter is an account Seneca sends Lucilius of a previous letter of consolation that he had written to Marullus upon the death of his son. Therein he taught about the inconsequential nature of death and thus trained the addressee “to rouse [his] spirit against Fortune and to be on the watch for all her missiles” (“contra fortunam tolleres animos et omnia eius tela . . . prospiceres” [Ad Lucilium 99.32]). The fact that Seneca sends Lucilius an account of this letter shows that he considers such a consolation something that could benefit Lucilius as a reader and, no less important, himself as a writer – training both to endure similar misfortunes with equanimity. See also Foucault, “Self Writing,” 215.

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attempts to care for his own self no less than for his readers comes most explicitly to the fore in a letter of consolation he wrote to his friend Donato Albanzani in 1368 upon the death of his son (Seniles 10.4). Alluding near the beginning of the letter to his own recent loss of his beloved grandson, Petrarch declares: “so I succor and comfort you, dear friend, in what time there is, and to the best of my ability, and I comfort myself (me ipsum solor) since we share everything: hopes, fears, joys, and grief. And so, as I have said, I combine our wounds in order to prepare the salves (vulnera nostra coniungo, ut medicamenta permisceam).”55 Through this written medication – consisting mainly of the attempt to persuade both that death is not truly an evil – Petrarch strives to develop the “firm and manly” (virile ac solidum) quality of their minds, training both to accept such misfortunes steadfastly.56 To attain the goal of cultivating his own and his readers’ virtue by means of writing letters of consolation, Petrarch – like Seneca – often inserts into the letters, as we have seen in the letters to the exiled Severo, an abundance of ancient exempla of virtue. In letter 6.4 of the Familiares, he provides a theoretical justification for his use of exempla in his letters – a justification that highlights the variety of ways in which such documentation of exempla serves him in itself as an important technique of self-care. Responding to the accusations that he uses too many examples in his works, Petrarch declares that such documentation is the best way to lead his readers to virtue: “besides experience itself which is the best teacher of things, I would wager there is no better way for the reader to learn than by being moved by my admonition to emulate these greats as closely as possible.”57 In writing about these exempla, however, as he goes on to state, he benefits no less than his readers: “I hope that it will profit others as I know for certain it has profited me as a reader and writer (scribenti ac legenti)” (my emphasis).58 Through the act of writing about the great men of the past, Petrarch is therefore filled with the desire to imitate them and shape his own self in their image. 55 “Succurro

ego tibi et solor te, amice, pro spatio temporis proque ingenii viribus, et me ipsum solor, quibus sunt cunta comunia, spes et metus et gaudia et dolores; ideo, ut dixi, vulnera nostra coniungo, ut medicamenta permisceam” (Sen.10.4.14; Letters of Old Age, 2:381). 56 Sen.10.4.18; Letters of Old Age, 2:382. 57 “Id sane, preter experientiam que certissima magistra rerum est, nullo melius modo fit, quam si eum his quibus simillimus esse cupit, admoveam” (Fam.6.4.4; Familiar Letters, 1:314; translation modified). 58 “Quod et aliis profutura spero, et michi scribenti ac legenti profuisse admodum certe scio” (Fam.6.4.7; Familiar Letters, 1:315).

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Increasing his desire for imitation is not the only way in which the documentation of exempla in his letters is beneficial for Petrarch as a writer, however. A few lines earlier in this letter, Petrarch alludes to the way in which the writing about the great men of the past also leads him to conduct an internal self-examination: “There is nothing that moves me as much as the examples of outstanding men. They help one to rise on high and to test the mind to see whether it possesses anything solid, anything noble, anything unbending and firm against fortune, or whether it lies to itself about itself.”59 The period of writing (or reading) about the great men of the past is therefore accompanied for Petrarch by one of meditation in which he reflects inwardly on the state of his soul, examining whether he is truly as virtuous and steadfast in the face of the vicissitudes of fortune as he would like to believe. By comparing himself in this fashion to past models of virtue and inspecting his reactions to the calamities they suffered, Petrarch is able to prepare himself for similar hardships that might take place in the future, and in this respect the documentation of exempla also serves him as a type of premeditation of future evils – a practice that was common in the Stoic tradition and in which one was supposed to imagine hardships such as exile as if they are real and thus prepare oneself for them in advance.60 In addition to the writing of Senecan letters of consolation and the documentation of ancient exempla of virtue, Petrarch also uses writing in his Latin letters to document the lessons he learns from his own experience, turning the events of his everyday life into a moral exemplum that educates both himself and his readers. As Petrarch states in the passage from Fam.6.4 mentioned earlier, experience is the best teacher of life (“experientiam que certissima magistra rerum est”; Fam.6.4.4), and writing down the lessons he learns from his own experience thus has an invaluable moral value.61 Indeed, both the content of the letters in the 59 “Me

quidem nichil est quod moveat quantum exempla clarorum hominum. Iuvat enim assurgere, iuvat animum experiri an quicquam solidi habeat, an generosi aliquid atque adversus fortunam indomiti et infracti, an sibi de se ipse mentitus sit” (Fam.6.4.3; Familiar Letters, 1:314). 60 On the Stoic praemeditatio malorum, see Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 239. 61 Petrarch emphasizes the value of everyday experience as a teacher of life also in his description of the storm in Fam.5.5: “This is a digest of yesterday’s happenings . . . the account does offer ample matter regarding human behavior in times of crisis about which much has often been said but very little by wise men in view of the subject’s importance” (“Hec hesterne historie summa est . . . quamvis humanorum discriminum amplam preferat materiam, de quibus multa quidem sepe, sed pro rei qualitate pauca semper a sapientibus dici solent” [Fam.5.5.19; Familiar Letters, 1:247]).

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Familiares and the way Petrarch organizes them together in a collection often provide a lesson from his own experience on the fickleness of fortune, thus encouraging both him and his readers to renounce their attachment to earthly things bound to fluctuate. The letters from Book 4 of the Familiares portraying his presumable coronation on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter, April 8, 1341, provide a good example of this use of self-writing. In Fam.4.8, written to his friend Barbato da Sulmona, the royal secretary of King Robert of Naples, Petrarch briefly describes his coronation, and then adds: You will be informed about the other things that happened beyond all hope and expectation. But so that I might learn from fresh experience how sad things always accompany joyful things, we had scarcely left the walls of the city when I, together with those who had followed me on land and sea, fell into the hands of an armed band of thieves.62

Experience, Petrarch states, provided him with a lesson on the fluctuations of fortune – immediately following his earthly triumph, he was attacked by a band of thieves – and by documenting in writing these vicissitudes, turning his own story into an exemplum, he educates both himself and his audience about the vanity of earthly achievements and expectations. The same notion is then advanced in Fam.4.10 – the first letter following the letters dealing with the coronation – which laments the untimely death of his friend, Tommaso da Messina: The blow is not one to which my mind is accustomed and cannot be lightened by ordinary remedies, it has descended very deeply into my heart. Untamed fortune watched the place and time for the blow and waited for it to have its fullest effect. In what might be called the springtime of life she snatched away my Tommaso whom I can never mention without tears. . . . His premature death, I must confess, makes all mortal things worthless to me. I see now how great is the strength of our existence and what I can hope for now, and I am warned by the example of that very close brother of mine.63 62 “Cetera

supra spem et supra fidem successisse noveris. At ut recenti experimento cognoscerem quam semper letis iuncta sunt tristia, vix menia Urbis egressi, ego cum his qui me terra et pelago secuti erant, in latronum armatas manus incidimus” (Fam.4.8.2–3; Familiar Letters, 1:196). 63 “Non est usitatum animi mei vulnus aut vulgato medicamine relevandum; altius in precordia descendit. Observavit enim nocendi locum ac tempus et toto pondere ferox incubuit fortuna; Thomamque meum, nunquam michi sine lacrimis nominandum . . . primo, ut sic dixerim, etatis vere preripuit. Cuius immaturo obitu, ipse michi, fateor, et mortalia cunta viluerunt. Video quanta rerum nostrarum firmitas, et quid michi nunc sperandum sit, exemplo coniunctissimi fratris admoneor” (Fam.4.10.1–2; Familiar Letters, 1:198).

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The death of Tommaso in the springtime of life serves here again as an exemplum, a moral lesson for Petrarch on the vanity of trusting in worldly things and earthly hopes, and the documentation of this lesson in writing is an important reminder of this vanity to him and his readers. The fact that Petrarch places this letter right after the series of letters on the coronation demonstrates that the organization of the letters in the collection serves at least in part a moral and educational purpose. The letter on the death of Tommaso opens a series of four letters lamenting the death of Petrarch’s friends and acquaintances, and by placing these letters after the description of his earthly triumph, Petrarch turns his own and the reader’s awareness to the words he addressed to the Bishop Giacomo Colonna about two months before the coronation: “You ask why so much trouble, enthusiasm and care. . . . ‘To what purpose therefore this pomp of foliage?’ What will I answer, you ask. What else except those words of that learned Hebrew: ‘vanity of vanities, all is but vanity’? Thus are the ways of men.”64 Petrarch’s use of the practice of self-writing as a means to create a moral exemplum out of his everyday experiences is also evident in Book 8 of the Familiares, which portrays his plans to move to live with his three close friends – Olimpio (Luca Cristiani), Simplicianus (Mainardo Accursio), and Socrates (Ludwig van Kempen).65 In Fam.8.2, written in 1349 to Olimpio, Petrarch laments his absence during Olimpio and Simplicianus’ visit to his house in Parma. Having learned about their visit upon his return home, Petrarch writes Olimpio that he hopes that the irritation they feel will soon be replaced by the joy of their eventual meeting, but adds that “she alone can accomplish this whose inflexible hardness often blunts the weak edge of human counsel.”66 The following three letters are addressed as well to Olimpio, and Petrarch beseeches him in them to accept his offer to move together with their other two friends Simplicianus and Socrates to a shared accommodation, where rejecting the snares of worldly ambition they will be able to enjoy peace of mind and quiet study of the liberal arts: “what impedes us from completing 64 “Queris

quo hic labor, hoc studium, hec cura; . . . ‘Quorsum igitur hic frondium apparatus?’ quid respondeam, queris. Quid, putas, nisi illud Sapientis Hebreorum: ‘Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas’? Sed sic sunt mores hominum” (Fam.4.6.7; Familiar Letters, 1:192). 65 See Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 82–3. 66 “De hoc tamen illa viderit, cuius adamantina duritie sepe humani consilii acies infirma retunditur” (Fam.8.2.3; Familiar Letters, 1:396).

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together what remains of our life, however little that may be, through peace of mind and in the study of the arts, and, as Seneca says, ‘if we have lived on the waters (to) die in port?’”67 Nonetheless, following the letters documenting these expectations, Petrarch turns in Fam.8.7–8, written probably also in 1349, to lament the horrors of the Plague of 1348, and in the following letter, Fam.8.9, written to Socrates in that same year, Petrarch returns to the visit of Olimpio and Simplicianus described in the second letter of the book, but this time to narrate the news he received about its tragic outcome. Having discovered that he is not at home, Petrarch tells Socrates, the two turned back, and on their way home, they were attacked by robbers. Whereas Simplicianus died in the attack, Olimpio managed to run away, but his fate is still unknown. His hope to move to live together with his closest friends, as Petrarch states, ended in nothing but heartache and fragmentation, making him “distracted and torn to pieces in an extraordinary and wretched manner by raging and contradictory anxieties.”68 Through this dramatic recollection of the events – masterfully depicting the twists and turns of fortune and the tragic outcome of its ways – Petrarch again turns his own story into an exemplum, teaching both himself and his readers about the dangers of worldly attachments. Here as well, the organization of the letters serves to emphasize this lesson: placing first the letter to Olimpio in which he apologizes for his absence and looks forward to their eventual meeting, then inserting the three letters calling them to live together, and finally breaking to the letters on the Black Death before closing the book with the terrible news of the outcome of the visit – Petrarch thus creates in the book a short sequence that highlights the vanity and futileness of attaching oneself to earthly things bound to fluctuate. His own experiences in time, Petrarch in sum shows, are the perfect material for an epiclike tale that educates both the writer and his readers about the twisted ways of fortune and the need to detach oneself from it. It is this affirmation of experience as the true teacher of life, and of the value of the documentation of the lessons learned from it in writing, that might explain at least in part the proliferation of autobiographical 67 “Nos

vero quid impedit quominus has vite reliquias, quantulecunque sunt, simul in pace animi bonarumque artium studiis transigamus, et ‘si in freto viximus’ ut ait Seneca, ‘moriamur in portu’?” (Fam.8.4.23; Familiar Letters, 1:406). 68 “Mirum ac miserabilem in modum fluctuantibus atque inter se certantibus curis ac nuntiis distrahor ac discerpor” (Fam.8.9.22; Familiar Letters, 1:426).

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texts in early Italian humanism. In the Convivio, Dante states that writing about oneself is justified only in the extreme cases when one needs to obviate grave disgrace or danger (as was the case with Boethius) or when one’s personal story would be of great help to others and no one else is better equipped than that same person to understand and narrate this story (as was the case with Augustine).69 Dante then goes on to state that he is justified in speaking about himself for both reasons: “I am moved to speak by both the fear of disgrace and the desire to give instruction which no one else is in a position to give.”70 Petrarch’s practice of selfwriting, however, does not follow from any of these justifications. He is neither a virtuous man like Augustine nor in a grave danger like Boethius. Moreover, in contrast to Dante, he specifically states that he is in no better position than others to know and portray the meaning of his own story: “In what condition my mind is, I neither know fully, nor is it for me to declare. As Augustine says, ‘Those shadows in which my possibilities are hidden from me are to be regretted since my mind questioning itself about its own powers believes that it should not easily trust in itself.’”71 Nonetheless, despite all these limitations, it is Petrarch’s belief that the documentation of the embodied experience of self-in-time – even of an imperfect man like him – is morally beneficial both for the writer and his readers, that justifies in his view the practice of self-writing. The validation of experience, the affirmation of the value of writing as a spiritual exercise, and the rise of autobiography in the period are thus intrinsically intertwined.72 Thus far we have encountered four main ways in which Petrarch uses writing as a spiritual exercise in his Latin works – taking notes on his 69 Dante,

Convivio 1.2.13. The edition cited is Dante, Convivio, ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1995). The translation is from Dante, The Banquet, trans. Christopher Ryan (Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1989). 70 “Movemi timore d’infamia, e movemi disiderio di dottrina dare, la quale altri veramente ` (Convivio 1.2.15). dare non puo” 71 “Qualis sit animus meus, nec plene scio nec asserere meum est. ‘Sunt enim’ ut ait Augustinus, ‘et iste plangende tenebre, in quibus me latet facultas mea, que in me est, ut animus meus de viribus suis ipse se interrogans non facile sibi credendum existimet’” (Fam.5.18.2; Familiar Letters, 1:276). 72 A central example of the rise of autobiographical texts in humanist circles after Petrarch is provided in Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna’s works Rationarium vite and Dialogus inter Johannem et literam. In both works, the Petrarchan emphasis on the value of self-writing as a spiritual exercise is evident. See Conversini, Rationarium vite, ed. Vittore Nason (Florence: Olschki, 1986), and Dialogue between Giovanni and a Letter, ed. and trans. Helen Lanneau Eaker, introduction and notes by Helen Lanneau Eaker and Benjamin G. Kohl (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, in conjunction with The Renaissance Society of America, 1989).

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readings, writing letters of consolation that serve to alleviate his own and his readers’ wounds, documenting in letters ancient exempla of virtue (which entice his desire for imitation and lead him to examine his state in their mirror), and turning his own everyday experiences into a moral exemplum. In addition to these uses, Petrarch also employs writing in his Latin texts as a tool for the examination of conscience. For that purpose, he revives in his letters another ancient practice – conducting an examination of conscience in letters to friends. In Fam.7.16, Petrarch states that one of the aims of letter writing among friends should be to provide the addressee with a mirror through which he might come to know his own shortcomings: I beg you devote yourself to this; turn your most eloquent pen this way; reveal me to myself; take over the power of your tongue; seize, bind, strike, burn, cut, restrain all exaggeration, cut away all that is superfluous, and do not fear that you will cause me either to blush or to grow pale. A dismal drink drives away dismal illness. I am ill, who does not know it? I must be cured by more bitter remedies than yours.73

Ostende me michi – reveal me to myself – Petrarch beseeches his addressee, indicating that the practice of letter writing between friends should serve as a vehicle for self-knowledge, facilitating true change.74 Petrarch’s practice of writing letters about his own condition (De stato suo) in the collection can be regarded, from this perspective, as an attempt to turn the mirror of writing upon himself, revealing his state both to himself and to the gaze of others and by that enticing himself to change his ways. Seneca recommends this practice of reviewing and revealing one’s state in letters to friends in letter 83 of his Moral Letters to Lucilius: You bid me give you an account of each separate day, and of the whole day too (Singulos dies tibi meos et quidem totos indicari iubes); so you must have a good opinion of me if you think that in these days of mine there is nothing to hide. At any rate, it is thus that we should live, as if we lived in plain sight of all men; and it is thus that we should think, as if there were someone who 73 “Hic

precor, incumbe, huc facundissimum calamum tuum verte, ostende me michi, inice lingue manum, arripe, liga, feri, ure, seca, tumida comprime, supervacua rescinde, nec ruborem michi fecisse timueris nec pallorem; tristis potio tristes pellit egritudines. Eger sum, quis nescit?; acriore tibi sum curandus antidoto” (Fam.7.16.5; Familiar Letters, 1:378–9). 74 In Fam.22.7, Petrarch provides his addressee, a certain “stubborn youth” (contumacis adolescentis), with such a mirror, harshly rebuking him and stating that through the letter he could come to see his soul as it really is: “in these pages you will see the reflection of your spirit as in a mirror” (“inque hac pagina quasi in speculo detersam animi tui faciem videbis” [Fam.22.7.23; Familiar Letters, 3:228]).

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could look into our inmost souls. . . . I shall therefore do as you bid, and shall gladly inform you by letter what I am doing, and in what sequence. I shall keep watching myself continually, and – a most useful habit – shall review each day. For this is what makes us wicked, that no one of us looks back over his own life.75

Continuous self-examination, Seneca therefore maintains, is required to make us better, and the enactment of such examination in letters to friends – revealing the examination to the gaze of all – is especially useful to motivate change. Petrarch echoes these words of Seneca in his letter concerning his condition (De statu suo) to his longtime friend Guido Sette: “unless I am mistaken, you are now asking for particular details and day-to-day information: what I do during the day, what plans I have for the future” (“minutiora, ni fallor, et quotidiana exigis, quid in dies agam, quid de futuro statuam”; Fam.19.16.2; Familiar Letters, 3:106). In the remainder of the letter, Petrarch goes on to review his condition and day-to-day activities, describing his reading and writing habits, his struggles with bodily passions, and his fame, before finally turning to review to the gaze of all everyday habits such as his eating and sleeping routines, encouraging himself through the revelation to renounce habits contradictory to virtue and to continue to adhere to beneficial ones. Petrarch’s obsessive self-revelation in his letters therefore serves at least in part as a form of self-examination that allows him to care for his own self, to cultivate his inner virtue.76 75 “Singulos

dies tibi meos et quidem totos indicari iubes; bene de me iudicas, si nihil esse in illis putas, quod abscondam. Sic certe vivendum est, tamquam in conspectu vivamus; sic cogitandum, tamquam aliquis in pectus intimum introspicere possit. . . . Faciam ergo, quod iubes, et quid agam et quo ordine, libenter tibi scribam. Observabo me protinus et, quod est utilissimum, diem meum recognoscam. Hoc nos pessimos facit, quod nemo vitam suam respicit” (Ad Lucilium 83.1–2). 76 Another example of a letter in which Petrarch reviews his condition to the gaze of all is Fam.5.18, written also to Guido Sette. In his letter of exhortation to Luigi Marsili (Sen.15.6), Petrarch stresses the general value of the ancient practice of conducting daily self-examinations for the purpose of caring for the self, advising Marsili to go over his actions at the end of each day and inspect whether he used his time well: “Rouse yourself and examine your days one by one; and any day that you find to have gone by you with no benefit, consider that you have not even lived that day . . . take care that no day pass without our sifting through it and reflecting upon ourselves. For how will we be able to care for other matters if we neglect ourselves?” (“Excute tecum et examina singulos dies tuos et quem inutilem tibi preteriisse deprehenderis, non vixisse te credito. . . . Hoc possumus curare, ne dies ulla sine nostra discussione et in nos animi reflexione pertranseat. Quomodo enim aliena curabimus, si nostra negligimus?” (Sen.15.6.11–12; Letters of Old Age, 2:578; translation modified). On the use of such daily self-examinations in the Stoic tradition, see Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 233–4; 236–8.

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Petrarch’s use of writing as a means to conduct an internal examination of conscience receives its most evident example in his imaginary dialogue with the figure of Augustine, the Secretum. The notion of “examination of conscience” is a central one in the work itself; Augustinus often encourages Franciscus to turn to his conscience to discover the truth about his condition. In the first dialogue of the work, for example, Augustinus attempts to convince Franciscus that the reason for his ongoing misery and his inability to alleviate his sense of restlessness and inquietude despite his ongoing meditations on death (“ad conditionis mee miseriam mortemque respexerim”; Secretum 1.9) is the fact that he did not wish wholeheartedly to be freed from his earthly passions. Franciscus objects to the accusation and maintains that he did fully wish for such change,77 and in response Augustinus invites him to examine his conscience and discover there the truth about his desires: To see this more clearly, examine your conscience (conscientiam ipse tuam consule). That faculty is the best interpreter of virtue. It is the infallible and true evaluator of thoughts and actions. Your conscience will tell you that you have never longed to attain salvation as you should, but only more halfheartedly and more lazily than your extremely perilous situation warranted.78

“Consulting his conscience” following this admonition, Franciscus admits that Augustinus’ accusations are true and agrees that his problem is indeed that he never truly desired to be released from his chains. This exhortation of Augustinus to Franciscus to look within his conscience and discover there the truth about his condition – the fact that he never truly wished to leave behind his earthly desires – is in turn reflected in the entire work: throughout the Secretum, Petrarch is using the austere figure of Augustinus to examine in and through writing the instances in which he is still subjected to earthly passions and ambitions and thus also to the blows of fortune.79 From the examination of the 77 “I am shocked [to hear] that up until now, I have never wanted what I believed I had always

wanted” (“Obstupeo, noluisse hactenus quod semper voluisse credideram” [Secretum 1.15; The Secret, 57]). 78 “Ut certius credas conscientiam ipse tuam consule. Illa optima virtutis interpres, illa infallibilis et verax est operum cogitationumque pensatrix. Illa tibi dicet nunquam te ad salutem qua decuit aspirasse, sed tepidius remissiusque quam periculorum tantorum consideratio requirebat” (Secretum 1.15; The Secret, 57–8). 79 Hans Baron describes Augustinus as the representative of Petrarch’s conscience, whose aim in the work is to “uncover those secret trends of Petrarch’s mind which he tries to hide from himself.” Baron, however, does not discuss the crucial role of writing in this examination. See Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 72.

