The Petrarchan way

Francesco Petrarca was an Italian scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy. His name is often anglicised as Petrarch. He is credited as having founded the 14th-century Italian Renaissance / il Rinascimento (“Re-birth”), a movement of medieval Europe centred in Italy and focused on reimagining and levelling up from the feats of classical antiquity, with his rediscovery of Roman republican statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer Cicero’s letters. He was also the founder of Renaissance humanism, a scholastic humanistically-focused movement for the revival of the study of classical antiquity, revolving around studia humanitatis (i.e. study of the humanities), which included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. This was the origin for the term “humanities”. His poetry is renowned -sonnets addressed to the idealised beloved figure of Laura de Noves- and contributed to the flourishing of Renaissance lyric poetry. He was, moreover, a key central figure in the history of the Italian language.

In the 16th century, scholar Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern standard Italian language on the output of Petrarch, alongside his contemporaries Giovanni Boccaccio and Dante Alighieri. Petrarch’s style would come to be endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca, whose motto is Petrarch’s famous line “Il più bel fior ne coglie” (‘She gathers the fairest flower’), the historic central institution for scholarship of the Italian language, as well as linguistics and philology, and the oldest linguistic academy in the world – founded in 1583 and based in Florence, Italy / Firenze, Italia. The three figures of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch are iconic and revered within the context of the history of the Italian language, whose modern standard variant originally emerged from the Tuscan dialect of the Florentine elite, all having been born in or near the Republic of Florence / la Repubblica di Firenze. Petrarch, for his part, was born in the Tuscan city state of Arezzo – once part of the ancient Etruscan League.

He came to be regarded as the greatest scholar of his time. His dominion began with his vehement passion for Classical writings, growing into “an unquenchable thirst for literature”. He was raised with a lexical predisposition, born in Arezzo in 1304 unto a Florentine lawyer who had been obliged to leave Florence in 1302. The family moved to Avignon in 1312, in the Provence region of southern France, the location of the exiled papal court at which his Italian lawyer father hoped to find employment. He was first sent to study law but ended up giving in instead to his literary devotion.

His first love was Classical Latin writing, but he was active at a time when the Italian vernacular was flourishing and he found himself obliged by the contemporary trend to focus on that instead. In addition to his love of literature, Petrarch acquired a deep religious Catholic faith at a young age, accompanied by a preoccupation with virtue, and an endless fascination with and intuitive understanding of human affairs. He went on to develop intense chaste love for a certain Laura, who inspired his most celebrated poetry. His legal background, religious devotion, and romantic adoration gave him indomitable intensity and focus as a scholar. Between 1330-40, he founded the school of Renaissance humanism, propelled by the perceived sterility of Medieval scholasticism, which he sought to complement with his illuminating moral humanist perspective.

His enduring legacy has formed around his philosophical underlining of the fact that from the past springs the present, and he concordantly cultivated a potent consciousness of this dynamic. The Petrarchan way through history is an easy one -streamlined, yet painstakingly so- and his influence on European literature and scholarship similarly stunning. Words, people, are the most valuable resource that time may never forget. Petrarch relished this and thus his corresponding advantage with them.