Petrarch

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Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) - usually known in English as Petrarch (pronounced PET-rahk, IPA: /'pɛtrɑːk/ - was an Italian poet and scholar. As a poet, he is famed for his sonnets and the part he played in the development of the sonnet form. As a scholar, he was among the first to articulate a set of attitudes which became central to the humanism of the Renaissance. The adjective from Petrarch is Petrarchan (pronounced pet-RAHK- ern, IPA: /pɛ'trɑːkən/).

Petrarch was born in Arezzo in Tuscany and spent his earliest years in Incisa, a village not far from Florence. In 1309 Clement V, who had become Pope on the death of Boniface VIII in 1303, moved the seat of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in the south of France, and in 1312 Petrarch's father, who was a lawyer, moved the family to Avignon for professional reasons. Petrarch remained in the south of France until he was 16 and studied law at the University of Montpellier before, in 1320, returning to Italy to continue his legal studies at the University of Bologna (1320-1323). On the death of his father in 1326 he returned to Avignon, where he held a number of positions in the Church and devoted much of his time to literature, first achieving recognition with Africa, an epic poem in Latin about the ancient Roman general Scipio Africanus. He also travelled extensively in Europe as a scholar and on diplomatic missions - he is known to have visited, e.g., Paris, Ghent, Liège, Cologne, Aachen, and Lyons. In the 1360s, however, he returned to northern Italy and made his home first in Venice and then, from 1368, in the town of Arquà  near Padua, where he died.

Petrarch wrote far more in Latin than in Italian. In Latin, besides the epic poem Africa, mentioned above, he wrote a spiritual autobiography Secretum in the form of a dialogue between himself and St. Augustine of Hippo, as well as many essays on historical and philosophical subjects. He also collected Latin manuscripts and was responsible for the discovery in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona of the collection of letters which the Roman orator and politician Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus (Epistulae ad Atticum). Petrarch's thought has a 'secular' quality which has led many to see him as the first of the Renaissance humanists: he emphasised the need to study, and learn from, the classical tradition of Greece and Rome as well as the Christian tradition; and he had a lively sense of the vast range of human abilities and a strong belief in the capacity of the human intellect to solve problems and to make progress.

Petrarch's lyric poetry, which is written in Italian and contained in two collections, Il canzoniere (The Song-book) and Triunfi (Triumphs), consists for the most part of sonnets - of the 366 poems in Il canzoniere 317 are sonnets. Petrarch inherited the sonnet form, which had been invented by the Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini in the thirteenth century, but he developed and refined it, establishing the conventions of the so-called Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, a model which was followed by other Italian poets and by some English poets. (For more on this and for an example of a Petrarchan sonnet see Petrarchan sonnet.) The theme of Petrarch's poetry is his idealised love for Laura - probably Laura de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade, an ancestor of the more famous Marquis. By his own account Petrarch met Laura for the first time in the Church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon on Good Friday, April 6, 1327, but she was by then already married, and his love for her was not reciprocated. After their initial meeting he encountered her only occasionally, but he was nonetheless deeply affected by her death in 1348, and his feelings for her both while she was alive and after her death dominated his poetry.

See further Sonnet, Three types of sonnet, Petrarchan sonnet.