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passions of pride, ambition, anger, melancholy, and so on in Book 2 to the discussion of the two major chains that bind Franciscus – love and glory – in Book 3, the dialogue revolves around Augustinus’ attempts to prove to Franciscus that he indeed suffers from these passions – that the motivations for his actions are not as noble as he would like to believe – and around his effort to persuade Franciscus to leave these passions behind. This attempt to decipher the true nature of Franciscus’ desires is ultimately presented in the work as an act of reading – the reading of Franciscus’ “book of experiences.” In Book 3 of the work, following Augustinus’ efforts to convince Franciscus that his love for Laura is not as noble as he would like to believe and that its impact on him has been mostly negative, Franciscus finally declares that he is persuaded because it seems to him that Augustinus took his arguments directly from his “book of experiences” (experientie libro).80 The examination of conscience in the work thus consists of the combined acts of reading and writing: it is through the internal reading of his past experiences that Petrarch is able to realize the truth about his condition, and it is the writing of the dialogue that facilitates this internal reading. The role of writing does not end in encouraging the internal reading, however: through the documentation of this reading, Petrarch is also able to imprint on his mind the conclusions he reaches in the process of reading and writing, shaping himself accordingly. As Petrarch states in the prologue, he took care to “impress deep in [his] memory” the reproaches of Augustinus that were most applicable to his condition, thus alluding to the close link between the writing of the dialogue and the inscription of its results on his mind.81 In the same fashion that Augustinus advised Franciscus in Book 2 to write notes on his readings of ancient texts to assimilate the salutary precepts contained in them, so the writing of the Secretum permits him to internalize and make his own the conclusions he reaches from the reading of his own “book of experience.” The entire Secretum, as a result, should be regarded as a spiritual exercise for which the aim is the examination of conscience through the mutual acts of writing and internal reading, an examination that in turn is supposed to shape and transform 80 “I

have been conquered, I confess, because you seem to have taken all the things you describe directly from the book of my own experiences” (“Victus sum, fateor, quoniam cunta que memoras de medio experientie libro michi videris excerpsisse” [Secretum 3.35; The Secret, 119]). 81 “Ea tamen quibus ipse notatus sum memorie altius impressi” (Secretum Proh.9; The Secret, 47).

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the person writing according to the discoveries made in the process of writing.82 Both the Secretum and the collections of letters therefore present us with a plethora of ways in which writing serves Petrarch as a spiritual exercise, allowing him to cultivate his inner virtue. Through the act of writing, Petrarch inscribes on his soul the precepts contained in his readings, consoles and trains himself to accept with equanimity the blows of fortune, kindles his desire to imitate outstanding men, educates and reminds himself of the lessons learned from his own experience, and conducts an internal examination of conscience – an examination for which the aim is not only to allow him to know and profess his own shortcomings but also to actively shape and reform who he is. In these efforts to cultivate the self by means of writing, as we have seen, Petrarch often revives ancient uses of writing that were common in the Stoic tradition, among them the writing of letters of consolation and the conducting of an examination of conscience in letters to friends. The practice of writing, in sum, plays a crucial role for Petrarch in his philosophical project of caring for the self, and the revival of ancient uses of writing as a spiritual exercise – in addition to the ancient idea of “care of the self ” in general – thus become a defining feature of his humanism.

The Secularization of Care Although Petrarch’s approach to the self, and to philosophy in general, is defined, as shown in the first two sections of this chapter, by his return to the ancient, and particularly Senecan, emphasis on the need to care for the self by means of spiritual exercises such as reading and writing, the centrality of the notion of cura animi in his works and the crucial role he gives to the techniques of reading and writing in undertaking such care also have strong affinities to the works of the historical Augustine and the monastic tradition of the later Middle Ages.83 Petrarch’s attempts to care for the self through the documentation of his own experiences in 82 There

is no doubt that, at the same time, Franciscus is not simply a passive recipient of the admonitions of his “conscience” Augustinus and that the entire attempt to cultivate the self through reading and writing in the dialogue ends to a large extent in a failure. I address this aspect and what I consider to be the causes of this failure in the following chapter. 83 Petrarch’s familiarity with the monastic traditions of the later Middle Ages, and particularly the Carthusian order to which his brother belonged, is discussed by Ronald G. Witt in his introduction to Petrarch, On Religious Leisure. On the impact of medieval monasticism on Petrarch, see also Giles Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” in Francesco Petrarca:

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writing and his enactment of an inner dialogue, an internal examination of conscience, through the production of a literary text in the Secretum are without a doubt indebted to Augustine’s works such as the Confessions and the Soliloquies. The later part of Book 10 of the Confessions, in which Augustine turns from examining his past experiences to reflect on the present state of his soul – examining its susceptibility to sin – is particularly echoed in Petrarch’s examination of his sins in the Secretum. In addition, from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onward, monastic reformers – building to a large extent on the thought of Augustine – stressed in a similar fashion the central role that the practice of writing, as well as the reflection on one’s own experiences, should play in the cultivation of the self.84 William of St. Thierry, in his Golden Epistle written to the Carthusians at Mont Dieu, for example, emphasizes the value of writing as a spiritual exercise: “physical exercise is necessary as a help to spiritual pursuits. But not all its forms are of the same value in this respect. Those are to be preferred which have the greater likeness and kinship to the spiritual; for example, meditating on something to be written or writing something to be read for spiritual edification.”85 Guigo I, Prior of the Charterhouse, conducts in his Meditations written in the first half of the twelfth century an elaborate self-analysis through the act of writing, which often entails an examination of conscience that focuses on his reactions to his everyday experiences: “Your reading glass has been broken, and you are upset. Blame yourself for this, and your own error, in attaching Citizen of the World, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Padova: Editrice Antenore; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 53–99; Jean Leclercq, “Temi monastici nell’opera del Petrarca,” Lettere Italiane 43 (1991): 42–54; and Ugo Mariani, Il Petrarca e gli Agostiniani (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1946). 84 See Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 195–273; C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1989), chaps. 9 and 12; and Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 52– 70. See also Ineke van ’T Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). 85 “Sic cum in adjutorium spiritualis studii necessaria sint, non tamen in hoc semper aeque convenire videntur omnia corporalia exercitia, sed quae cum spiritualibus propiorem habere videntur similitudinem, et affinitatem propiorem; sicut ad aedificationem spiritualem, meditari quod scribatur, vel scribere quod legatur.” The Latin edition is William of Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux fr`eres du Mont-Dieu: lettre d’or, ed. Jean D´echanet. Sources Chr´etiennes, 223 (Paris: Les e´ ditions du cerf, 1975), 85. The English translation is from William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, trans. Theodore Berkeley (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976).

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yourself to breakable things.”86 Bernard of Clairvaux advises such reading from the “book of experience” in his sermons: “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae”87 – the exact same phrase that is used by Petrarch, as we have seen, during his attempts to decipher the true nature of his love for Laura in Book 3 of the Secretum.88 This twelfth-century emphasis on the value of writing as a spiritual exercise – and particularly of the value of conducting an internal examination of conscience through the act of writing – grew steadily in the later Middle Ages, often with relation to the rise of the sacrament of penance. The fourteenth-century Dominican preacher Jacopo Passavanti advised his readers to write down their sins, so that they might use what they write later during confession.89 Florentius Radewijns, one of the founders of the lay devotional group the Devotio Moderna, gives the novices in his Tractatulus devotus the following advice: “speak to a certain spiritual man . . . about your triumphs and defects and about your temptations at least twice or thrice a year, and show to him in writing your way of life”90 86 Article

265. The Latin edition is Guigo I, Les m´editationis, ed. un chartreux. Sources Chr´etiennes, 308 (Paris: Les e´ ditions du cerf, 1983), 186. The English translation is from Guigo I, The Meditations of Guigo I, Prior of the Charterhouse, trans. A. Gordon Mursell (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995). 87 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi opera, 8 vols., eds. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77), 1:14. See also Mursell’s introduction to The Meditations of Guigo I, 34. Guigo II the Carthusian uses this term as well: “Those who have not known such things do not understand them, for they could learn more clearly of them only from the book of experience where God’s grace itself is the teacher.” See Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life and Twelve Meditations, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1978), 89. 88 “I have been conquered, I confess, because you seem to have taken all the things you describe directly from the book of my own experiences” (“Victus sum, fateor, quoniam cunta que memoras de medio experientie libro michi videris excerpsisse” [Secretum 3.35; The Secret, 119]). 89 Passavanti, Lo specchio, 144–5: “E se fosse stata la persona piu ` tempo che non si fosse confessata, e dubitasse di non ricordarsene bene nell’ora della confessione . . . s`ı ne potrebbe fare una memoria per iscrittura, la quale potrebbe poi leggere a pi`e del prete.” On the relation between the rise of the sacrament of penance, officially prescribed by the Lateran Council of 1215, and humanist autobiographies, see T. C. Price Zimmerman, “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, eds. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 119–40. 90 “Alicui viro spirituali . . . bis vel ter in anno, loquatur de profectu et defectu suo, de temptacionibus, et modum suum vivendi ostendat et in scriptis.” Quoted in Nikolaus Staubach, “Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Bereich der Devotio moderna,” Fr¨uhmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 418–61, at 433 n. 48. Translation is mine. On the centrality of the practices of reading and writing to the spirituality of the Devotio Moderna,

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(emphasis mine). Petrarch’s attempts to conduct an internal examination of conscience and review his susceptibility to sin through the act of writing in the Secretum are thus clearly indebted to this medieval tradition of writing. In addition to the close proximity of Petrarch’s examination of conscience in the Secretum and the medieval spiritual tradition, his portrayal of the way the documentation of ancient exempla leads him to examine his condition in the mirror of the text in Fam.6.4 closely resembles the use of books as catalysts for self-examination in the monastic tradition. Hugh of St. Victor, commenting on the Rule of St. Augustine, advises the novices to examine their soul in the mirror of the Rule: “This little book may well be called a mirror. In it we are able to see our state of soul, whether it present an appearance of beauty or ugliness, that is to say, whether it be holy or sinful.”91 In a remarkable passage from the twelfth-century Cistercian treatise Liber de modo bene vivendi, the author advises the sister to whom the book is addressed to use it as a mirror and examine herself in it: “Receive this book, put it before your eyes like a mirror, and think about it at all times like a source of reflection. For the precepts of God are mirrors, in which souls look into themselves, become acquainted with their faults . . . and . . . correct the defects of their thoughts (vitia cogitationum).”92 Alongside his use of writing as a spiritual exercise, Petrarch’s technique of reading, especially as it comes to the fore in Book 2 of the Secretum, resembles in several aspects the use of reading in the monastic tradition of the later Middle Ages. Reading, as Augustinus maintains in the Secretum, should be a slow and attentive process, accompanied by both the meticulous writing of notes on useful passages in the text and a period of meditation in which the reader reflects inwardly on these passages, thus “writing” them upon the soul.93 This type of see also John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 266–304. 91 “Et bene hunc libellum dicit speculum; quia in eo tanquam in speculo inspicere possumus quales sumus, sive pulchri, sive foedi, sive justi, sive injusti.” Hugh of St. Victor, “Expositio in regulam beati Augustini,” in Patrologia latina 176, col. 924. The translation is from Hugh of St. Victor, Explanation of the Rule of St. Augustine, trans. Dom Aloysius Smith (London: Sands and Company, 1911). 92 “Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem,” Patrologia latina 184, col. 1199. Quoted in Brian Stock, Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture (Hanover and London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University, 2007), 71. 93 See also the discussion at the end of the first section of this chapter (“The Humanist Hermeneutics of Self ”).

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attentive reading echoes the monastic technique of lectio divina, in which the monk read (or heard read aloud) a passage of Scripture, on which he was then expected to meditate in silence.94 In his work De archa Noe, Hugh of St. Victor describes this monastic process of lectio in similar terms to Petrarch’s Augustinus, stating that we need to digest the passage of Scripture we read and to make it “our own” (meas faciam), shaping who we are according to the precepts and examples contained in it.95 Petrarch’s efforts to cultivate the self by means of the practices of reading and writing therefore share central aspects and, in instances such as the writing of the Secretum, are undoubtedly directly influenced by the works of Augustine and the developments in the uses of reading and writing in the monastic tradition of the later Middle Ages. However, although resembling or directly drawing on the Augustinian-monastic tradition of the Middle Ages, Petrarch’s uses of the techniques of reading and writing also depart from the medieval tradition in significant ways, a departure that allows us to further recognize the humanistic nature of his ethics of care of the self. Thus, although echoing the monastic lectio in his description of reading in Book 2 of the Secretum, Petrarch also differs from this monastic practice by replacing Scripture with the ancient books of Cicero and Seneca as the object of his attentive reading and accompanying meditation.96 In this emphasis in Book 2 of the Secretum on the need to shape the self by means of the assimilation of pagan texts, Petrarch not only affirms the value of ancient letters for the purpose of self-cultivation but also departs from the Augustinian-monastic notion of reading in one further important sense: whereas Augustine, as well as later medieval authors such as Hugh of St. Victor, assert that the goal of reading is above all to allow us to rediscover the divine truth within – the Word of God printed on the soul – Petrarch claims, like Seneca, that the aim of reading 94 On the monastic lectio divina, see the classic account by Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning

and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 88–91. See also Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 205–6, and Stock, Ethics Through Literature, 59–74. 95 De archa Noe, 2.5. The edition cited is Hugh of St. Victor, De archa Noe, ed. Patricii Sicard, CCSL 176 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 41. The phrase meas faciam, as we have seen in n. 48 of this chapter, is also used by Seneca in his portrayal of the relation between reading and self in letter 84 of his Moral Letters. In addition, the practice of writing notes as memory aids advised by Augustinus was in itself common in the later Middle Ages, even though in some cases, as Mary Carruthers has shown, such notes were purely mental. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 135–6. 96 See also the discussion of this passage from Book 2 of the Secretum at the end of the first section of this chapter (“The Humanist Hermeneutics of Self ”).

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is to shape the self through the appropriation of universal precepts of conduct phrased by others and attained from the outside.97 Petrarch’s self-examination in the mirror of the text in Fam.6.4 – facilitated by the documentation of ancient exempla – also departs in a crucial way from the medieval tradition: whereas Hugh of St. Victor and the Liber de modo bene vivendi maintain, as we have seen, that literary works should encourage a self-examination that focuses on the revelation of past sins and evil thoughts (vitia cogitationum), Petrarch describes in Fam.6.4 a selfexamination that concentrates on inspecting his possible reactions to the fluctuations of fortune. Rather than serving as his own judge and using the act of self-examination as a means to blame and reproach himself, Petrarch therefore attempts through his self-inspection to shape and build his inner virtue, prepare himself for future possible calamities. This difference in the nature and goal of the self-examination conducted in the mirror of the text is in turn echoed in the way Petrarch’s use of writing in the Secretum clearly departs from the Augustinian-monastic tradition to which it is indebted. For Augustine, a central aim in writing down his Confessions is to remind himself of his sins, excavate his guilt, and thus to convince himself further of the wickedness inherent within his soul and strengthen his resolve to renounce all earthly desires: I intend to remind myself of my past foulness and carnal corruptions, not because I love them but so that I may love you, my God. It is from love of your love that I make the act of recollection. The recalling of my wicked ways is bitter in my memory, but I do it so that you may be sweet to me, a sweetness touched by no deception, a sweetness serene and content. You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had been fruitlessly divided.98

By recollecting in writing his past sins, Augustine is reminded of his wickedness and the benevolence of God – how he brought him back 97 For

Augustine’s notion that the aim of reading is above all to allow us to discover truth within, see, for example, the quotation from the De magistro in n. 41 of this chapter. Hugh of St. Victor advances this notion in the Didascalicon: “This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness (ut divina similitudo in nobis reparetur).” The Didascalicon, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 61. Latin edition: Didascalicon de studio legendi, ed. Charles Henry Buttimer. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Latin 10 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1939). 98 “Recordari volo transactas foeditates meas, et carnales corruptiones animae meae, non quod eas amem, sed ut amem te, deus meus. Amore amoris tui facio istuc, recolens vias meas nequissimas in amaritudine recogitationis meae, ut tu dulcescas mihi, dulcedo non fallax, dulcedo felix et secura, et conligens me a dispersione, in qua frustatim discissus sum” (Conf.2.1.1).

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from fragmentation to unity – and is thus able to further secure his resolution to give up his earthly attachments – including to his own self – and direct his desire solely to God. This paradoxical attempt to renounce the self through the act of writing about it comes to the fore also in Book 10 of the Confessions, in which Augustine turns from reflecting on his past sins to examining his present ones. Focusing particularly on his ongoing attachment to praise, Augustine laments his inability to either understand the source of this continuous attachment or to fully renounce it. Trapped within his earthly attachments, Augustine nevertheless declares that by “secretly groaning” (in occulto gemitu) about this sin in writing, he becomes vexed with himself and is thus led to seek God’s mercy, his only hope for salvation.99 The aim of the act of writing, here again, is ultimately to reveal his guilt and thus lead himself to renounce his trust in his own self and submit himself fully to the authority of God. The Augustinian practice of using writing as a means to excavate guilt and thus renounce the self is also evident in monastic texts such as the Meditations of Guigo I. In article 162 of the Meditations, for example, Guigo writes, “The beginning of the return to the truth is dissatisfaction with yourself for your falsehood.”100 Reproaching and despising the self, he adds in another place, is the way for true care: “In all the care which you take for your own salvation, you have no more profitable service or remedy than to reproach and despise yourself.”101 A central aspect of the Meditations is therefore revealing to himself in writing his falsehoods, his guilt, to despise and renounce the self: “Notice how you will willingly turn toward a grape or a mulberry without needing to be threatened by punishment; and you enjoy them wholeheartedly. But you won’t turn toward him who made all these things, and you yourself, either after threats of eternal torments or after the promise of eternal happiness, which is he himself.”102 99 “Egenus

et pauper ego sum, et melior in occulto gemitu displicens mihi et quaerens misericordiam tuam, donec reficiatur defectus meus et perficiatur usque in pacem quam nescit arrogantis oculus” (Conf.10.38.63). 100 “Initium redeundi ad veritatem, displicere sibi in falsitate” (M´editationis, 152; article 162). 101 “In omni cura quam pro salute tua geris, non est ullum officium vel medicamentum utilius tibi, quam te ipsum vituperare atque contemnere” (M´editationis, 156; article 177). 102 “Ecce ad acinum botri, vel granum mori, sine ullis minis tormentorum libens converteris, eisque inclinato animo frueris. Ad eum vero qui haec omnia fecit, et te ipsum, nec post minas aeternorum suppliciorum, nec post promissionem aeternae beatitudinis, quod est ipse, converteris” (M´editationis, 189; article 272).

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In Thomas a` Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, a work which in many ways stands as the culmination of the developments in the spirituality of the Devotio Moderna of the fourteenth century,103 the need to excavate guilt to renounce self is again emphasized: “Give to God what is God’s, and assign to yourself what is yours – that is, attribute all grace to God with thanks, and take to yourself all the guilt.”104 The goal of this excavation, as Thomas further declares, is the complete abolition of self: “to leave self entirely behind, and to have no vestige left of love for self.”105 In the third book of the work, the author turns to excavate his guilt in writing in a similar fashion to the Confessions: “I will confess my weakness to you, Lord. Often it is such a small thing that makes me downcast and sad.”106 In contrast to Augustine and these late medieval authors, Petrarch’s aim in the writing of the Secretum is not to excavate guilt. Although, like Augustine and Guigo, Petrarch is concerned in the Secretum with his intentions, attempting to decipher the instances in which his actions are motivated by carnal desires, the aim of the writing is still very different. Writing down the examination as an inner dialogue, Petrarch’s aim in writing, as we have seen, is to discern the true nature of his attachments and the impact they have on him, and in turn to train himself to accept the conclusions he reaches in the process of writing – to “imprint them upon his memory” – and act accordingly.107 Rather than revealing guilt to renounce the self, therefore, his aim is to elucidate the truth about his condition and assimilate and internalize it to establish the self as an authority over itself, over the passions and the fluctuations of fortune. As Augustinus declares in Book 2 of the work, “You will know that you have finally cut off this yoke when, having scorned human passions, you have submitted wholly to the rule of virtue. From then on you will be free, needing nothing, subject to no human being – at last a king both truly powerful and completely happy.”108 Not submission to God through 103 See

John van Engen, “Introduction,” in Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, trans. John van Engen, preface by Heiko A. Oberman (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 8–10. 104 “Da Deo quidquid Dei est, et tibi adscribe, quod tuum est. Hoc est Deo gratias pro gratia tribue, tibi autem soli culpam” (De imitatione Christi 2.10.3). The Latin edition is De imitatione Christi: libri quatuor, ed. Tiburzio Lupo (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1982). The English translation is from Thomas a` Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Betty I. Knott (Glasgow: Collins, 1963). 105 “A se totaliter exeat, nihilque de privato amore retineat” (De imitatione Christi 2.11.4). 106 “Confitebor tibi, Domini, infirmitatem meam. Saepe parva res est quae dejicit et contristat” (De imitatione Christi 3.20.1). 107 See also the discussion at the end of the second section of this chapter (“Ethics of Writing”). 108 “Quod tum demum excidisse tibi noveris cum calcatis passionibus humanis, totus sub virtutis imperium concesseris, liber illic futurus, nulla egens re, nulli subiectus hominum, denique rex et vere potens absoluteque felix” (Secretum 2.33; The Secret, 83).

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excavation of guilt, therefore, but rather the affirmation of self through examination, training, and the assimilation of truth, is the aim of writing in the Secretum. Petrarch’s departure from Augustine and the monastic tradition in his use of writing in this case points to, and is no doubt dependent on, the differences in the hermeneutics of self between them. In the works of Augustine and those of monastic authors of the later Middle Ages, as we have seen in the discussion of reading, our “true self ” is often identified with the image of God residing within, an image that was blurred and corrupted by original sin.109 The recovery of this image and the “return to ourselves,” according to these writers, depend above all on our ability to direct our desire completely to God, renouncing all other attachments – including to our own earthly self.110 It is therefore this identification of our “true self ” with the image of God, and the emphasis on the desire for God as the way to revive this image, that determines Augustine’s and later medieval authors’ use of writing as a means to excavate guilt and abolish love of self. In opposition to this Augustinian tradition, Petrarch does not adhere in the Secretum or his letters to this theology of “image and likeness” – particularly not to its stress on the need to abolish love of self to direct all our desire to God – but rather focuses much more on the Stoic equation

109 On

the identification of our inner self with the image of God in Augustine and the monastic tradition, see also David N. Bell, The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of St. Thierry (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984); Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 87; Stock, After Augustine, 111–12; and Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, 181–92. 110 As Augustine states in Book 4 of the Confessions, “The Word himself cries to you to return. There is the place of undisturbed quietness where love is not deserted if it does not itself depart. . . . He is very close to the heart; but the heart has wandered from him. ‘Return, sinners, to your heart’ (Isa. 46:8 LXX), and adhere to him who made you” (“verbum ipsum clamat ut redeas, et ibi est locus quietis imperturbabilis, ubi non deseritur amor si ipse non deserat . . . intimus cordi est, sed cor erravit ab eo. Redite, praevaricatores, ad cor et inhaerete illi qui fecit vos” [Conf.4.11.16–4.12.18]). In his Meditations, Guigo identifies the image of God within as our true self and claims that it is through the imitation of Christ that we can revive it: “In the same way, it was good for man to be conformed only to God, in whose image he was made; but he could conform only to man. Thus God was made man, so that while being conformed to a man, which he could, he might also be conformed to God, which was good” (“Item non proderat conformari nisi Deo, ad cuius imaginem factus est, nec poterat nisi homini. Itaque Deus factus est homo, ut dum conformatur homini cui potest, conformetur et Deo cui prodest” [M´editationis, 306; article 476]). The characteristic of Christ that we need to imitate the most to conform to God, as Guigo adds, is his unconditional love for his Father: “He loved nothing more, nothing as much, nothing in proportion to any part of him whatever” (“Nihil plus dilexit, nihil tantum, nihil pro quantacumque parte ad comparationem illius” [M´editationis, 304; article 475]).

