Humanism and Renaissance Italy

In 1345 Petrarch was in Verona, a city in northern Italy. In the library of its cathedral he found an old manuscript holding letters by Cicero, the great Roman orator, who had died more than 1,300 years before. Petrarch had loved Cicero's books since boyhood, but these were letters Cicero had written to his friend Atticus, his brother Quintus, and Brutus.

There were no printed books yet. If Petrarch wanted his own copy, someone had to write out every word by hand. He wrote later that the copyists could not make sense of the old writing, so he copied the whole large volume himself, though he was in poor health at the time.

The letters surprised him. In his books Cicero had written wise words about virtue. In these private letters Petrarch met a man who was anxious and changeable, caught up in the quarrels of Roman politics. That same year Petrarch wrote a letter to Cicero, as if to a friend who could read it. He scolded him for throwing himself into politics instead of living by his own teaching. He dated it from Verona, in the year 1345 from the birth of the God whom Cicero never knew.

Years later Petrarch told a friend a story against himself. He kept his big Cicero book on the floor, leaning against the doorpost of his library. One day the hem of his gown caught it, and it fell on his left leg. The next day it fell on him again, and again after that, until the skin above his ankle was cut and swollen. He joked that Cicero did not like being kept on the floor, and moved him to a higher place.

Petrarch was a Christian and had taken minor orders in the church. He did not want to bring back the old Roman religion. He wanted the ancient writers back: their Latin, their histories, and their thinking about how to live well. The scholars who followed him came to be called humanists.

Petrarch, Letter to Posterity, written in stages after 1351 and added to until his death in 1374, translated by James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe.

I possessed a well-balanced rather than a keen intellect, one prone to all kinds of good and wholesome study, but especially inclined to moral philosophy and the art of poetry. The latter, indeed, I neglected as time went on, and took delight in sacred literature. Finding in that a hidden sweetness which I had once esteemed but lightly, I came to regard the works of the poets as only amenities. Among the many subjects which interested me, I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own. In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I delighted in history; not that the conflicting statements did not offend me, but when in doubt I accepted what appeared to me most probable, or yielded to the authority of the writer.