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of our “true self” with reason and virtue – the state in which we have established the control of reason over our passions.111 Returning to the Stoic hermeneutics of self, Petrarch also uses the practice of writing as a means to train himself to attain control over his desires, not as a vehicle for the excavation of guilt and the transcendence of attachment to self.112 Furthermore, Petrarch’s departure from the Augustinian-monastic tradition in his use of writing in the Secretum is also influenced by his distinct view of the source of sin. For Augustine, as shown in the first section of this chapter, the source of sin – the attachment of the soul to earthly things – resides within the soul itself and not in the outside impact of the body and society. This sinfulness inherent within the soul, as Augustine shows in his portrayal of the titanic struggle of will within his soul before his conversion, prevents the soul from serving as its own doctor, from curing its own malaise. Its only hope of redemption, he therefore claims, lies in receiving the outside aid of the grace of God: “The house of my soul is too small for you to come to it. May it be enlarged by you. It is in ruins: restore it. In your eyes it has offensive features. I admit it, I know it; but who will clean it up? . . . ‘Cleanse me from my secret faults, Lord’ 111 For

Petrarch’s identification of our “true self ” with the Stoic ideal of reason and virtue, see Chapter 1, n. 27. In Book 3 of the Secretum, moreover, the figure of Augustinus states, alluding to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 2.21.47–8, “‘It is very inappropriate for shame to take the place of reason’. . . . You should know that you are now being called to that high tower [i.e., reason], the only place where you can be safe from the attacks of passion, because of which you are called ‘human’” (“valde est absonum cum in locum rationis pudor succedit. . . . Nunc autem ad illam arcem te vocari noveris in qua sola tutus esse potes ab incursibus passionum et per quam homo diceris” [Secretum 3.67–8; The Secret, 132]). 112 In her study of Petrarch the poet as theologian, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle claims that “what Petrarch essayed to discover interiorly was not ego but Christ,” basing her assertion on Fam.2.7.15: “If you desire it fully and sacredly and reasonably (otherwise such a great thing cannot be desired), you will find that what you seek is already with you. Seek and you will find Him whom you desire deep in your soul.” See Boyle, Petrarch’s Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 41–2. However, even while alluding to the image of God within in this letter, it is striking how throughout the letter Petrarch focuses on the pursuit of the Stoic ideal of attaining control over our desires through the concentration on the present moment and completely ignores the Augustinian-monastic stress on the need to abolish love of self to direct all our desire to God: “Therefore, do as follows: be happy with the present and you will not feel yourself being pulled away by any expectations for the future” (“Hoc igitur fac, et presenti letus, nulla futuri temporis expectatione torqueberis” [Fam.2.7.8; Familiar Letters, 1:93]). As a result, even in instances in which Petrarch does allude to the image of God within, he seems to identify this image with the Stoic ideal of reason and virtue – the state in which we have attained full authority over our desires – and not with the state in which we have completely transcended our love of self as in the Augustinian-monastic tradition.

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(Ps.31:5).”113 Given the soul’s inability to cure itself, the aim of the act of writing for Augustine is to train the soul to mistrust its own powers, and thus prepare it to receive the aid of God. Petrarch, in contrast, using the words of Virgil to emphasize the nobility of the soul and claiming that it is the alienating outside impact of the body and society – and not an inherent sinfulness within the soul – that is responsible for its attachment to earthly objects, also asserts in opposition to Augustine that the soul can serve as its own doctor, bring itself to perfection, provided that it will be able to disperse the clouds of error imposed from the outside. This emphasis on the soul’s ability to serve as its own doctor, after all, is the kernel of Augustinus’ argument in the first dialogue of the Secretum: “Just as someone who through deep meditation has discovered that he is miserable will desire to be so no more, and as someone who has formed this wish will seek to achieve it, so he who seeks will be able to reach what he wishes.”114 Asserting that the soul presumably has the power to redeem itself, Petrarch uses writing as a vehicle for self-training that is supposed to allow him to attain the cure, not as a means to convince himself about his own powerlessness. In conclusion, although Petrarch’s efforts to cultivate the self by reading and writing have close affinities to, and in some instances undoubtedly directly draw on, the Augustinian-monastic tradition of the Middle Ages, his use of these practices depart in crucial ways from this medieval tradition. Petrarch used writing to establish authority over himself rather than as a vehicle for the excavation of guilt and the disavowal of self. Further, he focused his meditative reading on pagan texts, striving to shape the inner self through the assimilation of precepts of conduct contained in them. In so doing, Petrarch departs from and secularizes the medieval uses of reading and writing as spiritual exercises. By transforming medieval techniques of self-care in accordance with his Stoic understanding of the self, in addition to reviving classical practices such as the conducting of examination of conscience in letters to friends and the writing of “Senecan” letters of consolation, Petrarch establishes his humanism as a spiritual alternative to the monastic traditions of “care 113 “Angusta est domus animae meae quo venias ad eam: dilatetur abs te. Ruinosa est: refice

eam. Habet quae offendant oculos tuos: fateor et scio. Sed quis mundabit eam? Aut cui alteri praeter te clamabo, ‘ab occultis meis munda me, domine, et ab alienis parce servo tuo?’” (Conf.1.5.6). 114 “Sicut qui se miserum alta et fixa meditatione cognoverit cupiat esse non miser, et qui id optare ceperit sectetur, sic et qui id sectatus fuerit, possit etiam adipisci” (Secretum 1.2; The Secret, 49–50).

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of the soul” of the later Middle Ages, fashioning it as what might be described as a form of secular spirituality.115 As Petrarch realized all too well, however, this humanistic project of taking care of the self through the practices of reading and writing has its limitations. Throughout his Latin letters, the notion that reading and writing can lead to virtue – allow one to attain full control over the passions and the fluctuations of fortune – is persistently undermined through what might be called the “Ovidian” challenge to the Stoic ethics of “care of the self,” the realization that reading and writing are always tainted by desire and emotions and cannot serve as unproblematic sources of virtue. It is this realization that also plays a crucial role in the religious-Augustinian backlash against the Stoic notion of “care of the self” in Petrarch’s writings, calling for the replacement of classical practices with sacred ones. This challenge comes to the fore especially in the Secretum and mainly through the contradictions inherent within the figure of Augustinus. The tensions among the Stoic, Ovidian, and Augustinian views of the relation between reading and writing and selfhood thus emerge as a central feature of Petrarch’s Latin works. It is to these tensions, as well as to the synthesis that Petrarch ultimately attempted to attain between them, that I turn in the following chapter. 115 By alluding to the secular nature of Petrarch’s ethics of care of the self, I do not mean to

imply that he was not a religious person but only that the ethical program he advocates has strong secularizing tendencies, focused as it is on ancient techniques and goals, particularly the perfection of our earthly self rather than its denial. As we shall see in the following chapter, Petrarch himself detected a tension between “classical” and “Christian” programs of care, a tension that for him was based primarily on the question of whether reading and writing based on classical – rather than sacred – texts and models can in fact lead to virtue, the state of self-mastery over the passions.

4 Ovid, Augustine, and the Limits of the Ethics of Care of the Self

Petrarch’s attempt in his collections of letters and the Secretum, described in the previous chapter, to use writing to care for his own self, to provide him with authority and control over desire and the emotions, is in direct opposition to the nature of writing in his vernacular poetry. As shown in Chapter 1, in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, writing is always dominated by desire and longing and serves to rekindle and intensify the poet’s desire and emotions. By that, writing allows him to return to the golden age of his youth and to keep his hope for poetic immortality alive, providing him with a sense of being and presence. From the Stoic perspective, however, as the poems imply, such writings – because they serve as instigators and associates of earthly desire – only lead the self further away from virtue into the exile of fluctuation and change. Petrarch’s ethical goal in the Latin writings is therefore largely to detach himself from the matrix of desire and writing that dominates his writings in the vernacular. In the first Eclogue of the Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch alludes directly to this division between his Latin writings, which were influenced by Virgil, and his writings in the vernacular. He attributes the many problems and cares that plague his life to his youthful decision to leave behind the benevolent impact of Virgil (Dulcissimus Parthenias) and adopt instead a new, misguided style: “But an age followed after / Bolder; I dared with no guide make my own way into the forest, / Dense as it was, unafraid of the savage beasts that roamed in it. / There, in a voice now changed, I broke into new song and new measures, / Lured by the charm of false glory, driven by keen emulation.”1 The notion of stepping into the forest is of 1 “Venerat

etas / Fortior; audebam, nullo duce, iam per opacum / Ire nemus, nec lustra feris habitata timebam; / Mutatamque novo frangebam carmine vocem, / Emulus, et

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course an echo of the opening verses of Dante’s Commedia, with Virgil now serving as the lost guide who needs to be rediscovered rather than the one coming to guide the poet to a salvation higher than himself. The “keen emulation” and “vain glory” for which Petrarch left Virgil are most likely his writings in the vernacular and the style they represent, as Petrarch describes in letter 5.2 of his Letters of Old Age: At times I had also had the self-contradictory idea to devote all my time to vernacular pursuits since the loftier Latin style – both prose and poetry – had been so highly polished by ancient talents that now my resources, or anyone else’s, can add very little. On the other hand, this vernacular writing, just invented, still new, showed itself capable of great improvement and development after having been ravaged by many and cultivated by very few husbandmen. Well then, this hope so attracted me and at the same time the spur of youth so urged me onward that I undertook a great work in that style.2

Creating in this fashion a dichotomy between the lofty Latin style and the vulgar one, Petrarch often portrays Ovid as a central model behind his “lower” style, declaring, for example, in Fam.24.1 – the introduction to his book of letters to ancient authors – that Ovid was the false authority of his licentious past: “I used to listen to Ovid, who was for me a more serious authority and incorruptible witness, the more licentious his Muse.”3 (It is not a coincidence, as a result, that from all the ancient authorities Petrarch mentions in this letter, the only one to whom he does not address a letter is Ovid).4 fame dulcedine tactus inani” (1.15–19). Text and translation: Petrarch, Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, trans. Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 2 “Cum, eidem michi, tamen aliquando, contraria mens fuisset totum huic vulgari studio tempus dare, quod uterque stilus altior latinus eousque priscis ingeniis cultus esset ut pene iam nichil nostra ope vel cuiuslibet addi posset, at hic, modo inventus, adhuc recens, vastatoribus crebris ac raro squalidus colono, magni se vel ornamenti capacem ostenderet vel augmenti. Quid vis? Hac spe tractus simulque stimulis actus adolescentie, magnum eo in genere opus inceperam” (Sen.5.2.23–4; Letters of Old Age, 1:162). 3 “Audiebam Ovidium, cuius quo lascivior Musa eo michi severior graviorque confessio et incorruptius testimonium veri erat” (Fam.24.1.6; Familiar Letters, 3:309). 4 Petrarch harshly criticizes Ovid also in the De vita solitaria, directly contrasting Ovid’s negative view of solitude with the opinions of both Virgil and Horace. As he states, Ovid was “a man of great genius but of a lascivious, unsteady, and extremely effeminate temper, who found pleasure in the company of women to such an extent that he placed in them the sum and apex of his happiness” (“Ille michi quidem magni vir ingenii videtur, sed lascivi et lubrici et prorsus mulierosi animi fuisse, quem conventus feminei delectarent usque adeo, ut in illis felicitatis sue apicem summamque reponeret” [De vita solitaria 2.12; The Life of Solitude, 273]). It is because of his weakness and effeminate character, Petrarch goes on to declare, that Ovid suffered exile and could not endure it with “more equanimity” (equanimius). Significantly, following this description of Ovid’s frailty,

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This dichotomy that Petrarch creates between a lofty style influenced by Virgil and a vulgar one associated with Ovid, however, is also prevalent within the letters themselves. In Fam.8.7, written to “his Socrates,” Ludwig van Kempen, following the ravages of the Plague of 1348, Petrarch – imagining the reaction of his readers to his current mournful words – states, You who seem to offer comfort and aid to others, who had promised us things that were superior, who ought to have formed a thick skin from your constant misfortunes and to have become calloused against all the blows of fortune and hardened to something like a flintstone, see how weakly (molliter) you bear your burdens, see how often you direct your frequent wailings to us. Where is that loftiness of soul which now especially should mark your profession? Where are the magnificent words, which, if intended rather to extol your genius than as advice for life, can be no more than empty sounds and curious charms for the ears? We expected from you a heroic poem, we get elegiac verses.5

The line closing the passage (Prestolabamur ex te carmen heroicum, elegos legimus) is a possible echo of the opening lines of Ovid’s Amores, in which he refers to the attack of Cupid that took away a foot from his meter, thus turning it from the heroic hexameter to the elegiac.6 Here as well, therefore, Petrarch differentiates between a “strong” style governed by reason and whose aim is to edify its readers (and its writer) and lead them to virtue – provide them with “an advice for life” – and a “weak” one that is full of laments and controlled by passions and emotions, influenced by the model of Ovid rather than the heroic and manly Virgil. Petrarch states that he should move on to discuss “the example of a firmer intellect” (rigidioris ingenii exemplum) – that of Seneca. Latin edition is from Petrarch, Prose, eds. G. Martellotti et al. (Milan: Ricciardi Editore, 1955). Translation: The Life of Solitude, trans. Jacob Zeitlin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924). 5 “Tu qui solamen auxiliumque aliis laturus videbaris, qui de te nobis nil mediocre promiseras, qui malorum usu obduxisse iam callum adversus omnes fortune tribulos omnemque duritiem seu magis in silicem obriguisse debueras, ecce quam molliter sarcinas tuas fers, ecce quam crebris eiulatibus aures nostras percutis. Ubi nunc maxime professioni tue debita celsitudo animi? ubi verba magnifica, que si ad ingenii laudem non ad vite consilium referantur, quid nisi sonitus inanis et curiosarum delinimenta sunt aurium? Prestolabamur ex te carmen heroicum, elegos legimus” (Fam.8.7.3–5; Familiar Letters, 1:415). 6 “Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam / edere, materia conveniente modis. / par erat inferior versus – risisse Cupido / dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem” (Amores, 1.1–4) (“Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was making ready to sound forth – in weighty numbers, with matter suited to the measure. The second verse was equal to the first – but Cupid, they say, with a laugh stole away one foot”). Text and translation is from Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).

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The tension between a Virgilian “strong” style – both revealing and fashioning virtuous minds – and a “weak” Ovidian style thus not only separates Petrarch’s Latin and vernacular writings but is also a defining feature of the letters. The aim of the act of writing in his Latin works is therefore to train himself to renounce the writing style associated with Ovid – and the state of mind that generates and is fashioned by it – both in the vernacular poetry and the letters themselves. Nonetheless, as the letter to van Kempen already shows, this task is persistently undermined throughout the letters, and it is in fact writing itself – the remedy applied to the malaise – that is presented as the source of this failure: writing, as the letters demonstrate over and over again, cannot unequivocally function as a source of virtue because it inevitably serves Petrarch for purposes contradictory to virtue and because it is always governed by passions and emotions, always tainted by carnality and earthly desires. As such, writing is by necessity bound to lead him away from virtue even while directing him toward it. In most of the cases in which writing hinders the pursuit of virtue, as we shall see in the first section of this chapter, these are the Ovidian uses of writing that repeatedly come to the fore, manifesting in the letters the limits of the attempt to cultivate virtue through the practice of writing. The second section of the chapter then discusses the “Augustinian” reaction in Petrarch’s works and, particularly in the Secretum, to the attempt to care for the self through writing and the reading of secular texts – a reaction that emerges largely from the realization of the ambiguity inherent in this project. The third and closing section explores how in his Letters of Old Age Petrarch attempted to attain a synthesis among the “Ovidian” uses of writing (aimed particularly at satisfying the earthly desire for glory), the “Stoic” attempt to cultivate virtue through reading and writing, and the “Augustinian” admonition that the true care of self requires the complete renunciation of secular letters and the adoption of sacred texts and practices.

“Ovidian” Writing and the Limits of Care A good example of the fact that for Petrarch writing by necessity serves purposes contradictory to the pursuit of virtue is found in the mournful letter to van Kempen mentioned earlier (Fam.8.7). Discussing the shame he feels for revealing his weakness in writing, Petrarch declares, “I realize that a man must either drive away grief or destroy it, or control it, or finally conceal it. But what can I do? I shall die if I cannot pour out my

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grief in tears and words.”7 In such a mournful state, in which he cannot write virtuously, Petrarch maintains, it would be better to remain silent, not to write at all. Nonetheless, as he states, he has no choice but to write: if he will not be able to pour out his grief in writing, he will die. As a result, even though the use of writing in this case clearly contradicts the demands of virtue, he cannot help but do it. Petrarch also alludes to this notion in a letter to his patron, the cardinal Giovanni Colonna, following the death of the latter’s brother Giacomo: “impelled by an innate devotion I return to my pen which I had hitherto rejected and cast aside, for no other reason than that thereby the sorrow which burns within and oppresses my mind will cease for a while.”8 Writing, here as well, is necessary as a form of therapy that will allow Petrarch to somehow manage, though not eradicate, his grief. This use of writing is a dominant feature in Ovid’s Poems of Exile, as, for example, in Tristia 4.1: Perhaps this obsession may be seen as madness; but the madness has some utility, it forbids the mind to be always brooding over its troubles, makes it oblivious of present ills.9

In both his letters to Colonna and van Kempen, Petrarch therefore follows this model of Ovid, using writing not to train himself to confront his current misfortunes with dignity – as in the case of Seneca – but to somehow forget them for a while. In another letter to Ludwig van Kempen from the same period (Fam.8.9) – the one dealing with the death of his friend at the hands of robbers described in the previous chapter – Petrarch states not only that he must write to pour out his grief but that this type of sorrowful writing also provides him with a certain twisted pleasure: “Weeping has 7 “Scio viri esse primum quidem dolorem propellere, proximum extinguere, tertium mod-

erari, ultimum abscondere. Sed quid agam? moriar nisi dolorem in fletum ac verba profudero” (Fam.8.7.9; Familiar Letters, 1:416). 8 “Insite devotionis imperio, damnatum sepius et abiectum revertor ad calamum; sic enim, etsi nichil amplius, tantisper evaporabit iste qui me intus urit et pregravat, calamitose mentis affectus” (Fam.4.12.1; Familiar Letters, 1:201). 9 “Forsitan hoc studium possit furor esse videri, / sed quiddam furor hic utilitatis habet. / semper in obtutu mentem vetat esse malorum, / praesentis casus immemoremque facit” (Tristia 4.1.37–40). See also ex Ponto, 1.5.53–6: “Ponder my options well, you’ll find nothing more useful / than this art of mine that has no use – / from it I win oblivion to my misfortunes: / harvest enough if my soil yield only this!” (“Cum bene quaesieris quid agam, magis utile nil est / artibus his, quae nil utilitatis habent. / consequor ex illis casus obliuia nostri: / hanc messem satis est si mea reddit humus”).

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also a certain kind of sweetness with which I have unhappily nourished myself in these days, and tormented myself, and in which I have taken pleasure. For unless I do find delight in it, who compels me to deal with these sorrowful things?”10 His writings in this case are not aimed toward the attainment of virtue; their goal is pleasure of the lowest kind – that which delights in its own misery. The practice of writing, as Petrarch confesses, serves to satisfy and intensify the very passions he attempts to overcome through it. Another example of a use of writing in the Familiares for purposes contradictory to virtue is given in letter 6.4, the same letter in which, as we have seen, Petrarch provides one of his strongest defenses of the value of the practices of reading and writing for the purpose of selfcultivation in the Stoic fashion. Immediately after his description of the value of writing for enticing both reader and writer to imitate the greats and examine their conscience in their mirror, Petrarch states, “There is another [cause], however, because I also write for myself, and while I write I become eagerly (cupide) engaged with our greatest writers in whatever way I can and willingly forget those among whom my unlucky star destined me to live; and to flee from these I concentrate all my strength following the ancients instead.”11 For Petrarch writing, we learn, is intertwined with desire – “while I write I become eagerly (cupide) engaged” – and it is through the dual working of writing and desire that he is led to forget his present circumstances and return to the lost past he admires. The purpose of writing in this letter, as a result, is not very different from that Petrarch describes in the group of canzoni 125–9 in which he attempts to forget his present circumstances through the mutual act of desire, memory, and writing and return to his “golden age” – the first time he saw his lady.12 Although the “golden age” to which he attempts to return in the letter is a different one – the time in which his favorite authors lived and worked – the effort to forget the present through the 10 “Nempe

est quedam et lugendi dulcedo, qua sepe per hos dies infelix pascor et crucior et delector. Nisi enim delectarer, quis ad hec tam mesta me cogeret?” (Fam.8.9.8; Familiar Letters, 1:423). 11 “Altera est, quod et michi scribo, et inter scribendum cupide cum maioribus nostris versor uno quo possum modo; atque hos, cum quibus iniquo sidere datum erat ut viverem, libentissime obliviscor; inque hoc animi vires cuntas exerceo, ut hos fugiam, illos sequar” (Fam.6.4.5; Familiar Letters, 1:314–15). 12 “S`ı forte mi rimembra / del portamento umile / ch’ allor fioriva et poi crebbe anzi agli anni, / cagion sola et riposo de’ miei affanni” (127.39–42) (“So strongly I remember her humble bearing which then was flowering and then grew before her years, sole cause and healing of my woes”). See also the discussion in the first section of Chapter 1 (“Writing, Desire, and Transcendence”).

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act of writing is similar and leads to the same dangerous results – waking up from the dream and realizing that in the process he forgot himself, just as in canzone 129: Poi quando il vero sgombra quel dolce error, pur l`ı medesmo assido me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva, in guisa d’uom che pensi et pianga et scriva. (129.49–52) Then, when the truth dispels that sweet deception, right there in the same place I sit down, cold, a dead stone on the living rock, like a man who thinks and weeps and writes.

Rather than pursuing virtue, training himself to accept with equanimity the passage of time and its inevitable outcomes, Petrarch therefore uses writing in the letter to flee from his present reality, deluding himself that he has the power to abolish time’s insurmountable passage. While persistently using writing for purposes that contradict the pursuit of virtue, Petrarch also shows in the letters that to be able to write at all, he must be under the spell of passions and emotions – thus implying that writing by nature cannot fully serve as a source of virtue. In another letter dealing with the death of one of his acquaintances (Fam.11.3), this time Jacopo da Carrara the younger, Petrarch discusses the request from his addressee, Giovanni Aretino, to write a lament in honor of the deceased. Attempting first to console himself and his addressee for Jacopo’s violent death – torn to pieces by the rage of his rabid dog – Petrarch states that they should accept such miserable occurrences with equanimity, realizing through the guidance of reason and the Stoics that “what is called life is but a shadow of a fleeting cloud, or smoke wafted by the winds, or finally troubled sleep or an unfinished tale or anything else conceivably more empty.”13 He then adds that “nothing but virtue can be considered constant in mortal affairs, that she alone can make blessed those who embrace her and wretched those who forsake her.”14 Nonetheless, while stressing the need to embrace virtue and control their grief, Petrarch describes at the end of the letter how, to compose the epitaph for the dead Jacopo, he had to walk alone to the fresh tomb; only there, sitting next to the grave and addressing the dead lord with many words was 13 “Video

eam ipsam que vita dicitur, fugacis umbram nebule vel fumum ventis impulsum denique vel confusum somnium esse vel fabulam inexpletam vel siquid inanius dici potest” (Fam.11.3.10; Familiar Letters, 2:90). 14 “Video in rebus mortalium preter virtutem solidi nichil esse, eam solam beatos facere quos amplectitur miserosque quos deserit” (Fam.11.3.10; Familiar Letters, 2:90).

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he finally able to compose “not without tears (non sine lacrimis), sixteen elegiac verses, inspired more by the ardor of my spirit than by study or by the reason of art.”15 Writing and emotions, Petrarch therefore asserts, are intrinsically intertwined: in this case, his studies and reason cannot come to his aid; only the “ardor of his spirit” can help him. The practice of writing, as we learn, has an aspect inherently contradictory to the pursuit of virtue, to the attempt to eradicate the emotions. Above all, however, the letters also constantly manifest the fact that writing cannot unequivocally serve as a guide to virtue because it is always tainted by the poet’s desire for glory, becoming in itself an object of desire, a source of delight and attachment that is bound to lead him away from virtue rather than allow him to obtain it. In Fam.18.8, written to Francesco Nelli, Petrarch opens the letter by denying the accusation made against him that he is concerned with making his letters elegant, revising them over and over again, “quite,” as he states, “like a lascivious youth who examines not only his face but his back in the mirror” (“quasi lascivior adolescens, non tantum vultus in speculo, sed terga contempler” [Fam.18.8.1; Familiar Letters, 3:56]). The comparison of the writer to a desiring youth beholding his image in the mirror – an obvious echo of Ovid’s myth of Narcissus – suggests that the written text, just like the image in the mirror, becomes an object of desire, a self-image that provides its author with delight and self-satisfaction, holding the promise of eternal praise and fame. Further, although Petrarch denies the narcissistic accusation in this letter, throughout the collection, he often describes his infatuation with his own writings through the language of desire and delight, thus affirming his wanton attachment to his own texts. Already in the introductory letter to the collection, Petrarch describes how he reread “not with little delight and love” (“dulcedine non parva atque amore” [Fam.1.1.7; Familiar Letters, 1:4]) his own creations that lay scattered and neglected throughout his house. In Fam.5.16, describing his incredible sorrow and concern over the disappearance of one of his letters, Petrarch confesses that he is amazed at “how I could have become so concerned over anything so small”16 and rebukes himself for his “search for an untimely glory from the first fruits of my studies.”17 In both cases, 15 “Sedecim

elegos dictavi, ardore magis animi quam studio aut ratione artis adiutus” (Fam.11.3.15; Familiar Letters, 2:91 [translation modified]). 16 “Nunquam credidissem quod res ulla tam parva tam magne michi foret perturbationis causa” (Fam.5.16.3; Familiar Letters, 1:270). 17 “Michi quod immaturam gloriam e primitiis studiorum querens” (Fam.5.16.3; Familiar Letters, 1:270).

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therefore, the written text becomes an object of desire, an end in itself rather than a means to an end. These references to the written text as an object of desire, an end in itself, suggest that the goal of writing in the letters is not very different from that of writing vernacular poetry: just as his transformation into the laurel in canzone 23 signified his desire to become his own book, thus overcoming the endless slippage of time and attaining identity and being, so his Latin letters – in so far as their aim is the attainment of glory – represent the same longing. The problem that dominated the poems thus also comes to dominate the letters: in the same way that in canzone 23 the transformation into the laurel was essentially ambiguous, alluding to the poet’s attainment of being and presence through his writing and desire while simultaneously pointing to his subjection to a process of endless fluctuation and change, so the letters, dominated as they are by desire, are bound to serve in the same fashion as a source of both satisfaction and frustration, both presence and absence.18 By desiring to become his own book, Petrarch is inevitably sacrificing himself, his pursuit of virtue, entering into a process of endless desire and want over which he will have no control, just as we have seen in Augustinus’ admonition to Franciscus in Book 3 of the Secretum: “Do you still not understand how demented it is to have entrusted your soul to mortal things that inflame it with the heat of passion, that will never bring it rest, and that are not able to endure forever? Mortal things that torture with endless distractions the one whom they promise to soothe?”19 This notion that writing is inevitably tainted by the desire for glory and that its impact on the self, as a result, is bound to be ambiguous is highly Ovidian. In his Poems of Exile in particular, Ovid dramatizes the Gordian knot connecting writing and desire – particularly the desire for glory – and its ambivalent results. Addressing his own book in the poem opening the Tristia, Ovid declares, “While I walked safe still, I yearned for recognition, / was on fire to make myself a name; / but now, let it suffice me not to detest the poems, / the pursuit that undid me: it was my own wit / brought me to exile. So go in my stead, you have license, / be my eyes in Rome (dear God, how I wish I could be my 18 See

the discussion opening the second section of Chapter 1 (“Writing, Desire, and the Fall”). 19 “O cece, necdum intelligis quanta dementia est sic animum rebus subiecisse mortalibus, que eum et desiderii flammis accendant nec quietare noverint nec permanere valeant in finem et crebris motibus, quem demulcere pollicentur, excrucient?” (Secretum, 3.13; The Secret, 108).

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book!)”20 Burning to make himself a name, Ovid turned to writing, and the playful statement “dear God, how I wish I could be my book!” refers in this respect to his desire to win eternal name and glory through becoming his text no less than to his longing to be his book in order to see Rome again like it. This desire to make himself a name, and the book it generated, however, was also the source of his ruin, of his all too literal exile, and the declaration “it was my own wit brought me to exile” (ingenio sic fuga parta meo) brings to mind the lament of Narcissus after recognizing the true identity of the image in the pool: “the very abundance of my riches beggars me” (“inopem me copia fecit” [Met.3.466]). In the same way that the image in the pool was for Narcissus a source of both satisfaction and frustration, both self-awareness and death, so Ovid’s own book, his own object of desire, is for him a source of both glory and ruin.21 By describing his own attachment to his letters through the language of the myth of Narcissus, Petrarch therefore admits that his Latin writings are dominated by a similar ambiguity to that described by Ovid, providing him with a sense of identity and being (through the promise of eternal and changeless glory), which is inevitably accompanied by a sense of (inner) exile and fragmentation. This “Ovidian” challenge to the Stoic notion of care of the self – asserting that writing cannot unequivocally serve as a source of virtue because it is unavoidably tainted by desire – is precisely the argument raised by the Augustinian stream in Petrarch’s thought, leading the figure of Augustinus in the Secretum to undermine the remedies of reading and writing even as he recommends them to Franciscus throughout the work. 20 “Donec

eram sospes, tituli tangebar amore, / quaerendique mihi nominis ardor erat. / carmina nunc si non studiumque, quod obfuit, odi, / sit satis; ingenio sic fuga parta meo. / tu tamen i pro me, tu, cui licet, aspice Romam. / di facerent, possem nunc meus esse liber!” (Tristia 1.1.53–9). 21 Ovid’s emphasis on the essential ambiguity of the act of writing and the desire to win glory through it is also evident, for example, in Tristia 2.1.1–6: “Books, my unlucky obsession, why do I stay with you / when it was my own talent brought me down? / Why go back to those fresh-condemned Muses, my nemesis? / . . . Poetry made men and women eager to know me – / that was my bad luck” (“Quid mihi uobiscum est, infelix cura, libelli, / ingenio perii qui miser ipse meo? / cur modo damnatas repeto, mea crimina, Musas? / . . . / carmina fecerunt, ut me cognoscere uellet / omine non fausto femina uirque meo”). For an analysis of the ambivalent nature of Narcissus’ image in the pool, see my article “A Humanist in Exile: Ovid’s Myth of Narcissus and the Experience of Self in Petrarch’s Secretum,” in Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Press, 2007), 179–98, at 182–5.

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The Secretum and the Augustinian Challenge The writing of the Secretum, as Hans Baron and Francisco Rico have shown, took place between the years 1347 and 1353 – around the same time that Petrarch had written his letters dealing with the ravages of the Black Death discussed earlier.22 In these letters, as we have seen, Petrarch’s trust in the humanistic project of caring for the self through the practices of reading and writing is greatly diminished: “Almost never have I examined anything as I now have myself, and I must confess not without shame that I find more feeling in me and less strength than I thought; for I used to think (and it was proper because of my wide reading and long experience in life) that I had hardened myself against all blows and injustices of fortune. Unhappily I was wrong: there was nothing softer than I, nothing weaker.”23 A similar portrayal of his inability to cope with the repetitive blows of fortune is provided near the end of the second book of the Secretum, attributing to these blows his ongoing experience of “melancholy” – accidia, or aegritudo: “Each time I suffer an injury of Fortune, I stand firm and undaunted. . . . But if soon after this injury another injury strikes, I begin to stagger a little. And if after these two injuries a third and a fourth should follow, I am forced to escape, not in a hasty retreat, but step by step, to the citadel of reason. If even there Fortune continues to press in on me with her whole army . . . then, cornered, hemmed in on all sides, horrified at such collection of evils, I begin to groan, terrified. This is how my disease is born.”24 22 Hans

Baron, Petrarch’s Secretum: Its Making and Its Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), and Francisco Rico, Vida u Obra de Petrarca. Vol. 1: Lectura del “Secretum” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Department of Romance Languages, 1974). A summary of the debate over the dating of the Secretum is given by Vinicio Pacca, Petrarca (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1998), 122–4. 23 “Nunquam fere alias me ipsum, ut nunc, excusseram; quod non sine pudore fateor, et affectuum in me plus et virium minus quam opinabar, invenio; putabam enim – et dignum erat multa lectione longaque rerum experientia – obduruisse adversus omnes ictus et iniurias fortune. Fallebar infelix: nichil me mollius, nichil enervatius” (Fam.7.12.11; Familiar Letters, 1:363). 24 “Quotiens unum aliquod fortune vulnus infligitur, persisto interritus. . . . Si mox illa vulnus ingeminet, titubare parumper incipio; quod si duobus tertium quartum ve successerit, tunc coactus non quidem fuga precipiti, sed pede sensim relato in arcem rationis evado. Illic si toto circum agmine incubuerit fortuna . . . tum demum, pulsatus undique et tantam malorum congeriem perhorrescens, ingemisco. Hinc dolor ille gravis oritur” (Secretum 2.50–1; The Secret, 91). Petrarch also alludes to his failure to withstand the blows of fortune around the time of the Plague in the introductory letter to the Familiares, describing the way in which this failure is reflected in the style of the letters he wrote at the time: “A serious disease is not easily hidden since it breaks out and becomes visible

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These descriptions of the failure of reading and writing to shape his mind as he had hoped, found in both the letters written around the time of the Plague and in the Secretum, might suggest that one motivation for writing the Secretum was Petrarch’s attempt to cope with these emerging doubts about the humanistic project he trusted throughout his youth and to ponder alternative remedies. Indeed, on one hand, the figure of Augustinus serves to validate in the Secretum the importance and usefulness of writing and of reading of secular letters for the purpose of care of the self; he explains to Franciscus, as we have seen, the right way to read ancient texts and praises the value of the texts Franciscus himself has written as guides to virtue.25 Yet on the other hand, on several occasions, Augustinus directly criticizes Franciscus’ uses of reading and writing – and the entire notion of “caring for the self” through these techniques – arguing that these practices are in fact part of the problem rather than the solution. A central critique of the practices of reading and writing in the Secretum emerges in the discussion of Franciscus’ pride at the beginning of Book 2. Addressing the pride Franciscus takes in his reading of many books, Augustinus invites him to examine how much of these readings really stayed in his soul and declares: “What does it matter if you have learned about the orbits of the planets, if you know the expanse of the oceans and the course of the stars, about the properties of plants through its own peculiar features. I am ashamed of a life fallen into excessive softness. The very order of my letters will testify to this. My style was strong and sober in the early years, an indicator of a truly strong mind, of the type which was a source of comfort not only to myself but often to others. With the passage of time it became weaker and more humble and seemed to lack strength of character. . . . Could it be that I was a man in my youth and a youth in my old age? Unfortunate and cursed perversity!” (“Ingens morbus non facile occultatur; erumpit enim et indicio suo proditur. Pudet vite in mollitiem dilapse: ecce enim, quod epystolarum ordo ipse testabitur, primo michi tempore sermo fortis ac sobrius, bene valentis index animi, fuerat, adeo ut non me solum sed sepe alios consolarer; sequentia in dies fragiliora atque humiliora sunt, neque sat virilibus referta querimoniis . . . ergo ego in adolescentia vir fuero, ut in senectute puer essem? Infelix et execranda perversitas” [Fam.1.1.38–9; Familiar Letters, 1:11–12]). 25 For example, attempting in the third dialogue of the work to convince Franciscus to renounce his desire for glory, Augustinus quotes directly from the Africa, praising the power of Franciscus’ words: “And even if books were to avoid all these, still old age and mortality doom them. ‘For it is fitting that all things produced through the small genius of mortal labor are themselves also mortal.’ Thus may your own words powerfully refute your childish error” (“Que si cunta cessarent, senium suum suaque illis mortalitas annexa est: mortalia namque / esse decet quecunque labor mortalis inani / edidit ingenio, ut tuis potissimum verbis tuus tam puerilis error convincatur” [Secretum 3.90; The Secret, 142]).

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and rocks and the secrets of nature? What difference does all of this make if you do not know yourself? If, following Scripture, you have recognized the right path of arduous virtue, how has this helped you if madness leads you instead to a crooked, downward path? Suppose that you have learned by heart the deeds of illustrious heroes throughout the ages. What good is this if it does not change the way you live your daily life?”26 Echoing Augustine’s words in Book 10 of the Confessions on the lack of interest people show in their own selves (Conf.10.8.15), Augustinus asserts that the texts Franciscus reads deal only with the “outside” – provide him with inane and useless knowledge – and hence they cannot change him inwardly and transform the way he lives his everyday life. At the same time, as Augustinus states, even a text that did provide him with such redemptive knowledge – the Bible – did not truly change him, and the reason for that is some sort of “madness” (furor) that plagues him. Going on to discuss the two other sources of Franciscus’ dangerous pride – eloquence and the body – we also learn what this “madness” might be. Addressing first Franciscus’ trust in his own eloquent writings, Augustinus states, For what, I ask you, is more childish, what is crazier, than to ignore important things and to spend time on the study of words and, blind to your own faults, to take such pleasure in speech, just like certain small birds who, they say, are so delighted by the sweetness of their song that they sing themselves to death?”27

Franciscus’ words, according to Augustinus, are like songs of birds – beautiful sounds that lack any significance and only bring with them the danger of death. Concerned as he is with making his words “sweet” and “pleasurable,” with appearances, the writing of his eloquent works thus cannot correct Franciscus’ faults and lead him to virtue; they only direct him away from it and cause him to “ignore important things.” It is this 26 “Quanquam

vel multa nosse quid relevat si, cum celi terreque ambitum, si, cum maris spatium et astrorum cursus herbarumque virtutes ac lapidum et nature secreta didiceritis, vobis estis incogniti? Si, cum rectam virtutis ardue semitam Scripturis ducibus agnoveritis, obliquo calle transversos agit furor? Si, cum omnis evi clarorum hominum gesta memineritis, quid vos quotidie agitis non curatis?” (Secretum 2.5; The Secret, 72). 27 “Quid enim, queso, puerilius imo vero quid insanius quam, in tanta rerum omnium incuria tantaque segnitie, verborum studio tempus impendere et lippis oculis nunquam sua probra cernentem, tantam voluptatem ex sermone percipere, quarundam avicolarum in morem, quas aiunt usque in perniciem proprii cantus dulcedine delectari?” (Secretum 2.7; The Secret, 72).

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fascination with the “body,” with the appearance of words, that is probably also the “madness” to which Augustinus alluded beforehand, preventing Franciscus from following the beneficial guidance of Scripture. Reading and writing, therefore, cannot provide him with virtue, and they are also responsible for his failure to follow the Bible. The fact that his superficiality, his fascination with the surface, is the “madness” that plagues Franciscus and prevents him from pursuing the remedy inherent in the Bible is made evident in the ensuing critique of the pride he takes in his own bodily appearance. Admonishing Franciscus against the dangers of such an attachment, Augustinus brings up the exemplum of Narcissus: “Hasn’t the story of Narcissus terrified you? Hasn’t courageous recognition of what you really are on the inside warned you of the vileness of the body? No. Content to focus on the appearance of the skin, you do not reach farther with the mind’s eye.”28 As in the discussion of reading and eloquence, Franciscus’ problem here again is his focus on the surface, on the “exterior skin” (exterioris cutis), the fact that he does not direct his gaze beyond it to eternal objects such as the soul. This Neoplatonic interpretation of the myth of Narcissus as a fable on the dangers of attaching oneself to the body, or the surface, goes back to Plotinus and was prevalent in the Middle Ages as well – for example, in Alexander Neckham’s De naturis rerum.29 At the same time, however, this allusion to the myth also contains an element that is unmistakably Augustinian. The references to the body as a covering (exterioris cutis) and to the reluctance to “look beyond it” as the source of failure closely echo the Augustinian hermeneutics of the Bible with its emphasis on the need to go beyond the “letter” – the “body” – to the meaning lying within – the “spirit.”30 In addition, the language Augustinus uses in this reference to the myth resembles the passage from Book 3 of the

28 “Neque

te Narcissi terruit fabella, nec quid esses introrsus virilis consideratio corporee feditatis admonuit? Exterioris cutis contentus aspectu, oculos mentis ultra non porrigis” (Secretum 2.12; The Secret, 74). For a discussion of Petrarch’s use of the Narcissus myth in the Secretum, see also my article, “A Humanist in Exile.” 29 On Plotinus’ use of Narcissus (Enn.1.6–8), see Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century, trans. R. Dewsnap, L. Gronlund, N. Reeves, and I. Soderberg-Reeves (Lund: Gleerups, 1967), 37. On Neckham, see Vinge, The Narcissus Theme, 75. 30 Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.5.9: “‘The letter kills but the spirit gives life.’ For when something meant figuratively is interpreted as if it were meant literally, it is understood in a carnal way” (“‘Littera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat (2 Cor. 3:6).’ Cum enim figurate dictum sic accipitur tamquam proprie dictum sit, carnaliter sapitur”). Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

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Confessions in which Augustine describes his attitude toward the Bible in his student years: What I am now saying did not then enter my mind when I gave my attention to the Scripture. It seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero. My inflated conceit shunned the Bible’s restraint, and my gaze never penetrated to its inwardness (acies mea non penetrabat interiora eius) [my emphasis].31

It is his puffed-up pride, as Augustine tells us here, that prevented him from looking beyond the surface – acies mea non penetrabat interiora eius – and discovering the interior meaning of the Bible. This failure, he goes on to say, led him to identify with false objects – words manifesting Ciceronian eloquence such as those of the Manichees – and to a constant feeling of lack and frustration: “I derived no nourishment from them but was left more exhausted than before” (“nec nutriebar eis, sed exhauriebar magis” [Conf.3.6.10]). The allusion to Franciscus’ failure to “reach farther with the mind’s eye” (oculos mentis ultra non porrigis) in the reference to the myth of Narcissus in Book 2 thus echoes this Augustinian emphasis on his own inability to look beyond the surface (acies mea non penetrabat interiora eius) and suggests that Franciscus suffers from exactly the same “madness”: fascinated by outward appearances, by the body, he clings to the beauty of ancient (as well as his own) texts and arrogantly rejects the true salvation residing within the pages of Scripture. The practices of reading and writing that Augustinus recommends elsewhere in the Secretum, as we discover, are the source of the problem rather than the solution. From this Augustinian perspective, the true solution to Petrarch’s condition resides in rejecting the surface – both the ancient and his own texts and their false charms – and following the guidelines of Scripture. Although adhering in his discussion of pride in the Secretum to this Augustinian viewpoint, it is important to emphasize that the Petrarchan ethics in this case is in several crucial aspects still markedly different from that of Augustine. First, whereas Augustine emphasizes the value of the Bible as a source of meaning, providing nourishment by revealing “Truth” to those who are able to penetrate its mysteries – as the lengthy reflections on the meaning of the Biblical creation story in Books 12 and 13 of the Confessions demonstrate – for Petrarch, the Bible serves 31 “Non enim sicut modo loquor, ita sensi, cum attendi ad illam scripturam, sed visa est mihi

indigna quam tullianae dignitati compararem. Tumor enim meus refugiebat modum eius et acies mea non penetrabat interiora eius” (Conf.3.5.9).

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mainly as a guide for right action: its nourishment does not reside in the knowledge hidden within it but rather in the precepts for life it entails. As Augustinus declares in the passage quoted earlier, the Bible is that which revealed for Franciscus “the right path of arduous virtue” (rectam virtutis ardue semitam). In addition, for Augustine, the ability to turn to the Bible and to penetrate its secrets requires the complete disavowal of self, the complete submission to the authority of God: “May I not be my own life. On my own resources I lived evilly. To myself I was death. In you I am recovering life. Speak to me, instruct me, I have put faith in your books. And their words are mysteries indeed.”32 This penetration of the mysteries of the Bible, in turn, facilitates the further disavowal of self, the further submission to the authority of God: “Already you have said to me, Lord, with a loud voice in my inner ear, that you are eternal. . . . ‘In your sight’ (Ps. 18:15) this truth is clear to me. Let it become more and more evident, I pray you, and as it becomes manifest may I dwell calmly under your wings (cf. Ps. 35:8).”33 In the Secretum, in contrast, there is a sense that the turn to the Bible would supply Franciscus with a remedy to his condition not because it would entail and facilitate the complete disavowal of self but because it would allow him to establish his authority over himself, over the passions and the fluctuations of fortune, providing him, as we have seen, with “the right path of arduous virtue.” By renouncing his corporeal attachments to his body, writings, and ancient texts, Petrarch would be able to follow the Bible into the benevolent hands of his own reason and virtue. As a result, even when advising Franciscus in the Secretum to renounce writing and the reading of ancient letters and to turn to the Bible instead, the goal Augustinus advocates remains the classical one of attaining self-mastery over the passions.34

32 “Non

ego vita mea sim: male vixi ex me. Mors mihi fui: in te revivesco. Tu me alloquere, tu mihi sermocinare: credidi libris tuis, et verba eorum arcana valde” (Conf.12.10.10). 33 “Iam dixisti mihi, domine, voce forti in aurem interiorem, quia tu aeternus es. . . . Hoc in conspectu tuo claret mihi et magis magisque clarescat, oro te, atque in ea manifestatione persistam sobrius sub alis tuis” (Conf.12.11.11). 34 For Petrarch, it is important to emphasize, this pursuit of the classical goal of self-mastery does not contradict the religious care for his salvation, for his fate at the end of days, but the two in fact go hand in hand. As he states, for example, in letter 24.1 of the Familiares discussed in the Introduction, “we never live here except when doing something virtuous to pave our path to the true life” (“nunquam vivimus dum hic sumus, nisi quandiu virtuosum aliquid agentes sternimus iter nobis ad veram vitam” [Fam.24.1.27; Familiar Letters, 3:312]), thus indicating that for him it is the pursuit of self-mastery and virtue in this life that also secures our place in the next.

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Augustinus’ critique of the practices of reading and writing in the Secretum continues in the third dialogue of the work in yet another allusion to mirrors. Discussing the feeling of shame as a possible remedy for Franciscus’ desire for Laura, Augustinus asks whether Franciscus has looked in the mirror lately (“Vidisti ne te nuper in speculo” [Secretum 3.57; The Secret, 128]) and goes on to inquire whether he noticed there the gray hairs showing around his temples and, later, whether this brought about any change in his soul.35 Franciscus answers that although these signs no doubt “disturbed” him, they did not bring about change36 and continues to explain that the cause of this was the consolation he received from several classical exempla of great men who accepted with equanimity the signs of old age. Angered by his answer, Augustinus criticizes the effect of these exempla: “such examples only persuade you to ignore the passage of time and to forget your own inevitable death.”37 Although later on Augustinus softens his accusation against these exempla,38 his emphasis on the danger they posit remains intact: leading Franciscus to ignore the inevitable passage of time and the fact of his approaching death, these exempla become the cause of his ongoing attachment to the world. Rather than allowing Franciscus to change, to advance on the road to virtue, we discover again, his wide readings in fact hinder change, perpetuating his fascination with the surface of things. This discussion of the relation between Petrarch’s failure to read the signs in the mirror and his reading of ancient exempla ends with a reference to the story of Hostius Quadra from Seneca’s Natural Questions. The reason he asked him whether he looked in the mirror lately, Augustinus tells Franciscus, is to remind him of Seneca’s explanation of why mirrors were invented by nature in the first place: “Mirrors were invented so 35 “Mutavit

ne animum, ulla ex parte, corporis conspecta mutatio?” (Secretum 3.58; The Secret, 128). 36 “Concussit utique, sed non mutavit” (Secretum 3.58; The Secret, 128). 37 “Quid enim aliud suadent quam lapsum etatis negligere et supremi temporis oblivisci?” (Secretum 3.59; The Secret, 129). 38 “To be honest, this library of examples is fine with me, as long as it doesn’t lead to laziness but rather only dispels fear and sorrow. I praise whatever allows you not to fear the coming of old age and not to despise the present. But I detest, I absolutely condemn, whatever suggests that old age does not signal the end of this life and whatever discourages meditation on death” (“Aperte quidem, nec supellex hec exemplorum displicet; modo non segnitiem afferat, sed metum meroremque discutiat. Laudo quicquid id est, propter quod nec adventantem metuas senectutem nec presentem oderis; quicquid vero non esse senectutem huius lucis exitum suggerit nec de morte cogitandum, summopere detestor atque execror” [Secretum 3.61; The Secret, 130]).

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that humans might know themselves. From them, many have acquired a first acquaintance of themselves, then they have gained some insightful advice: beautiful people, to avoid disgrace; ugly ones, that virtue must redeem what the body lacks; young men, that it is time to study and to begin to undertake the tasks of a man; old man, to put aside undignified pursuits when grey hair comes and to meditate a little about death.”39 Seneca refers to these uses of mirrors right after his portrayal of the story of Hostius, a man “whose obscene acts even became the subject of a theatrical performance.”40 This Hostius, Seneca narrates, used to place magnifying mirrors “in which a finger exceeded the size and thickness of an arm”41 in the places where he participated in orgies, beholding in them the acts in which he was engaged and thus intensifying his pleasure. What especially bothers Seneca in this story, as Bartsch points out, is not Hostius’ lust but his abuse of mirrors, using them for the opposite of their God-given purpose of self-knowledge.42 In addition, Seneca also criticizes the lack of shame that emerges from Hostius’ use of mirrors: “that monster had made a spectacle of his own obscenity and deliberately showed himself acts which no night is deep enough to conceal.”43 By emphasizing the fact that Franciscus failed to use mirrors for their proper purpose of self-knowledge and continued to shamelessly engage in his lust – “be ashamed to be called an elderly lover. Be ashamed that for so long you have been the talk of the town”44 – Augustinus associates Franciscus not only with the figure of Narcissus, as we have seen in Book 2, but also with the distorted one of Hostius Quadra. His continuous and shameless attachment to worldly desire is thus presented as a monstrosity, and a central cause of it, as the passage makes clear, is his readings of ancient exempla that lead him to abuse the signs in the mirror. 39 “Inventa

sunt specula, ut homo ipse se nosceret. Multi ex hoc consecuti sunt primo quidem sui notitiam, deinde etiam consilium aliquod: formosus, ut vitaret infamiam; deformis, ut sciret virtutibus esse redimendum, quod corpori deesset; iuvenis, ut sciret tempus illud esse discendi et virilia aggrediendi; senex, ut cum canis indecora deponeret et de morte aliquid cogitaret” (Secretum 3.65; The Secret, 131–2). The quotation is taken from Seneca, Naturales quaestiones (Nat. quaes.) 1.17.4. The text and translation are from Seneca, Natural Questions, trans. Thomas H. Corcoran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 40 “Obscenitatis in scaenam usque productae” (Nat. quaes.1.16.1). 41 “In quibus digitus brachii mensuram et crassitudinem excederet” (Nat. quaes.1.16.2). 42 Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 109. 43 “At illud monstrum obscenitatem suam spectaculum fecerat et ea sibi ostentabat quibus abscondendis nulla satis alta nox est” (Nat. quaes.1.16.6). 44 “Pudeat ergo senem amatorem dici; pudeat esse tam diu vulgi fabula” (Secretum 3.65; The Secret, 131).

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Finally, Augustinus’ critique of the practices of reading and writing reaches its zenith at the end of the work. Turning to discuss Franciscus’ excessive desire for glory, Augustinus directly describes Franciscus’ writings as the source of his fall and the problems that plagued him in life: “in the very beginning, when I saw you had taken up your pen, I warned that life would be brief and uncertain, while your labor would surely be long. The work you undertook would be enormous, the fruit only meager.”45 The problem with these writings, Augustinus explicitly states, is the fact that they are concerned with the surface, with the body rather than the soul, attempting to provide Franciscus with earthly glory by pleasing the senses of the readers: “Does it not seem demented to you to spend your better years and the best part of your life either in pleasing the eyes of others or in soothing the ears of mortals, and to reserve for God and yourself only the worst and last years . . . so that the freedom of your soul is the care you attend to last?”46 Rather than allow him to care for his soul, therefore, Franciscus’ writings are in fact that which prevents him from undertaking such care. Admonishing Franciscus against the danger posed by his writings, Augustinus singles out particularly the Africa and the De viris illustribus as the two works that Franciscus needs to renounce: “The deeds of the Romans have been sufficiently depicted both by their own reputation and through the ingenuity of others. Abandon Africa and leave it to its possessors.”47 The works that Augustinus depicted elsewhere as written in the “strong” and “manly” style with the goal of cultivating virtue are portrayed here as part of the “weak writings” that in fact hinder true care.48 As in the Familiares, the distinction between the two styles – the Virgilian and the Ovidian – collapses, and the cause of this collapse is that both are governed by the poet’s insurmountable desire for glory, by his longing to attain identity and being – to overcome the passage of time – by becoming his own texts. Dominated as they are by earthly desire, according to Augustinus, these writings are bound to lead him 45 “In

ipsis primordiis, ubi te calamum arripuisse vidi, prefatus sum, quod vita brevis et incerta, quod longus et certus labor, quod opus grande, quod fructus exiguus foret” (Secretum 3.102; The Secret, 147). 46 “Quanta tibi videtur amentia meliores annos atque optimas evi partes, vel in placendo oculis alienis vel in auribus hominum demulcendis expendere; deterrimas autem atque ultimas, . . . , Deo tibique reservare, ut anime tue libertas extrema omnium cura sit?” (Secretum 3.83; The Secret, 139). 47 “Satis romane res geste et suapte fama et aliorum ingeniis illustrate sunt. Dimitte Africam eamque possessoribus suis linque” (Secretum 3.94; The Secret, 144). 48 See n. 25 of this chapter.

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away from virtue, to engage him in a process in which “there are always hidden new abysses to be plumbed, and hidden twists and turns, and where there is no end to the investigation.”49 The adherence to his writings, as Augustinus ultimately declares, necessarily implies the loss of self rather than its attainment: “you would rather abandon yourself than your books.”50 It is only the abandonment of these writings, as a result, that will allow Franciscus to truly care for his soul, to finally “return himself to himself” (“te tandem tibi restitue” [Secretum 3.94; The Secret, 144]). However, like everything else in the Petrarchan corpus, this rejection of his writings at the end of the Secretum is not clear-cut. For even while exhorting Franciscus in his speech near the end of the work to give up the writing of the Africa and the De viris illustribus, Augustinus frequently quotes, as we have seen, from these very texts to persuade Franciscus to do so: “I know that recently in your Africa you have described these very ideas in outstanding verses. You said, ‘Confined within narrow bounds, the world is actually a meager island that the ocean surrounds with flowing curves.’”51 Praising the moral lesson contained within the writings he demands Franciscus to renounce, the figure of Augustinus undermines his own arguments, openly revealing the contradictions inherent within his own figure – both praising and rejecting the value of reading and writing secular letters for the purpose of care of the self at one and the same time. Augustinus’ ambiguous attitude toward Franciscus’ texts in this passage suggests that these writings are not “carnal” and “alienating” in themselves but that the problem resides in the way Franciscus is using them: not unlike the mirrors of Narcissus and Hostius Quadra mentioned earlier in the work, these writings thus have a positive value, but Franciscus – just as these two figures – cannot help but distort their use for his twisted carnal purposes. If he would only be able to detach these writings from his excessive desire for glory, their use would undoubtedly be beneficial. Nonetheless, as the text makes clear, the separation of writing from desire is beyond Petrarch’s powers: after all, even when Augustinus praises the moral value of Franciscus’ texts, we cannot escape the feeling that this praise is in fact an act of narcissistic self-adulation 49 “Ubi

novi semper recessus et inaccesse latebre et inquisitionum nullus est terminus” (Secretum 3.74; The Secret, 136). 50 “Te ipsum derelinquere mavis quam libellos tuos” (Secretum 3.94; The Secret, 144). 51 “Sciebam te nuper in Africa tua hanc ipsam sententiam preclaris versibus descripsisse, ubi dixisti: angustis arctatus finibus orbis / insula parva situ est, curvis quam flexibus ambit / Occeanus” (Secretum 3.87; The Secret, 141).

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in which Petrarch uses the figure of Augustinus to assert his own glory and authority. Further, as Franciscus declares near the end of the work: “I know, as you said a little while ago, that it would be much safer for me to pursue only the care of myself now and, bypassing the detours, to seize the right path of salvation. But I cannot restrain my desire for the world.”52 The disengagement of writing from his earthly desire is out of Petrarch’s reach. Franciscus’ assertion in this final quotation that he is aware that it would be much safer for him to renounce his desire and yet it is beyond his powers to do so ends the Secretum on a markedly Ovidian note. In the Poems of Exile, Ovid often similarly declares that he is aware of the madness inherent in his attachment to his writings but cannot act otherwise: “Often a lover recognizes his own destruction / yet clings to it, hunts down / the stuff of his doom. So I relish the books that have hurt me, / love the weapon that inflicted my wounds.”53 Describing himself as a lover who recognizes his own destruction yet clings to it, Ovid again creates a possible correlation between his own figure and that of Narcissus, given that in his portrayal of the myth in the Metamorphoses Ovid emphasizes the fact that even after recognizing the emptiness of his reflection and the doom that it entails, Narcissus consciously continued to adhere to it: “Death is nothing to me, for in the death I shall leave my troubles” (“nec mihi mors gravis est, posituro morte dolores” [Met.3.471]). Aware of the futility and harmful nature of their desires yet unable to renounce them, both Ovid and Narcissus are bound to remain trapped within the ever-frustrated cycles of their desire – as is clear from both Narcissus’ eternal and unfulfilled desire for his own image in the water of the river Styx and Ovid’s repetitive and failing attempts to end his exile through his letters.54 By alluding at the end of the Secretum to his own inability 52 “Non

ignarus, ut paulo ante dicebas, multo michi futurum esse securius studium hoc unum sectari et, deviis pretermissis, rectum callem salutis apprehendere. Sed desiderium frenare non valeo” (Secretum 3.104; The Secret, 148). 53 “Sentit amans sua damna fere, tamen haeret in illis, / materiam culpae persequiturque suae. / nos quoque delectant, quamvis nocuere, libelli, / quodque mihi telum vulnera fecit, amo” (Tristia 4.1.33–6). 54 This emphasis on the circularity and entrapment imposed by desire, as Philip Hardie has shown, is a defining feature of Ovid’s texts: in the Metamorphoses, the same violent passion that brings Narcissus down from his primary arrogant bliss in Book 3 was responsible for the fall of Apollo in Book 1 and is then echoed in the story of Pygmalion in Book 10; the myths of Book 3 reenact over and over again the entrapments of mirroring; the stories of Hyacinthus and Adonis recounted by Orpheus in Book 10 are both versions of his own personal tale of loss of love. This thematic repetition in the stories of Orpheus is in turn reflected in the structure of the work: the stories of loss told by

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to renounce his harmful desire even though fully realizing its dangers, Petrarch again presents himself as a counterpart of both Narcissus and Ovid, pointing to his own similar entrapment within the endless cycles of desire. Petrarch’s “Ovidian” submission at the end of the Secretum to the ongoing circularity imposed by desire is made evident through the structure of the work: responding to Franciscus’ assertion that he is unable to renounce his desire for the world, Augustinus claims that they “relapse to their old argument,”55 the same one with which they started the dialogue: “what you call inability is really a question of will.”56 After three long days of conversation, therefore, we discover that not much has changed in Franciscus’ condition – the two have come full circle and ended right at their beginning. In addition, when returning at the end of the Secretum to the beginning following Augustinus’ declaration that they relapse to their old argument, we arrive at the quotation from Ovid’s Poems of Exile, which also appears amid Petrarch’s circuitous attempts to climb Mount Ventoux in Fam.4.1.13: “to want is not enough; if you are to possess something, it is necessary that you long for it.”57 Quoting ex Ponto 3.1.35, one of Ovid’s frequent and repetitive exhortations to his wife to find a way to end his exile and bring him back to Rome, Augustinus thus compares Ovid’s circuitous and futile attempts to end his physical exile with Petrarch’s own continuous failures to end his spiritual one in both the Secretum and Fam.4.1, highlighting once again the sense of stasis and entrapment that dominates Petrarch because of his insurmountable earthly desire. Closing the dialogue with this Ovidian emphasis on his ultimate inability to renounce his desire – to untie the knot between desire and writing – Petrarch demonstrates that the humanistic project of caring for the self through the practices of reading and writing cannot provide full transcendence, full control over the passions and the fluctuations of fortune, but is rather bound to be accompanied by an inevitable sense of exile Orpheus appear as a digression within the main narrative of the Metamorphoses in which Ovid tells about Orpheus’ own loss, thus creating a small circle of stories within the larger one – both reflecting each other. All these thematic and structural repetitions of the same passions in Ovid’s poem – manifesting, as Hardie suggests, “an undeniable monotony . . . experienced by every reader again and again with the feeling of ‘I’ve heard this one before’” (65) – are essentially a mark of the stasis imposed by desire, the recurring patterns of lack and longing that govern, according to Ovid, every personal life and the entire human history. See Philip R. Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–70. 55 “In antiquam litem relabimur” (Secretum 3.105; my translation). 56 “Voluntatem impotentiam vocas” (Secretum 3.105; The Secret, 148). 57 “Velle parum est; cupias, ut re potiaris, oportet” (Secretum 1.15; The Secret, 57).

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and flux. Complete transcendence, as Petrarch implies, is attainable only through the ascetic example of Augustine – renouncing his attachment to his writings and the reading of secular texts and turning to focus instead on sacred letters – but this solution is clearly beyond his power. At the same time, however, as both the praise Augustinus bestows on Franciscus’ own texts in the work and the attempt to cultivate his virtue through the writing of the dialogue show, Petrarch is also evidently unwilling to depart from the notion that his writings have moral value and can still aid in the pursuit of virtue. At the end of the Secretum, therefore – adhering to his writings and rejecting the ascetic Augustinian solution – Petrarch’s main conflict is whether the relative merits of his reading and writing outweigh the inevitable price of the insurmountable desire that is attached to them.

The Care of the Self in the Letters of Old Age The tensions among the “Stoic,” “Ovidian,” and “Augustinian” streams forming the core of Petrarch’s works and experience of self – the “Stoic” notion that the practices of reading and writing can lead to virtue, the “Ovidian” realization that writing is always motivated by desire and hence that its impact is inevitably ambiguous, and the Augustinian challenge that only the disavowal of secular letters might lead to virtue – continued to dominate Petrarch’s works virtually until the end of his life. Nevertheless, although the wavering and fluctuation in his life and writing continued till the end, the letters he had written later in life, especially those gathered together in his collection of Letters of Old Age, bring to the fore a sense of reconciliation, of compromise, of finding a middle ground between these different tendencies and practices – a compromise that in turn also allowed him, we might assume, to achieve a relative ease and peace of mind in old age. In the years following the writing of the Secretum, Petrarch declares – in accordance with the advice of Augustinus – that he dedicates his time to sacred letters, putting his trust in them as a true source of care and virtue: “I used to read works that gave me pleasure, now I am reading works that are good for me. . . . Now my orators shall be Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, my philosopher shall be Paul, and my poet David,”58 as he states in Fam.22.10, written to Nelli during his sojourn in 58 “Legi

que delectabant, lego que prosint; . . . Iamque oratores mei fuerint Ambrosius Augustinus Ieronimus Gregorius, philosophus meus Paulus, meus poeta David” (Fam.22.10.6–7; Familiar Letters, 3:233).

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Milan between the years 1353 and 1361. The ancient texts, as he maintains here following the Augustinus of the Secretum, are concerned only with the outside, with aesthetic pleasure, and hence true care can be found only in sacred letters. In these later years, Petrarch also declares that to train himself to reject earthly attachments, he dedicates his time to religious practices such as prayer, nightly vigils, and meditation on the death of Christ: “Frequent meditation (meditatio frequens), not nature, will allow us to die more often and to relieve through practice something the multitude considers hardest. How the philosophers did this is for them to explain. Now much more clearly than before, our meditation – that is, Christian meditation – is through Christ and Christ’s life-giving death and victory over death,”59 he writes to Boccaccio in Seniles 1.5 from 1362. To accomplish the philosophical task of caring for the self, Petrarch therefore states here explicitly, we need to adopt Christian – not pagan – spiritual techniques. Later, in a letter to the papal secretary Francesco Bruni from 1367–8, Petrarch describes his practice of nightly vigils: “By habit I get up at midnight to intone the praises of Christ; although I am a sinner and the Lord would say to me, “Why do you speak of my judgments and take my covenant upon your lips” [Ps. 50:16], I still trust in His mercy that justifies the wicked, and I derive so much pleasure and such sober joy from this that there is no other time so pleasing to me and so fully my own.”60 Nevertheless, although stressing his dedication to Christian letters and practices as the true road to virtue and the care of the self, Petrarch clearly does not renounce his commitment to his writings in his old 59 “Ut

sepius moriamur et rem vulgi opinione durissimam consuetudine leniamus, meditatio frequens efficiet non natura. Que qualis fuerit philosophis, norunt ipsi. Nunc clarius multo quam prius nostra, id est Cristianorum, meditatio: Cristus est vitalisque Cristi mors ac de morte victoria” (Sen.1.5.33–4; Letters of Old Age, 1:21).The critical edition of the Seniles I am using in the following discussion is P´etrarque, Lettres de la vieillesse. For Books 16–18, not yet published in this edition, I am following the order suggested by Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo in their English translation, which is based on the collective edition printed in Venice in 1501. Quotations from the Latin for Books 16–18 are taken from Petrarca, Opera omnia, ed. Pasquale Stoppelli (Rome: Lexis Progetti Editoriali, 1997), and Petrarca, Opera omnia (Basel, 1554). 60 “Surgo ex more nocte media ad dicendas Cristo laudes. Quamvis ‘autem peccatori’ (et sic michi) ‘Deus dixerit: quare tu enarras iustitias meas et assumis testamentum meum per os tuum?’, confisus tamen de misericordia iustificante impios, tantam inde dulcedinem et tam salubrem voluptatem percipio, ut nulla pars temporis michi tam grata tamque ex integro mea sit” (Sen.9.2.52; Letters of Old Age, 1:342). Giles Constable, based on Fam.10.3, suggests that Petrarch started to perform such nightly vigils in 1348–9. See Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” in Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Padova: Editrice Antenore; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 86 n. 153.

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age. In the Seniles, Petrarch often reserves the language of fragmentation and recollection he used at the end of the Secretum when promising to “recollect the scattered fragments of soul” (sparsa anime fragmenta recolligam) to his own writings, thus suggesting that his concern in old age is with the recollection of the fragments of his texts – putting his authorial stamp over them – no less than of his soul. Writing to Boccaccio in Seniles 2.1, Petrarch describes how in the past he gave some verses of his still unfinished and unpolished Africa to his friend Barbato da Sulmona and how the latter, driven by his love for him, “scattered the verses around and exposed them to many criticisms” (“sparsit ac reprehensoribus multis dedit” [Sen.2.1.13; Letters of Old Age, 1:39]). In Seniles 6.5, sending his “authorized” version of his work De vita solitaria to his longtime friend the Bishop and later Cardinal Philippe de Cabassoles, Petrarch laments that many of his works were snatched from him before finished and that they are now “read by scholars in scattered and piecemeal form.”61 Stressing in this fashion the fragmentation of his texts, Petrarch states in a letter to the physician Giovanni Dondi from 1370 that old age is the fitting time to recollect these fragments: “This is succeeded by that riper season – old age . . . more peaceful and mild than all the others, and more fit to gather the fruits of the past, when the fires of passion have been spent by age and tamed by the pursuits of the virtues”62 – with the reference to “fruits” clearly indicating his writings.63 In yet another letter to Boccaccio, written in 1373, a year before his death, Petrarch stresses his concern with his writings most explicitly: “With these and like thoughts, I am aroused, however late, to correct with God’s favor what was missing not only from my life, but also from my writings.”64 This evident care for his writings, Petrarch insists in the collection, does not contradict his new dedication to sacred letters and practices – nor the ethical quest of the care of the self in general – but rather goes hand in hand with them in leading to virtue, provided that the one who uses them is endowed with a “good soul” (bonam animam): “We 61 “Multa

hodie a scolasticis leguntur mea sparsim atque discerptim” (Sen.6.5.4; Letters of Old Age, 1:197). 62 “Hanc subit etas iste maturior, senectus, . . . et tranquillior cuntis et lenior et legendis fructibus retroacti temporis aptior, evo consumptis et virtutum studio domitis estibus passionum” (Sen.12.1.5; Letters of Old Age, 2:439). 63 On the gathering of fruits as a metaphor to writing in Petrarch’s works, see Chapter 1, n. 35. 64 “His horumque similibus expergiscor, ut favente deo emendem – sero licet – in me, non solum quod vite defuerit, sed etiam quod scripture” (Sen.17.2.3, ed. Stoppelli; Letters of Old Age, 2:647).

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must not be scared away from literature either by the exhortation to virtue or by the pretext of approaching death. If literature is harbored in a good soul, it arouses a love of virtue and either removes or lessens the fear of death. . . . Literature does not impede, but rather helps a man of good character who masters it; it advances the journey of life, it does not delay it.”65 Petrarch addresses these words to Boccaccio in a letter from 1362, written in response to the latter’s declaration that he intends to give up secular letters altogether and dismantle his library following a prophecy he had received from a certain Pietro of Siena, who claimed that he saw in a vision that Boccaccio is about to die and that Christ ordered him to abandon poetry. Continuing his defense of secular literature, Petrarch adds that the Christian forefathers they are striving to emulate – such as Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory – all used such letters. In fact, he concludes, although there are two roads to virtue – one through ignorance and one through literature and knowledge – the latter is more noble because it is harder: “All have a blessed journey, but surely the higher, the more conspicuous it is, the more glorious; whence it follows that uncouthness, however devout, is not comparable to literate devotion.”66 The reference to the two paths in these lines echoes Petrarch’s letter describing his ascent of Mount Ventoux, and the assertion that the arduous literary path is more noble than the other suggests that he now holds the view that his difficult and wavering ascent to the top of the mountain is in fact more righteous than the “level” and “easy” one of his brother, the Carthusian monk Gherardo.67 The practices of reading and writing secular letters, Petrarch therefore claims, do not contradict religious letters and techniques but aid in the pursuit of virtue, because the healthy mind is able to use them for virtuous and beneficial purposes. Care of writing and care of self, he argues, can in fact go hand in hand. Thus asserting that the healthy mind will be able to use literature for virtuous purposes, one of Petrarch’s main concerns in the Letters of Old Age becomes to demonstrate that he indeed acquired 65 “Non

sumus aut exhortatione virtutis aut vicine mortis obtentu a literis deterrendi (que si in bonam animam sint recepte, et virtutis excitant amorem et aut tollunt metum mortis aut minuunt). . . . Neque enim impediunt litere sed adiuvant bene moratum possessorem, viteque viam promovent, non retardant” (Sen.1.5.51; Letters of Old Age, 1:23). 66 “Quorum quidem omnium peregrinatio est beata, sed ea certe gloriosior que clarior, que altior, unde fit ut literate devotioni comparabilis non sit, quamvis devota, rusticitas” (Sen.1.5.62; Letters of Old Age, 1:25). 67 “Planum forsitan, sed ignavum iter per ignorantiam ad virtutem” (Sen.1.5.62; Letters of Old Age, 1:25). For a similar defense of secular letters, see Sen.15.6. On Fam.4.1 see the discussion in the third section of Chapter 2 (“Desire and the Crisis of the Will”).

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such a healthy mind, that he has made progress on the road to virtue that allows him to use literature well. The central tension dominating the Letters of Old Age is therefore not so much that between secular and sacred letters as that between the “strong” and “weak” styles – between his ability on one hand to use writing for the “Stoic” and “Virgilian” manly purposes of caring for his own self and that of his readers – leading them to virtue – and his unavoidable lapses on the other to the “weak” and “Ovidian” style, both reflecting and intensifying the weaknesses of his unhealthy mind. Petrarch’s concern in the collection with demonstrating the progress he has made on the road to virtue, validating his use of literature, is already evident in the introductory letter to the collection. Dedicating the Seniles to Francesco Nelli, Petrarch begins the letter by recalling his introductory letter to the Familiares: Writing some time ago to my Socrates [Ludwig van Kempen], I had complained that the year 1348 of our era had deprived me of nearly every consolation in life because of my friends’ death. For I remember with what grief I gave vent to uncontrollable laments and tears. Now what shall I do in the sixty-first year of this century, which has snatched away, together with nearly every other treasure, even my dearest and most precious one, Socrates himself? I have no wish to weary my pen describing the loss of other friends, lest the sad memories make me weep anew, and lest this plague-ridden year force me once again to do what I would rather not – burst into plaints unworthy of my years, of my studies, unworthy of me altogether; this year has not only equaled but even surpassed the earlier one in many regions, especially here in Cisalpine Gaul, and has almost completely emptied along with many other cities the most flourishing and populous Milan, untouched until now by these disasters. Earlier I had allowed myself much that I now reject. I do hope that Fortune will never again catch me in tears; I shall stand erect if I can, and if not, she will lay me low, tearless and silent. A groan is more shameful than a fall.68 68 “Olim,

Socrati meo scribens, questus eram quod etatis huius annus ille, post millesimum trecentesimum, quadragesimus octavus, omnibus me prope solatiis vite amicorum mortibus spoliasset; quo dolore, nam memini, questibus et lacrimis cunta compleveram. Quid nunc primo et sexagesimo faciam anno qui, cum cetera ornamenta ferme omnia, tum id quod carissimum unicumque habui, ipsum michi Socratem eripuit? Nolo per aliorum casus stilum ducere, ne tristis michi fletum renovet memoria et annus hic pestilens, qui illum multis in locis perque hanc maxime Cisalpinam Galliam non equavit modo sed vicit, quique inter ceteras Mediolanum, florentissimam frequentissimamque urbem his hactenus malis intactam pene funditus exhausit, me, quod nolim, iterum in querelas neque hac etate neque his studiis neque omnino me dignas cogat. Multa michi tunc permisi que nunc nego. Spero non me flentem cernet amplius fortuna: stabo si potero; si minus, siccum sternet ac tacitum: turpior est gemitus quam ruina” (Sen.1.1.1–3; Letters of Old Age, 1:1).

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What he had allowed himself in the past, Petrarch declares – to write in a mournful style unworthy of his years and studies – he does not allow himself anymore. His use of writing from now on, he suggests, will be only for worthy purposes, and the brevity and restraint with which he ends this introductory letter serve to demonstrate this new steadfastness. Petrarch stresses this resolution again in a letter to Boccaccio from 1363, written following the deaths of two of his closest friends, Lelius (Angelo di Pietro Stefano dei Tosetti) and Simonides himself (Francesco Nelli): “What would you say?” he describes to Boccaccio his condition after hearing the sad news, “I am utterly beside myself. It is an unusual metamorphosis: I have cast off my mental habit and tenor, and my image alone remains. Thus have the swift years, few indeed and evil, transformed me; thus have they engulfed with sad clouds on all sides.”69 The language of Ovid, of metamorphosis, stands here again for the loss of reason, of self-control, the succumbing to the grip of the passions. Nonetheless, although overcome by grief, Petrarch goes on to state: “I see, dear friend, that lamentations now return to my pen, though my reason condemned them and my mind cast them out. . . . Regardless of where my old habit has pushed my tongue or pen, I have recently made a resolution and fixed it in my mind with much effort, I confess, but determined by the great storm of events: to disdain hope and fear, joys and griefs.”70 His weak habit of the past, he claims, is now rejected, and in the remainder of the letter Petrarch turns to a long and harsh refutation of the astrologers, leaving lamentations aside. In the letter of consolation he wrote to Donato Albanzani in 1368 upon the death of his son, in which Petrarch portrays, as noted in the previous chapter, his own untimely loss of his beloved grandson, he uses again the sorrowful opportunity to describe his new resolution: “I confess I could not help but be upset because I have been robbed of so much sweetness of life. And if I were now of the same disposition as a few years ago, believe me, I would overwhelm all my friends, and you above

69 “Quid vis? Prorsus extra me sum. Insueta metamorphosis: animi habitum moresque exui,

sola restat effigies. Sic me celeres transformarunt anni et quidem pauci et mali . . . mestis undique nubibus involverunt” (Sen.3.1.12; Letters of Old Age, 1:77). 70 “Viden, amice, ut, iudicio damnate depulseque animo, ad calamum redeunt querele. . . . Michi, quocunque consuetudo antiqua linguam aut calamum impulerit, propositum recens est fixumque animo quod dixi, multo quidem nisu, fateor, sed et multo rerum turbine stabilitum: ex equo despicere spes metusque gaudia et dolores” (Sen.3.1.18; Letters of Old Age, 1:78).

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all, with wailing and groaning (lamentis ac gemitu).”71 Later in the letter, Petrarch attributes the two possible reactions to such blows of fortune – the mournful and the virtuous – to the two qualities that constitute our nature, described by him in clear gendered terms: “Nature excuses us for missing them, since she has injected something listless and watery (enerve et liquidum) into our spirits. . . . On the other hand, that same Nature censures this softness, since she has put a certain firm, manly (virile ac solidum) quality squarely in our minds, but quite deeply, so that it cannot be dug up, brought to light, and applied to our troubles, except with the aid of virtue.”72 His ability to control his emotions in writing is therefore an indication of the fact that he managed to cultivate the “manly” side of his character, and it is in turn this recently discovered “manliness” that now allows him, as we have seen, to attempt to cure both his own and his addressee’s minds through the writing of the letter: “And so, as I have said, I combine our wounds in order to prepare the salves (vulnera nostra coniungo ut medicamenta permisceam).”73 These newly acquired steadfastness and virility, as we learn from Sen.8.2, signify for Petrarch not only his ability to cope with the blows of fortune, but also his rejection of the excessive desires and lusts of his younger years: “O [old age] good conqueror of evil affections, best evictor of the worst lusts, to you alone, after God, am I grateful because you release me from my heavy shackles and from my gloomy prison, allowing me at length to begin feeling free, my own master.”74 The attainment of this self-mastery, as Petrarch declares a little beforehand, was made possible not only through his old age or the aid of God but also through his “book learning” (Literarum) – the study of letters in which he was engaged since his youth.75 71 “Tanta

tamen vite dulcedine spoliatus, non moveri, fateor, non potui, et, siquo eram ante hos paucos annos, animo nunc essem, amicos omnes, crede michi, teque ante alios, lamentis ac gemitu complessem” (Sen.10.4.9; Letters of Old Age, 2:379). 72 “Nempe excusat hoc nostrum desiderium natura que nescio quid enerve et liquidum animis nostris inseruit. . . . Ex diverso natura eadem mollitiem hanc accusat, que virile quiddam ac solidum ipsis nostris in mentibus posuit, sed profundius, sic ut nisi virtutis auxilio ervi atque effodi nequeat ac negotiis applicari” (Sen.10.4.17–18; Letters of Old Age, 2:382). 73 Sen.10.4.14; Letters of Old Age, 2:381. See also the discussion of this letter in the second section of Chapter 3 (“Ethics of Writing”). 74 “O bona malorum victrix affectuum expultrixque optima libidinum pessimarum. Tibi uni, post Deum, tribuo quod, preduris compedibus et tristi carcere relaxatus, liber tandem meique iuris esse incipio” (Sen.8.2.38–9; Letters of Old Age, 1:279). 75 Sen.8.2.23; Letters of Old Age, 1:275.

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Despite claiming that he has been released from the passions of youth, it is clear from Petrarch’s ongoing care for his writings in the collection that one of these passions – that for earthly glory – remained intact. Nonetheless, even this passion, as he now asserts, does not contradict the pursuit of virtue, because the glory he is seeking is the “true” and “noble” one, attained “through deeds that seek not the faint sound of fame but virtue itself, which necessarily projects the shadow of true glory.”76 The “virtuous deeds” that provide him with true glory are in turn precisely his “strong writings” by which he entices both himself and his readers to the pursuit of humanistic studies and virtue: “But suppose I have written much and am writing much, how much better could I exhort the minds of those who follow me to persevere?”77 For Petrarch, the ability to write such works is a mark of virtue worthy of true praise – an indication of the fact that he managed to neglect unworthy pursuits and to dedicate all of his time to noble activities. As he explains his admiration for Livy in Sen.16.7, the latter’s literary accomplishments are in themselves virtuous acts worthy of true praise: “even if he had done nothing else in his life nor could do or say anything further, still, with his divine style and incomparable energy . . . brought to completion in 142 volumes that immense work on the entire history of Rome from its founding. It is the next thing to a miracle; the life of one man could scarcely suffice to copy it – let alone to produce a new one like it. How much was it worth to behold the head that had dealt with so many things, and the fingers that had written of such noble things?”78 It is this type of virtuous glory that he seeks from his own writings, and for that purpose, as he states in Sen.17.2, he – “like Seneca” – keeps account of expenses, making sure not to lose time from his studies for laziness and empty pursuits. Asserting in Sen.17.2 that the ability to accomplish such literary undertakings is the mark of virtue worthy of true glory, Petrarch then states not only that glory does not contradict the pursuit of virtue but that it is in 76 “Factis,

inquam, non tenuem fame sonum aucupantibus sed virtutem ipsam, que necessario e se vere glorie umbram iacit” (Sen.1.5.39; Letters of Old Age, 1:21). 77 “Sed ut multa scripserim et ut multa scribam, quonam melius modo possim sequentium animos ad perseverantiam exhortari?” (Sen.17.2.5, ed. Stoppelli; Letters of Old Age, 2: 648–9). 78 “Quanti demum erat, unum hominem videre, qui, et si nihil aliud egisset in vita, nihil amplius aut agere posset, aut eloqui, divino tamen stylo summaque diligentia . . . opus illud immensum, totius ab origine Romanae Historiae centum quadraginta duobus voluminibus explicasset, miraculo proximum, ad quod ne dicam imitandum, sed vel transcribendum vix unius hominis vita sufficiat, spectare caput, quod tam multa tractasset, digitos qui talia taliter [exarassent]” (Sen.16.7; Basel edition: Sen.15.7, p. 1059; Letters of Old Age, 2:629).

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fact a necessary spur in its pursuit. Responding to Boccaccio’s advice that he should finally put down his pen because he has won enough praise and renown already, Petrarch declares, “Would you believe that would put a check upon my studies? It would be a spur: the more I would see the fruit of my labors prosper, the more keenly would I apply myself; and success would render me, in my state of mind, not lazy, but restless and eager.”79 The incentive of glory thus plays a crucial role in forming the writer’s virtue – encouraging him to use his time well and accomplish the literary undertakings that reveal his virtuosity and in turn entice further to virtue. The desire for earthly glory through writing, Petrarch responds to Augustinus’ arguments from the end of the Secretum, does not necessarily contradict the pursuit of virtue but can aid in its attainment. Body and soul, self and text, he argues, can in fact complement each other. Nonetheless, although claiming in the Seniles that the desire for glory and the pursuit of virtue can go together, it is clear from Petrarch’s portrayals of his own experience as a writer that the tension between the two is not completely resolved and that the Augustinian critique remains to a large extent intact: as long as he is attached to his desire for glory, the practice of writing will necessarily entail aspects contradictory to virtue and will inevitably lead to a sense of inner exile and alienation. Writing to the physician Francesco da Siena in the early 1370s, Petrarch mentions the praise the former bestowed on him for his work De vita solitaria and confesses how this praise boosted his confidence in his writing abilities: “everything of mine displeases me because I wish it to be so good that, however it is, it does not approach what I wanted. When I learn that it has been approved by the judgment of any intelligent man, I too begin to like and approve of my own work.”80 Petrarch then brings up the example of Augustine, who confessed in Book 4 of the Confessions that he suffered from the same malaise: “You will not be surprised that this can happen to me when you recall that it happened to such a man as Augustine, who would glow if his book, On the beautiful and the fitting, were approved by the Roman orator Hierius, to whom he had addressed 79 “An tu tamen id studii mei frenum crederes? calcar esset: quo prosperiorem exitum labo-

rum cernerem, eo acrius incumberem meque, quo sum animo, successus non segnem redderet sed solicitum et ardentem” (Sen.17.2.4, ed. Stoppelli; Letters of Old Age, 2:648). 80 “Mea mihi omnia displicent, tam bona illa esse cupio, ut qualiacumque sint non perveniant, quo volebam. Quae si quando cuiuspiam intelligentis viri iudicio probata cognovero, incipio et ipse mecum opus diligere, ac probare” (Sen.16.3; Basel edition: Sen.15.3, p. 1051; Letters of Old Age, 2:610).

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it; but if disapproved, it would be a blow to his heart.”81 What Petrarch does not mention here, however, is what Augustine said about this state of his: “if he approved of them I would be more ablaze, but if he did not, my vain heart, empty of your strength, O God, would be wounded.”82 For Augustine, therefore, the dependence on the judgment of others – which is an unavoidable outcome of the search for earthly glory – is inevitably the mark of a lack of virtue and inner strength. By presenting his condition as that of Augustine before his conversion, Petrarch shows that he is still in exile, dependent on the judgment of others and hence inevitably lacking in self-sufficiency and virtue. Letter 5.2 to Boccaccio, “concerning the obsessive appetite for first place,” reveals exactly the danger of this dependence upon the judgment of others and the sense of alienation the search for earthly glory through writing entails. Describing his career decisions – all clearly motivated by the prospects of glory – Petrarch, as shown, states that in his youth he decided to leave behind the “lofty Latin style” (stilus altior latinus) because it “had been so highly polished by ancient talents that now my resources, or anyone else’s, can add very little.”83 Instead, urged by the “spur of youth,” he decided to turn to write in the vernacular tongue, which “still new, showed itself capable of great improvement and development.”84 Nonetheless, after discovering that these writings were “not being recited but torn to pieces”85 by the ignorant multitude, he resolved to return to the Latin, “taking another pathway that I hope will be straighter and higher.”86 This new hope of attaining glory through loftier style addressed to the learned few, however, has its pitfalls as well, because these learned few, the “men of letters” (literatos), as he laments, are themselves ignorant, causing him to wish he had burned his writings 81 “Quod

haud quaquam evenire mihi posse miraberis, cum Augustino tali viro, memineris evenisse, ut magis flagraret, si libri sui De pulchro et apto, Hierio probarentur Romano oratori, ad quem eos scripserat, si autem improbarentur, sauciaretur cor ipsius” (Sen.16.3; Basel edition: Sen.15.3, p. 1051; Letters of Old Age, 2:610). 82 “Quae si probaret, flagrarem magis; si autem improbaret, sauciaretur cor vanum et inane soliditatis tuae” (Conf.4.14.23). Petrarch provided this quotation in a similar reference to his dependence on the approval of others in an earlier letter, Sen.6.9. 83 “Priscis ingeniis cultus esset ut pene iam nichil nostra ope vel cuiuslibet addi posset” (Sen.5.2.23; Letters of Old Age, 1:162). 84 “Adhuc recens . . . magni se vel ornamenti capacem ostenderet vel augmenti” (Sen.5.2.23; Letters of Old Age, 1:162). 85 “Ut non recitari scripta diceres sed discerpi” (Sen.5.2.24; Letters of Old Age, 1:162). 86 “Iterque aliud, ut spero, rectius atque altius arripui” (Sen.5.2.25; Letters of Old Age, 1: 162–3).

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altogether: “For seemingly there is no hope of fairer judges, and the license and number of these others increase daily.”87 Whether he is writing in the loftiest style directed to the learned few or in the “weak” one to the multitude, the result is the same frustration. The hope of attaining earthly glory through writing, we discover again, necessarily contradicts the demands of virtue and makes one dependent on the fluctuating judgments of others. Finally, the quotation I have provided before on the value of glory in Seniles 17.2, serving as a spur to virtue, also demonstrates the necessary sense of fluctuation and want it entails. For by declaring that “the more I would see the fruit of my labors prosper, the more keenly would I apply myself; and success would render me, in my state of mind, not lazy, but restless and eager,”88 Petrarch reveals that the pursuit of earthly glory is bound to be limitless, intensifying itself without an end and leading to an unavoidable experience of restlessness and agitation. The search for earthly glory through writing, the Seniles ultimately show – regardless of the texts on which it depends – is bound to lead to a sense of exile and flux. As a result, even though Petrarch was able to overcome many of the passions of the past, the fact that his use of reading and writing is still tainted by the desire for glory implies that the care they can provide him with is necessarily limited and ambiguous. Yet although Petrarch realizes this inevitable ambiguity, nowhere in the Seniles does he contemplate the complete disavowal of these practices in a similar fashion to the Secretum, and the collection in fact ends with a strong defense of the value of writing and of reading secular letters – as well as of earthly glory in itself – for the purpose of self-cultivation. In one letter after another from Seniles 16.6 onward the use of exempla is presented as the ultimate remedy of souls – both that of the writer and those of his readers – and glory and praise are at the same time portrayed in them as an invaluable spur in this pursuit of virtue. Celebrating the value of exempla, Petrarch focuses not only on the ancient ones but also on those of the living and even that of the author himself: “I cannot offer you a more dependable remedy,” he writes to his admirer Donino of Piacenza,

87 “Nulla

enim equiorum iudicum spes apparet horumque in dies et licentia crescit et numerus” (Sen.5.2.37; Letters of Old Age, 1:165). 88 “Quo prosperiorem exitum laborum cernerem, eo acrius incumberem meque, quo sum animo, successus non segnem redderet sed solicitum et ardentem” (Sen.17.2.4, ed. Stoppelli; Letters of Old Age, 2:648).

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“than what I found effective for myself in a like illness.”89 Attempting to alleviate Donino’s anxiety about the fact that he “knows nothing,” Petrarch narrates how as a young man he complained about the same feeling, and how he benefited from the response of a certain learned man who told him that “on the day you recognized your ignorance, believe me, you progressed inestimably.”90 In the following letter, written to the same Donino, Petrarch again uses himself as an exemplum, this time to demonstrate to Donino that virtue is still valued in their own day. Opening the letter with Jerome’s portrayal of those who came to Rome from the far lands of Spain and Gaul to see Livy, Petrarch goes on to tell the story of the old blind bard who followed him barefoot throughout Italy until he finally found him in Parma: “how many times, uplifted by the arms of his son . . . did he kiss my head with which I had conceived those works that he said had charmed him so powerfully, how many times did he kiss this right hand with which I had written them.”91 Presenting himself in the letter as a new Livy, Petrarch insists that this act of self-praise is not an empty boasting but the best way to care for his young addressee’s soul: “even though I may perhaps appear boastful to those who always put the worst interpretation on everything, I still figure that just as I had perfect right in the previous letter to encourage you with fatherly advice in your anxiety, so do I have it now to boast with fatherly confidence – if what has been gotten through no merit at all of mine can be called boasting, especially since both letters involved encouraging you and propping up your diffident spirit.”92 In this affirmation of the value of documenting one’s own experience in writing – even of an imperfect man like him – Petrarch rejects again Dante’s assertion in the Convivio that one should not speak about oneself

89 “Non

possum tibi remedium praestare fidelius, quam quod ipse pari in aegritudine, efficax sum expertus” (Sen.16.6; Basel edition: Sen.15.6, p. 1058; Letters of Old Age, 2:626). 90 “Quo die tuam ignorantiam deprehendisti, mihi crede inextimabiliter profecisti” (Sen.16.6; Basel edition: Sen.15.6, p. 1058; Letters of Old Age, 2:627). 91 “Quotiens filii . . . manibus sublatis, meum caput osculatus est, quo illa cogitassem, quotiens hanc dexteram, qua illa scripsissem, quibus se diceret vehementissime delectatum” (Sen.16.7; Basel edition: Sen.15.7, p. 1060; Letters of Old Age, 2:631). 92 “In quo et si forte gloriabundus videri possim, his qui omnia pessimam semper in partem trahunt, ego tamen, meo quodam iure, mihi licitum reor, et superior, in epistola te trepidum paterno consilio cohortari, sic nunc tecum paterna fiducia gloriari, si gloria dici potest, quae nullis omnino meritis parta est, praesertim cum ad tuam exhortationem, et diffidentis animi firmamentum, pariter utrumque pertineat” (Sen.16.7; Basel edition: Sen.15.7, p. 1059; Letters of Old Age, 2:630).

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unless in a case of necessity, insisting that self-writing, and even selfpraise in writing, is justified because it is the best vehicle for care of souls.93 In the following two letters, addressed to Jean Birel, Prior of the Grand Charterhouse at Garignano north of Milan, Petrarch turns to transform his addressee into an exemplum: praising him in the first letter for his devotion and beseeching him to pray for his sinful soul, Petrarch then defends in the second letter – following his addressee’s complaint – his practice of praising him while still alive and to his face: “what if it does good, what if it also proves useful to the one who praises and even to the one praised?”94 Praise and glory, Petrarch declares, are not dangerous to the virtuous one but rather provide him with a spur to persevere in his noble pursuits: “insults and threats drive the base to the straight path, the charming spur of glory drives generous minds.”95 Moreover, while the one praised is encouraged to persevere in the pursuit of virtue, the one praising is at the same time filled through the writing with the desire to imitate his object of praise, advancing in this way on the road to virtue: “in speaking with you, let me arouse myself, if I can, and, while doing you no harm, benefit myself if perchance in praising you this cold heart of mine may burn to imitate you.”96 Praising others in writing – even while still alive – Petrarch insists, is the way to care for souls, to entice both the writer and his readers to the pursuit of virtue. These two letters were written between 1354 and 1357, and Petrarch’s choice to insert them at the end of the collection manifests the importance he attributed to this theme of praise: in an epoch-making assertion, Petrarch affirms the value of the pagan notion of glory over Christian humility as the means to care for souls in this world. This defense of the value of writing about exempla of virtue reaches a peak in the final book before the closing Letter to Posterity, consisting of letters addressed solely to Boccaccio. The fact that Petrarch closes the collection with letters addressed to Boccaccio is in itself significant: throughout the collection, as Giuseppe Mazzotta pointed out, Petrarch adapts 93 See

the discussion in the second section of Chapter 3 (“Ethics of Writing”). si prosit, quid si laudanti, quid si ipsi etiam expediat laudato” (Sen.16.9; Basel edition: Sen.15.9, p. 1062; Letters of Old Age, 2:637). 95 “Sic est, degeneres in viam rectam iurgia et minae, generosos animos blandum gloriae calcar impellit” (Sen.16.9; Basel edition: Sen.15.9, p. 1062; Letters of Old Age, 2:637). 96 “Sed ut te alloquens me excitem, si possim, et dum tibi non noceam prosim mihi, si forsitan te laudando ad imitandum pectus hoc gelidum inardescat” (Sen.16.9; Basel edition: Sen.15.9, p. 1063; Letters of Old Age, 2:639). 94 “Quid

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the content and style of the letters to his addressees, each and every one of them thus highlighting a different aspect of his varied personality.97 It is in the letters to Boccaccio, as we have seen, that Petrarch often reveals his humanistic side, ardently defending the value of the practices of reading and writing for the purpose of self-cultivation. By choosing to close the collection with a series of letters to Boccaccio, Petrarch therefore emphasizes that this is the side of himself he ultimately adheres to and values most. In the book itself, Petrarch discusses his translation into Latin of Boccaccio’s story of Grizelda from the Decameron, stressing the value of fictional stories – including stories about women – as exempla of virtue: “I decided to retell this story in another language not so much to encourage the married women of our day to imitate this wife’s patience, which to me seems hardly imitable, as to encourage the readers to imitate at least this woman’s constancy, so that what she maintained toward her husband they may maintain toward our God.”98 This story, as he describes in the following letter, so overwhelmed a Paduan friend of theirs who was reading it that “he confessed that he could not proceed, and handed it to one of his company to read.”99 Interpreting his friend’s behavior, Petrarch declares, “I interpreted it in the best light and understood the man’s heart was very sensitive.”100 At the end of the collection, Petrarch thus even validates the value of the emotions in the pursuit of virtue, stating that to affect readers, the author must move their hearts: “Nature 97 Petrarch

refers to this practice explicitly in the opening letter of the Familiares, attributing to it the many “inconsistencies” that plague his letters: “Therefore in these storms of life, to return to the point, not throwing my anchor for any length of time in any port, and making a number of ordinary friends but unsure of how many true ones (being uncertain of their status and not really having very many), I struck an acquaintance with countless famous ones. I thus had to correspond a great deal with many of them who differed considerably in character and station. As a result, the letters were so different that in rereading them I seemed to be in constant contradiction” (“In his ergo vite tempestatibus, ut ad rem redeam, nullo portu anchoram longum in tempus iaciens, quot veros amicos nescio, quorum et iudicium anceps et penuria ingens est, notos autem innumerabiles quesivi. Multis itaque multumque animo et conditione distantibus scribere contigit; tam varie ut ea nunc relegens, interdum pugnantia locutus ipse michi videar” [Fam.1.1.27; Familiar Letters, 1:9]). See also Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 92. 98 “Hanc historiam stilo nunc alio retexere visum fuit, non tam ideo, ut matronas nostri temporis ad imitandam huius uxoris patientiam, que michi vix imitabilis videtur, quam ut legentes ad imitandam saltem femine constantiam excitarem, ut quod hec viro suo prestitit, hoc prestare Deo nostro audeant” (Sen.17.3.9, ed. Stoppelli; Letters of Old Age, 2:668). 99 Sen.17.4; Letters of Old Age, 2:669. 100 Ibid.

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admits / She gives the human race the softest hearts; / She gave us tears – the best part of our feelings.”101 Petrarch’s fluctuation and wavering, no doubt, did not stop at the end of his letters. Whereas in Sen.17.2 he furiously attacks Boccaccio for suggesting that he should put down his pen, stating that he hopes “death would find me reading or writing,”102 in letter 17.4 he declares that he is “sick of writing,” before bidding an emotional farewell to both his letters and his friends.103 Nevertheless, this strong defense of the practices of writing and the reading of secular letters, and even of “true” earthly glory and the emotions, at the end of the collection, suggests that he indeed managed to find a middle ground, a certain harmony, between the tensions that dominated him throughout his life: the “Stoic” effort to use reading and writing to cultivate virtue and curb the passions, the “Ovidian” recognition that writing is always tainted by desire and emotions and hence that its impact is bound to be ambiguous, and the “Augustinian” claim that only religious letters and practices can truly allow him to care for the self. Accepting the fact that reading and writing will always be tainted for him by an alienating element of carnality, of unquenchable earthly desire, Petrarch at the same time claims that the benefits of these practices – and the desire for glory that dominates them – outweigh their inevitable price. As he tells the physician Giovanni Dondi in a letter from 1372, complete virtue, just as complete rest, is unattainable in this life, and hence the fact that the practices of reading and writing allowed him to make some progress toward virtue – even if this progress is by necessity checked by the insurmountable desire that is attached to them – for him justifies their use.104 Despite their unavoidable limitations, Petrarch ultimately asserts at the end of the Seniles that the pursuit of virtue through writing and the reading of secular letters is the best means available in this life to care for both himself and the world around him, to bring it back to the virtue and glory of old. 101 Ibid. 102 “Opto

ut legentem aut scribentem . . . mors inveniat” (Sen.17.2.9, ed. Stoppelli; Letters of Old Age, 2:654). 103 Sen.17.4; Letters of Old Age, 2:670. 104 Sen.13.16.2; Letters of Old Age, 2:518.

Conclusion

This book contends that Petrarch’s humanist philosophy and concept of self are defined above all by his efforts to care for and cultivate the self through spiritual exercises, and particularly through the literary practice of writing. Plagued by a strong sense of fragmentation and inner exile due to his acute awareness of the flux of time and the scattering impact of society, Petrarch returned to the ancient idea that self, or soul, is not a given presence but a state of mind from which we are exiled and that we need to attain through constant practice. The goal of philosophy, he therefore argues, is not to provide us with systematic knowledge but to shape and cultivate the self through spiritual techniques, which for him consist mainly of writing. To demonstrate these claims and examine his humanist philosophy, this book has explored Petrarch’s various attempts to use writing as a spiritual technique, the ways in which these uses absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that ultimately arose from his efforts to cultivate the self through writing. Petrarch’s attempts to care for the self through the practice of writing are a dominant feature of both his vernacular poetry and Latin works, with each corpus displaying different uses of writing and diverse type of goals that he strived to attain. In his collection of vernacular poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the incessant passage of time is presented as the main source of the poet’s experience of fragmentation and exile. The constant slippage of time, as the poems show, challenges the very substantiality of the self, while also leading the poet away from what he claims to have been the time of full bliss he enjoyed in his youth. Nevertheless, although demonstrating the poet’s sense of exile and fragmentation, the poems also persistently bring to the fore his attempt to overcome this experience through the writing of poetry about his desire. Both desire and the 158

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act of writing poetry emerge in the poems as the steadfast and unchanging aspects of the poet’s existence, challenging the constant flux of time and also providing him with the hope of overcoming time through the promise of eternal and changeless poetic glory. Moreover, the writing of poetry serves for Petrarch as a personal ritual and a meditative technique that allow him both to endow the incessant flux of time with meaning and to return in his mind over and over again to a mythical time of wholeness he enjoyed in the past – the birth of his desire. Finally, Petrarch also advances in the poems the notion that by writing poetry about his virtuous object of desire – both Laura and the laurel – he is transformed into them, becomes virtuous and steadfast just like them. The overcoming of time and the attainment of a coherent and unchanging self depends, from this perspective in the collection, on identification with an outside object of desire functioning like an ideal mirror reflection of the self. Yet, as the poems show, the attempt to overcome the passage of time through writing and desire is bound to lead to ambiguous results, given that the entry into desire – which is also the entry into writing as the ultimate object of desire – is also that which leads to the poet’s subjection to temporality and change in the first place, submitting him to a longing that cannot be put to rest, and hence to a process of constant fluctuation and becoming. The impact of writing and desire on the self emerges as essentially ambiguous, making the poet both beyond time and subjected to time, both in exile and at home. By emphasizing this ambiguity, Petrarch was rejecting both Dante’s assertion in the Commedia that writing and desire can lead the self to the full transcendence of the flux of time and the Augustinian claim that the impact of desire and writing on the self is essentially negative, and hence the two must be discarded. Alongside the portrayal of the poet’s effort to abolish time completely through the mutual effect of writing and desire, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta also present an alternative solution to the malaise of temporality – the reconstruction in writing of the narrative of the poet’s vicissitudes and fluctuations in time. Rather than defying time completely, this alternative solution – corresponding with both Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Vita nuova – claims that it is the realization of the meaning of the constant change that allows one to overcome the experience of exile and fragmentation that inevitably accompanies the flux of time. Nonetheless, this attempt too, as Petrarch shows especially in canzone 23, is bound to fail. In direct opposition to Dante’s claims in the Vita nuova, Petrarch

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demonstrates through his use of the Ovidian language of myth that his experience of desire in time is essentially ambiguous, essentially meaningless, and hence that he has no way to discern and portray the narrative of his past. At the same time, unwilling to part from this desire altogether, Petrarch also cannot attain the right Augustinian disposition of will that would allow him to realize the thread that binds the scattered fragments of his past. Under such circumstances, as the collection ultimately shows, all that the poet can do is place the fragments of his past – the poems he wrote through the years – together in a sequence that only highlights the contradictions and fluctuations that govern his experience in time. In parallel to these attempts to overcome fragmentation and attain unity through his vernacular writings, Petrarch was engaged throughout his life in the often contradictory effort to transcend his experience of flux and fragmentation through his writings in Latin. In works such as his collections of letters, the Familiares and the Seniles, and the Secretum, Petrarch returns to the Stoic notion that the source of his experience of fragmentation and flux is ultimately his exile from reason and virtue – his “true self” – and submission to the rule of desire and the passions. To overcome this subjection and “return to himself,” Petrarch revives the Stoic, and particularly Senecan, emphasis on the need to care for the self – to cultivate virtue – by means of spiritual exercises, which in his case consist of, above all, again the practice of writing (which is always intertwined for him with that of reading). As a result, whereas in the vernacular poetry the aim of writing was to allow him to care for the self by means of reviving and intensifying desire, now its aim is the complete opposite one: curbing desire altogether. Several uses of writing as a technology of the self, a means to cultivate his inner virtue, emerge from Petrarch’s collections of letters and the Secretum: the writing down of meticulous notes on salutary precepts contained in his readings, which allow Petrarch to inscribe such precepts on his memory and shape his inner self accordingly; the composing of letters of consolation to friends with the aim of training both himself and his readers to withstand steadfastly the blows of fortune; the documentation of ancient exempla of virtue, which fill Petrarch with the desire to imitate them and lead him to examine his state in their mirror; the writing down of the lessons he learns from his own experience, by which Petrarch provides both himself and his readers with an ample demonstration of the fickleness of fortune; and finally, the conducting of an internal examination of conscience through the act of writing, for which purpose Petrarch

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revives the Senecan practice of conducting examination of conscience in letters to friends and also enacts an inner examination through the writing of an internal dialogue such as the Secretum. Petrarch’s efforts to cultivate the self by means of the practices of reading and writing in his Latin works draw on not only the ancient model of Seneca but also the Augustinian-monastic tradition of the Middle Ages, which often emphasized the spiritual value of the practices of reading and writing. His self-examination in the Secretum, which focuses on his susceptibility to sin, particularly echoes the written examination conducted by Augustine and late medieval monastic authors. However, although drawing on this medieval tradition, Petrarch also departs from it in several crucial aspects, a departure that further demonstrates the humanistic nature of his philosophy of care of the self. In opposition to the Augustinian-monastic assertion that the goal of the techniques of reading and writing is to discover the divine truth within – the image of God printed on the soul – Petrarch stresses the need to shape the inner self by assimilating the precepts of conduct phrased by pagan authors and attained from the outside. In addition, whereas the aim of the written self-examination in the Augustinian-monastic tradition is mainly the excavation of guilt and the abolition of one’s attachment to self, Petrarch uses this technique as a vehicle for self-training, the goal of which is establishing his authority over himself, over desire and the passions. In these departures from the monastic tradition, Petrarch fashions his humanism as a new form of spirituality in the period, an alternative to the monastic movements of the later Middle Ages. However, while stressing the value of writing for the purpose of the cultivation of virtue, Petrarch’s use of writing in his Latin works is plagued by the realization that writing is inevitably tainted by carnality, by earthly desire and emotions, and that as a result it is bound to lead the author away from virtue even while directing him toward it. As the letters reveal, to be able to write at all, Petrarch must be dominated by emotions. Moreover, in writing about his misfortunes, Petrarch cannot help but use writing – in a similar fashion to Ovid – as a form of therapy, the goal of which is to allow him to forget his grief for a while, rather than to eradicate it virtuously. Above all, the practice of writing – in Latin just as in the vernacular – is inevitably governed for Petrarch by the insatiable desire for glory. Dominated in this fashion by desire and emotions, the impact of the practice of writing on the self emerges in the Latin works – just as in the vernacular ones – as essentially ambiguous, serving as a source of transcendence just as of exile. The Ovidian emphasis on the

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duality inherent in the impact of the act of writing thus becomes a central feature of Petrarch’s Latin works as well. It is this Ovidian realization of the ambiguous impact of writing on the self that leads to a large extent to the Augustinian-religious critique in the Secretum of the value of writing, as well as of the reading of ancient texts, for the purpose of self-cultivation. Thus, although on one hand the figure of Augustinus serves to affirm in the Secretum the value of writing and of reading secular letters for the purpose of caring for the self, on the other hand he argues on several occasions that these practices are part of the problem rather than the solution. From this Augustinian perspective in the work, the only true solution to the experience of fragmentation is the complete disavowal of writing and of reading secular letters and the adoption of sacred letters and techniques. The tension between the “Stoic” assertion that writing and the reading of secular letters can lead to virtue, the “Ovidian” claim that writing is always tainted by desire and emotions and hence its impact is bound to be ambiguous, and the “Augustinian” contention that only sacred letters and practices can save the self from submission to the body of the world thus becomes a defining feature of Petrarch’s humanism. The tensions among these different streams continued without a doubt to plague Petrarch’s works until the end of his life, leading him to admit that the attempt to take care of the self through reading and writing cannot provide him with the full transcendence of his experience of exile and flux. Nevertheless, in his Letters of Old Age, he seems to have attained a certain harmony between these conflicting tendencies, asserting that the cultivation of the self through writing and the reading of secular letters – despite the insurmountable desire that is attached to them – is the best means available in this life to improve both himself and the world around him. The humanist tradition of care of the self – offering a new philosophy of life that is acutely aware of its own limitations – was thus ultimately born. How this philosophy was absorbed by the humanists that followed in Petrarch’s footsteps, and what types of solutions they found to the tensions that dominated his humanistic project, remains to be examined.

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Staubach, Nikolaus. “Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Bereich der Devotio moderna.” Fr¨uhmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 418–61. Stock, Brian. After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. . Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. . Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Ahesthetic Reading in Western Culture. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures. Hanover and London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University, 2007. . “Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners.” New Literary History 26 (1995): 717–30. Struever, Nancy S. Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sturm-Maddox, Sara. Petrarch’s Laurels. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. . Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime sparse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Taddeo, Edoardo. “Petrarca e il tempo.” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 27 (1983): 69–108. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Trinkaus, Charles. “In Our Image and Likness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. 2 vols. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Originally published by The University of Chicago Press, 1970. . The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Tripet, Arnaud. P´etrarque, ou la connaissance de soi. Geneva: Droz, 1967. Van Engen, John. “Introduction.” In Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, translated by John van Engen, preface by Heiko A. Oberman. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. . Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Vance, Eugene. “Augustine’s Confessions and the Grammar of Selfhood.” Genre 6 (1973): 1–28. Vickers, Nancy J. “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhymes.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–79. Vinge, Louise. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century. Translated by R. Dewsnap, L. Gronlund, N. Reeves, and I. Soderberg-Reeves. Lund: Gleerups, 1967. Von Martin, Alfred. Sociology of the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Waller, Marguerite. Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Wilkins, Ernest H. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. . The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Studies. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1951. . Petrarch’s Correspondence. Padova: Antenore, 1960.

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Index

` Kempis, Thomas, 116 A Accursio, Mainardo, 102–3 Ackerman, Robert W., 91n37 Actaeon, 67–9, 69n24 Africa, 132n25, 139–40, 145 Albanzani, Donato, 99 Ambrose, Saint, 143 Apollo, 35, 39–40, 39n31, 63n18, 64, 141n54 Apenninicola, Severo, 86–8, 92–4 Aretino, Giovanni, 127 Aristotle, 6, 11n31 Ascent of Mount Ventoux (Fam. 4.1): 10n29, 72n27, 74, 146; narrativity and circularity in, 72–3, 142 Ascoli, Albert R., 10n29 Augustine, Saint, 16, 19, 50, 104; and ancient letters, 95–6; approach to writing dominated by desire, 21, 44, 46, 52, 54; and the narrative self, 14, 55, 55n1, 57, 57n6, 72–3; and reading, 95–6, 113, 114n97; and written selfexamination, 114–15, 117–19; Works, City of God, 47n38, 90–1; Confessions, 25, 38, 38n29, 46, 46n37, 55n1, 74n30, 90–1, 95–6, 110, 114–16, 117n110, 133, 135–6, 151–2, 159; De doctrina Christiana, 134n30; De magistro, 93n41, 114n97; Soliloquies, 110; De vera religione, 91n35. See also Bible, body, circularity, Petrarch, self (care of), sin, time autobiography, 55n1, 56, 61n13, 61–2; in early Italian humanism, 103–4, 104n72; as fabula, 61; and the sacrament of

penance, 111n89. See also Augustine, Dante, narrative, self-writing Avignon, 7, 27, 94 Barbato da Sulmona, 101, 145 Barkan, Leonard, 35n21, 67–8, 69n24 Barolini, Teodolinda, 23nn1, 2, 26nn8, 9, 29nn14, 15, 57n6 Baron, Hans, 5n14, 107n79, 131 Barthes, Roland, 77 Bartsch, Shadi, 92–3n40, 138 Battus, 64–6 Baxandall, Michael, 18n57 being, 8, 26, 33–5, 38–9, 43, 45, 49, 63, 69, 121, 129, 139 Bell, David N., 117n109 Bernard of Clairvaux, 111 Bernardo, Aldo S., 47n38 Bettarini, Rosanna, 59n8, 66n21 Bible, 113; Augustine’s hermeneutics of, 134–6; Petrarch’s view of, 133–6 Billanovich, Giuseppe, 72n27 Biow, Douglas, 9n27 Birel, Jean, 155 Black Death, 29, 56, 103, 123, 131, 147 Blanchard, W. Scott, 4n9 Boccaccio, Giovanni: 11n31, 19, 144–6, 148, 151–2, 155–7; Decameron, 156 body, Augustine’s approach to, 90–1, 91n35; late medieval approaches to, 91–2; Petrarch’s view of, 89–92, 119, 133–5. See also soul Boethius, 104 Bosco, Umberto, 56n4 Bouwsma, William, 16, 16n49, 85n19

173

174

Index

Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 118n112 Brenkman, John, 69n26 Bruner, Jerome, 55n1 Bruni, Francesco, 144 Bucolicum Carmen, 7n18, 121–2 Burckhardt, Jacob, 5n14, 9n27, 15n44 Burke, Peter, 9n27 Byblis, 65–6 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 9n27, 92, 117n109 Cachey, Theodore J. Jr., 4n9 Calcaterra, Carlo, 39n31 Cavalca, Domenico, 7 canzone 23, 21, 30n16, 35–7, 57–75, 129, 159–60; and the narrative self, 58–74; tension between circularity and narrativity in, 62–75; writing and desire in, 63–74 Carruthers, Mary J., 110n84, 113nn94, 95 Carthusians, 109n83, 110 Celenza, Christopher, 15nn44, 45, 18 Charles IV, 61 Chenu, M.-D., 61n13 Cicero, 6; De oratore, 60, 81; Tusculan Disputations, 79n1, 89n30, 118n111. See also Petrarch Cino da Pistoia, 36n22 circularity, Augustine’s view of, 47n38; as a mark of constancy, 45, 70, 73–6; as a mark of entrapment, 45–7, 70–1, 73–6, 141–2; in Ovid, 141–2, 141–2n54. See also Ascent of Mount Ventoux, canzone 23, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Cistercians, 112 Colilli, Paul, 9n29 Colonna, Giacomo, 102, 125 Colonna, Giovanni (cardinal), 125 Colonna, Giovanni (friar), 1–2, 4, 11, 87–8, 98 Connell, William J., 9n27 conscience, 95; examination of, 83, 100, 105–12, 106n76, 114–19 consolation, letters of, 98–9, 119, 160 Constable, Giles, 109n83, 144n60 Conversini, Giovanni, 104n72 Cristiani, Luca, 102–3 Cupid, 123 Cygnus, 64, 66

Danae, 70 Dante, authorial language of, 59–63; conception of writing, 21, 51–2, 62n15; and the narrative self, 14, 55, 57–63, 57n6, 59n9, 71; view of self-writing, 104, 154–5; Works: Convivio, 104, 154; Paradiso, 26n8, 41n34, 52n42; Purgatorio, 31, 41, 50–2; Vita nuova, 21, 51–2, 55–9, 59n9, 61–2, 159–60. See also Petrarch Daphne, 35, 39–40, 39n31, 63n18 De Nolhac, Pierre, 5n14 De otio religioso, 96 De viris illustribus, 60–1, 139–40 De vita solitaria, 122–3n4, 145, 151 desire, ambiguous impact on the self, 27, 43–53, 62–77, 63n18, 159–60; and circularity, 45–7, 70–7, 141–2; as a cure to fragmentation, 14, 21, 27–35, 34n20, 54; and Ovid, 141–2, 141–2n54; as a source of exile and fragmentation, 21, 26, 35–43, 141–2, 159; steadfast nature of, 26–9, 70, 158–9. See also self, writing Devotio Moderna, 6, 111, 111n90, 116 Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, 38n29, 72 Dondi, Giovanni, 145, 157 Donino of Piacenza, 153–4 Dotti, Ugo, 5n14, 7n21, 39n31 Durling, Robert, 5n14, 29n14, 30n17, 31, 50, 56n4, 66n21, 69 Dutschke, Dennis, 29n14, 36n22, 58n7, 72n27 Echo, 66, 68 Eden, expulsion from, 41 Eurydice, 66–7 examination of conscience. See conscience exempla, 86; danger of, 137–8; value of writing about, 12, 14, 99–100, 112, 114, 153–7, 160 exile, experience of, 3–4, 4n9, 9–10, 10n30, 12–13, 21–2, 39, 41, 43–4, 48, 53–4, 66–7, 73, 84, 86, 130, 151; caused by the body, 88–90, 96; caused by evil inherent within the soul, 90–1; caused by society, 88, 96; caused by time, 3–4, 30, 32, 158; from classical Rome, 12, 126; from God, 90; from the moment of falling in love, 30–3; from the presence

Index of Laura, 30, 49; from virtue, 8, 21, 26–7, 37–8, 77, 86–9, 92, 98, 121, 124, 126–9, 140, 151–3, 160. See also desire, writing experience, as a book, 108, 111; as a teacher of life, 100–1, 100n61, 104; value of writing about, 100–4, 110–11, 154–5, 160 fabula, 60–2. See also autobiography, history Familiares (Rerum Familiarium Libri): care of the self in, 11–13, 98–106; structure of, 101–3; tension between secular and sacred letters in, 143–4; tension between “Virgilian” and “Ovidian” styles in, 123–9, 131n24; Individual letters: Fam. 1.1, 7–8, 128, 131–2n24, 147, 156n97; Fam. 1.9, 11, 79–82, 97; Fam. 2.3–5, 86–94, 98; Fam. 4.6, 102; Fam. 4.8, 101; Fam. 4.10, 101–2; Fam. 4.12, 87n25, 125; Fam. 5.5, 100n61; Fam. 5.16, 128; Fam. 5.18, 104, 106n76; Fam. 6.2, 1–4, 11–12, 30; Fam. 6.3, 11–12; Fam. 6.4, 12–13, 99–100, 112, 114, 126; Fam. 7.12, 131n23; Fam. 7.16, 105; Fam. 8.2, 102; Fam. 8.4, 87n25, 102–3; Fam. 8.7, 103, 123–5; Fam. 8.8, 103; Fam. 8.9, 69n24, 103, 125; Fam. 10.3, 144n60; Fam. 10.4, 7n18; Fam. 11.3, 127–8; Fam. 12.14, 14n43, 37n27; Fam. 15.7, 37n27; Fam. 16.11, 83; Fam. 18.8, 128; Fam. 19.3, 61; Fam. 19.16, 106; Fam. 22.7, 105n74; Fam. 22.10, 143; Fam. 24.1, 8, 8n25, 12, 33, 37, 82, 122, 136n34. See also Ascent of Mount Ventoux (Fam. 4.1) Folena, Gianfranco, 5n13, 23n2 forgetfulness. See memory fortune, fluctuations of, 83–5, 87, 89, 95, 98, 101–3, 107, 109, 114, 116, 120, 131, 136, 142, 147, 149 Foster, Kenelm, 56n3 Foucault, Michel, 10n30, 12, 12nn39, 40, 83–4, 84n18, 96n49, 98n54, 100n60, 106n76 fragmentation, in Augustine’s Confessions, 55n1, 114–15; caused by society, 3, 6–8, 158; caused by time, 2–4, 6–10, 23–30, 37–9, 45, 69, 158; Petrarch’s experience of, 3–4, 4n9, 7–10, 9n29, 12–14, 21–2, 26, 33, 56, 68, 77, 82–4, 87, 103, 130, 145, 158–162; of texts, 145. See also desire, narrative, writing

175

Francesco da Siena, 151 Franciscans, 6 Freccero, John, 5n14, 47n38, 57n5 Fubini, Ricardo, 19n63 Ganymede, 70 Garin, Eugenio, 6n15, 15, 15n45 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 4n9 glory, 14, 26, 28, 30, 34–5, 35n24, 41–2, 46n37, 62, 64, 108, 121–2, 124, 132n25, 139–40, 159; as an incentive for virtue, 150–1, 153, 155; Ovid’s approach to, 28, 129–30 golden age, 3, 4n9, 21, 33; identified with classical Rome, 12, 126; identified with the birth of desire, 30–1, 47, 54, 121, 126, 159; identified with the poet’s virtuous youth, 35–9, 62–4, 70; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 35–6 Gouwens, Kenneth, 1n2, 17, 17n56 Grafton, Anthony, 16–17, 16n50 Greenblatt, Stephen, 9n27 Greene, Thomas M., 1n2, 4n9, 6n15, 8n23, 20n65 Gregory the Great, 143, 146 Guigo I, 117n110; and written self-examination, 110, 115 Guigo II, 111n87 Hadot, Pierre, 11, 18, 83, 83n16 Hainsworth, Peter, 39n31, 51n40 Hankins, James, 17 Hardie, Philip, 39n31, 141–2n54 history, 94; as fabula, 60, 60n13; Hugh of St. Victor’s view of, 61n13; Petrarch’s concept of, 1n2 Holmes, Olivia, 23n2 Homer, 34–5n20 Horace: 122n4; Ars poetica, 60; Odes 27n10 Hugh of St. Victor: and reading, 112–14, 114n97; and self-examination, 112, 114. See also history humanism: as alternative to monasticism, 22, 78, 86, 109–20, 161; and the emergence of the “modern” self, 6, 6n15; interpretations of, 15–19, 15n44; as a “stylistic ideal”, 17–18. See also Petrarch image of God. See self imitation, 11n35, 18, 20n65

176

Index

individualism, 5–6, 5n14, 9, 9n27, 11n34, 93 Isidore of Seville, 60n13 Jacopo da Carrara, 127 Jerome, saint, 143, 146, 154 Jove, 70 Juno, 66 Kahn, Victoria, 20n65 Kempen, Ludwig van, 102–3, 123–5, 147 Kircher, Timothy, 7, 7n20, 11n31, 18–19 Kohl, Benjamin G., 60n10 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 15, 15nn44, 45 Lawrence, C. H., 110n84 Le Goff, Jacques, 5–7 Leclercq, Jean, 110n83, 113n94 lectio divina, 17, 113, 113n94 Lesnick, Daniel R., 6n17 Lethe, 29, 33n18, 50, 50n39 Little, Lester K., 5n12, 6nn16, 17 Lovati, Lovato dei, 18 Livy, See Petrach Mann, Nicholas, 56n4 Mariani, Ugo, 110n83 Marsili, Luigi, 106n76 Martin, John J., 9nn26, 27 Martinelli, Bortolo, 56n3 Mazzocco, Angelo, 15n44 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 9, 11n35, 20n65, 23n2, 25n5, 56, 57n5, 59n9, 61n13, 76n33, 85n19, 155 McClure, George W., 19n63 meditation, 83, 100; on the death of Christ, 144. See also memory, reading, writing memory, 1n2, 6n15, 160; as a book, 59; and desire, 71–4; and dismemberment, 67–8; and forgetfulness, 31–3, 47–51, 71; formed by writing, 97–8, 108, 113n95, 116; and meditation, 30–3, 33n18, 47–50; and narrative, 58–61, 68, 71–4; and reading, 95; revived by writing, 30–3, 47; steadfast nature of, 28–9 mirror: 21, 34, 92n40, 94, 141n54, 159; and self-knowledge, 137–8; text as, 105, 105n74, 112, 114

Mommsen, Theodor M., 1n2 monasticism: 19, 20; and the use of reading as a spiritual exercise, 112–13; and the use of writing as a spiritual exercise, 110–12, 115–16. See also Petrarch, self (care of) Morris, Colin, 9n27 Mursell, Gordon A., 111n87 Mussato, Albertino, 6, 18 Najemy, John M., 81n9 Narcissus, 43, 66, 128, 130, 130n21, 134–5, 138, 140–2 narrative, 24; as a cure to fragmentation, 14, 21, 24n4, 54–5, 55n1, 57, 72–3, 159; and the realization of meaning, 58–63, 75–6; and the transformation of the will, 71–4, 76. See also canzone 23, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, time Nauert, Charles G., 6n15 Neckham, Alexander, 134 Nelli, Francesco, 83, 128, 143, 147–8 Neoplatonism, 134 Noferi, Adelia, 10n29, 28n13, 40n32, 57n5 nonbeing, 8, 26–7, 33, 38, 55 notes (notae). See reading Olney, James, 55n1 Orpheus, 66–8, 141–2n54 Ovid, and writing, 13–14, 13n41, 124–5, 125n9, 129–30, 130n21; Works, Amores, 123; Metamorphoses, 28, 28n12, 36, 36n23, 40, 43, 63n18, 64–8; ex Ponto, 125n9, 142, Tristia, 13n41, 125, 129–30, 130n21. See also circularity, desire, glory, golden age, Petrarch, style Ozment, Steven, 6n17 Pacca, Vinicio, 131n22 Passavanti, Jacopo, 7, 7n20, 91, 111 penance, sacrament of, 111, 111n89 Petrarca, Gherardo, 7n18, 72, 96, 146 Petrarch, Francesco, and Augustine, 5n14, 13–14, 13n42, 19–22, 20n65, 27, 46–7, 47n38, 52, 54–8, 57n5, 71–4, 76, 90–1, 91n35, 93, 93n41, 95–6, 109–10, 113–19, 132–6, 143, 146, 151–2, 159–162; and the care of the self, 10–15, 20, 22, 26–35, 45, 47, 54–5, 77–86, 92–120, 124, 130–2, 140–57, 158–62;

Index and Cicero, 81, 81nn6, 9, 94, 97n51, 113, 118n111; and the Colonna family, 7; and Dante, 13–14, 20–1, 20n65, 27, 31, 41, 44, 50–63, 71, 75–6, 104, 122, 154, 159–60; and defense of secular letters, 145–6; as “first modern man”, 5, 5n14, 9–10n29; and individualism, 11n34, 93; and Livy, 150, 154; and monasticism, 109n83; and monastic techniques of self-care, 109–20, 161; nature of his humanism, 20, 22, 84–6, 109, 113, 119–20, 161–2; and Ovid, 13–14, 13n42, 20–2, 28, 35–6, 40, 43, 58, 62–74, 122–30, 122n4, 141–2, 148, 160–2; and the secularization of care, 109–20, 120n115; and Seneca, 8, 8n25, 13–14, 19–20, 38, 81, 81n9, 82nn11, 13, 84, 86–7, 87n25, 94–6, 98–9, 103, 105–6, 109, 113, 119, 123n4, 125, 137–8, 150, 160–1; and solitude, 2–4; and Virgil, 66–7, 89, 91n35, 119, 121–4, 122n4. See also Bible, body, exile, entries of individual works, fragmentation, history, philosophy, self, sin, time, writing Petrie, Jennifer, 1n2, 27n10 Petrucci, Armando, 98n53 Phaeton, 64, 66 Philippe de Cabassoles, 145 philology, 15 philosophy: and the care of the self, 11, 79–84, 84n18, 85n19, 144, 158; moral, 81, 94; Petrarch’s conception of, 10–11, 14, 18–19, 79–80, 83, 85, 85n19, 158; and Renaissance humanism, 15–18, 85n19; as spiritual exercises, 11, 18, 83. See also rhetoric Pietro of Siena, 146 Plato, 17, 79n2, 83, 88, 93 Plotinus, 134 praemeditatio malorum, 100, 100n60 Quadra, Hostius, 137–8, 140 Quillen, Carol, 18–19, 19n62, 90n32 Quinones, Ricardo J., 5n13, 23n2 Radewijns, Florentius, 111 reading, and authority, 19, 19n63; and the care of the self, 10, 22, 80–6, 93–6, 100, 108–9, 112–14, 119, 124, 126, 130–46,

177

153–7, 160–2; classical versus sacred letters, 132–6, 143, 162; and the examination of conscience, 100, 108, 110–14, 160; humanist techniques of, 17–19; and meditation, 17, 19, 112–14; and note-taking, 97–8, 108, 112–13, 113n95, 160. See also Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, memory, Seneca reason: 21, 37, 40, 52–3; (together with virtue) as the state of full control over desire and passions, 82–7, 84n17, 94–6, 116–8, 118nn111, 112, 123, 127, 131, 136, 148, 160. See also self Reiss, Timothy J., 10n29 reminiscence, 93 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 21, 158–60; fragmentation in, 56, 77; as a narrative, 54–8, 56n3, 74, 77; tension between narrativity and circularity in, 57–8, 74–7; Individual poems: poem 1, 23–5; poem 2, 37; poem 6, 39–42; poem 7, 34n20; poem 13, 75; poem 14, 75; poem 15, 75; sestina 30, 28–29, 42; poem 60, 41n35; poem 63, 33–4, 38; canzone 70, 29n15, 30n16; canzone 71, 33–4, 38, 42–3; canzone 72, 30n16; canzone 73, 43; poem 90, 29; poem 114, 41n35; poem 118, 44–7, 73–4, 74n30; poem 119, 41–2; canzone 125, 29n15, 30–1, 39, 47, 50; canzone 126, 29n15, 31–2, 48, 50; canzone 127, 29n15, 30, 30n16, 32–3, 41, 48, 51–2, 126n12; canzone 129, 29n15, 47–50, 127; poem 145, 27, 27n10, 29, 45; poem 186, 34–5n20; poem 193, 33n18, 50n39; canzone 264, 76; poem 272, 25–6; canzone 323, 69; canzone 325, 33n18; poem 336, 29; poem 360, 52–3; poem 361, 75; poem 362, 75; poem 363, 75; poem 364, 75; poem 366, 76. See also canzone 23 rhetoric: and philosophy, 15–16, 79–81, 85n19 Rico, Francisco, 131 Ricoeur, Paul, 55n1 Rivero, Albert J., 65n20 Rome, 1–4, 1n2, 12–13, 18, 101, 130, 142; ruins of, 2. See also golden age Robert of Naples, 101 Santagata, Marco, 20n65, 47n38, 55–6, 56n3, 74n31 Scipio Africanus, 34n20

178

Index

Secretum, 10n30, 20n65, 21–2, 34, 38, 47n38, 77, 88–90, 94, 96–8, 113–14, 118n111, 129–30, 151, 160; the ambiguous figure of Augustinus in, 140, 162; circular structure of, 142; critique of reading and writing in, 131–43; as an examination of conscience, 107–112, 116–19, 161 Seigel, Jerrold E., 79n2, 80n3, 85n19 self, Augustine’s conception of, 55n1, 117, 117nn109, 110; and the birth of desire, 14, 30–3; as emerging in the later Middle Ages, 5–6; as a humanist “discovery”, 6n15; identified with image of God, 55n1, 96, 113, 117, 117nn109, 110, 118n112, 161; identified with Stoic reason and virtue, 14, 14n43, 33–5, 37–8, 37n27, 82–3, 87, 94, 96, 117–18, 118nn111, 112, 136, 160; as narrative, 54–5, 55n1, 77; as “objective to be attained”, 10n30; ontology of, 8; Petrarch’s conception of, 10, 10n30, 14, 84–96, 117–18, 118nn111, 112, 158; technologies of, 12, 13n39, 98. See also desire, writing self, care of, and Augustine, 55n1, 85, 109–10, 113–15, 117–19; and monasticism, 22, 78, 85–6, 109–20; and Petrarch, 10–15, 20, 22, 26–35, 45, 47, 54–5, 77–86, 92–120, 124, 130–2, 140–57, 158–62; and Seneca, 14, 81, 83–4, 84n17, 92n40, 95–6, 95n48, 98–9, 105–6, 113. See also philosophy, reading, writing self-consciousness, 6, 6n15 self-examination. See conscience, examination of self-knowledge, 11, 15, 55n1, 105, 138 self-writing, 83, 101–4, 154–5, 160 Semele, 70 Seneca, and reading, 81, 95n48; uses of writing, 13–14, 13n40, 98–9, 98n54, 105–6; Works: De consolatione ad Helviam, 86, 86n22, 88n27, 94n43, 98; Moral Letters to Lucilius: letter 2, 95n48; letter 6, 81; letter 20, 82n11; letter 58, 8, 8n25, 38; letter 82, 83–4; letter 83, 105–6; letter 84, 95, 113n95; letter 99, 98n54; letter 115, 82n13; letter 120, 84n17; Natural Questions, 137–8. See also Petrarch, self (care of)

Seniles (Rerum senilium libri), care of the self in, 98–9, 106n76, 143–57, 162; tension between secular and sacred letters in, 143–7; tension between “Virgilian” and “Ovidian” styles in, 147–9, 152–3; Individual letters, Sen. 1.1, 147; Sen. 1.5, 144, 146, 150; Sen. 2.1, 145; Sen. 3.1, 148; Sen. 5.2, 122, 152–3; Sen. 6.5, 145; Sen. 6.9, 152n82; Sen. 8.2, 149; Sen. 9.2, 144; Sen. 10.4, 98–9, 148–9; Sen. 10.5, 37–8n27; Sen. 12.1, 145; Sen. 13.16, 157; Sen. 15.6, 106n76, 146n67; Sen. 16.3, 151–2; Sen. 16.6, 153–4; Sen. 16.7, 150, 154; Sen. 16.8, 155; Sen. 16.9, 155; Sen. 17.2, 145, 150, 153, 157; Sen. 17.3, 156; Sen. 17.4, 156–7 Sette, Guido, 106, 106n76 sin: Augustine’s view of, 90–1, 118; original, 91, 117; Petrarch’s view of, 87n25, 119 Singleton, Charles S., 59n9 soul, and body, 89–92, 134, 151 soul, care of. See self, care of Southern, Richard W., 6n17 Spijker, Ineke van ‘t, 110n84 spiritual exercises, 11, 18, 83, 83n16, 144. See also writing Stock, Brian, 19–20, 55n1, 93n41, 110n84, 112n92, 113n94, 117n109 Starn, Randolph, 4n9 Staubach, Nikolaus, 111n90 Stoicism, 13–16, 13n42, 14n43, 22, 37, 52, 77, 79n1, 84–6, 84n19, 89n30, 96n49, 100, 106n76, 117–20, 118nn111, 112, 127. See also Cicero, self, Seneca Struever, Nancy S., 19n63 studia humanitatis, 15n44 Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 39n31, 41n34, 51n40 style, 81n6, 97n51; “Virgilian” versus “Ovidian”, 34n20, 121–4, 131n24, 139, 147–9, 152–3. Taddeo, Edoardo, 23n2 Taylor, Charles, 55n1 time, Augustine’s conception of, 25–6; as a humanist “discovery”, 6n15; medieval conceptions of, 4–6; and narrative, 57n6; Petrarch’s awareness of flux of, 2–4, 6, 8–10, 19, 23–30, 45, 49, 69, 75, 82–3, 150, 158. See also exile, fragmentation, virtue

Index Tommaso da Messina, 79, 101–2 Tossetti, Angelo di Pietro Stefano dei (Lelius), 61, 148 Trinkaus, Charles, 5n14, 15–6, 16n47, 79n2, 85n19, 117n109 Tripet, Arnaud, 5n14 Van Engen, John, 112n90, 116n103 Vance, Eugene, 55n1 Vickers, Nancy J., 10n29 Vinge, Louise, 134n29 virtue, 2, 4n9, 21, 42; and being, 8, 33–5; cultivation of, 12–14, 18, 26, 33–5, 34n20, 77, 80–1, 94, 97–100, 106, 109, 114, 120, 122–4, 133–4, 136, 139, 143, 145–51, 153–7, 160–2; as the means to control time, 8, 33, 38, 82–3; and glory, 150–3. See also exile, reason, self, writing Virgil, 27n11, 34n20; Aeneid, 1n2, 89–90; Georgics, 66–7. See also Petrarch, style Von Martin, Alfred, 5n13 Waldensians, 6 Waller, Marguerite, 10n29, 20n65, 36–7n26 Wilkins, Ernest H., 1n1, 7n21, 8n23, 27n11, 52n43, 102n65 William of St. Thierry, 110

179

Witt, Ronald G., 15n44, 17–18, 18nn57, 58, 81n9, 97n51, 109n83 writing, ambiguous impact on the self, 21–2, 27, 35, 43–54, 62–74, 124, 129–30, 159; and the care of the self, 4, 10–15, 20–2, 26–35, 45, 47, 54–5, 81–6, 96–120, 124, 131–2, 143–50, 153–62; care for, 145–6; as a catalyst of desire, 31, 33, 39, 41–3, 46–7, 49, 121, 126; and emotions, 127–8, 149, 156–7, 161; ethics of, 11, 11n35, 14, 20, 96–109; and the examination of conscience, 105–112, 114–19, 126, 160–1; as a meditative exercise, 12, 21, 26, 30–3, 47–8, 126, 159; as an object of desire, 28, 31, 35–6, 36n24, 38, 42, 45–6, 58, 128–30, 140–1, 159, 161; as a personal ritual, 21, 26, 29, 159; as a source of exile in Petrarch’s Latin works, 124–143, 151–3, 157, 161; as a source of fragmentation and exile in Petrarch’s vernacular poems, 21, 26–7, 35–43, 46–7, 49, 121, 159; steadfast nature of, 21, 26–8, 35, 158–9. See also Augustine, Dante, memory, Ovid, Seneca, style Zak, Gur, 130n21, 134n28 Zimmerman, T. C. Price, 111n89