BOOK: Francesco Petrarca, "Selected Letters"

Francesco Petrarca: Selected Letters. Vol. 1. Translated by Elaine Fantham. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 76. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674058347. xlvi + 747 pp.

Francesco Petrarca: Selected Letters. Vol. 2. Translated by Elaine Fantham. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 77. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674971622. viii + 807 pp.

Petrarch seems to have been quite a prolific writer of letters, and also took the trouble to preserve them and publish them in the form of several collections: Familiar Letters (350 letters), Leters of Old Age (128 letters) and several others, and a few letters are also extant that he didn't publish that way (vol. 2, pp. 573–4). The present ITRL edition of Selected Letters contains 97 letters selected from the Familiar Letters and the Letters of Old Age.

In my previous posts about collections of letters in the ITRL series (Poliziano's, Fonzio's, and Valla's), I occasionally complained about how insubstantial many of those letters seemed, concerned only with relatively mundane everyday matters. By contrast, Petrarch's letters in the present collection are on average significantly longer and more interesting. He often enters into long discussions on religious, literary or moral topics, and he constantly quotes numerous ancient authors to support his views (but doesn't hesitate to disagree with them if necessary).

In this selection, the letters are arranged by topic rather than chronologically, which is probably a good idea as I'm not that familiar with the details of Petrarch's life and thus wouldn't benefit as much from a chronological arrangement of the letters. Many of the letters are to a handful of his close friends, of which Boccaccio is the best known nowadays, but he also didn't hesitate to write to princes, emperors, popes, chancellors and the like. Even in this latter group, there isn't nearly as much hustling and asking for favours as we saw in the previously mentioned volumes of correspondence by other authors.

There are a few frequently recurring subjects: plague epidemics, which ravaged Europe during Petrarch's time and took the lives of, among others, Petrarch's beloved Laura, several of his friends, and his ne'er-do-well son; rants against the corruption at the papal court in Avignon (which he likes to call “Babylon” :]); his introspective obsession with his supposed moral or religious shortcomings, which can be annoying at times, as I already complained in my recent post about his Secret Book; but overall, his letters are varied and interesting, and I definitely liked this collection better than the previous volumes of letters in the ITRL series.

I think there is perhaps something of a discrepancy between how a naive outside observer like me sees Petrarch vs. what he really was like (or how he saw himself). Nowadays we mostly remember him for his Italian love-poetry and are thus perhaps inclined to imagine him as a youthful and romantic character. But in fact that was only a small part of his work, and probably far from the most important in his eyes. There's a very interesting bibliography of his work here in vol. 2 (appendix II), from which we can see very clearly that his output in Latin was much bigger than in Italian, and mostly on much more serious subjects, often having to do with religion, history, moral philosophy and the like. Vol. 2 also includes a chronology of his life, which I also found quite useful as I didn't know much about his life before and his frequent movements were a bit hard to follow (sometimes it seemed like nearly every letter is written from a different town).

So all in all, I really enjoyed these two volumes. There's a long and interesting introduction in vol. 1, lots of explanatory notes, a useful chronology of his life and bibliography of his work, and the letters themselves were for the most part longer and more substantial than the ones by previous authors in the ITRL series. In the remainder of this post, I'll point out a few passages that struck me as particularly intersting.

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II.1 — includes an interesting account of Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux (a mountain in Provence) together with his brother (§5–11). Unfortunately he seems to be mostly interested in using this story as a starting point for religious meditations, and the translator's notes (vol. 1, p. 592) express some doubts whether the climb really happened at all, or is it just an allegory.

II.2 — Petrarch describes the sights he has seen while on a visit to Rome. He seems to have been so immersed in ancient history and mythology that the town as he describes it is an odd mixture of the real and the mythical: “Petrarca pictures the locations of many historical or even legendary episodes as if they were still recognizable in fourteenth-century Rome” (translator's note 5, vol. 1, p. 596).

He often mentions the plague (II.3, II.5), which raged again and again in mid-14th-century Italy, and laments the people he has lost to it. This is perhaps a useful reminder that Renaissance Italy wasn't all colour and light, as we sometimes imagine it — or perhaps I just played too much Assassin's Creed. Petrarch's lamentations can get a bit wearisome, but at least he was aware of this himself, and he imagines his critics saying: “We were expecting an epic poem from you, but we read elegies: we hoped for narratives of distinguished men, but we observed only the one narrative of your own grief; what we thought were letters, are laments;” etc. (II.3.5). A sense that death can come at any time (IV.11.14–16) seems to loom much larger in his mind than it does for most of us nowadays (I remember him mentioning it in his Secret Book), and perhaps the endless plague epidemics had something to do with that.

His brother Gherardo was a Carthusian monk; letter II.4 includes a touching account of how his monastery was struck by the plague, leaving Gherardo as the only survivor, burying his dead brethren and eventually reforming the monastery with new monks from elsewhere (§4–8).

II.6 — an interesting account of Petrarch's efforts at collecting manuscripts, especially of Cicero's works. He also obtained a manuscript of Homer in Greek and, as he didn't know Greek himself, he commissioned a Latin translation of it (¶14).* The letter ends with the sad story of Petrarch's beloved teacher, Convenevole da Prato, who struggled with great poverty in his old age. At one point he borrowed two rare manuscripts from Petrarch ‘for research’, pawned them off, and died soon afterwards.

[*Later there are two more letters about the translator, Leonzio Pilato — III.21–22, including an account of his unfortunate death: he was struck by lightning when the ship he was travelling in got caught in a storm (III.22.17).]

In II.12, Petrarch writes about his simple life in the countryside: “I do not see the face of any woman except that of my steward's wife, and if you saw her you would think you were contemplating the Libyan or Ethiopian desert: [. . .] her face is such that, if Helen had owned it, there would have been no Trojan war; if Lucretia or Virginia, Tarquin would not have been driven from his kingdom nor Appius ended his life in jail.” (II.12.3)

There are endless complaints and whinging about everything from his own health to international politics. “The Ligurians of the seaboard [. . .] are conducting their affairs and dividing their time in such a way that, according to their long established habit, the end of foreign war is the beginning of civil war.” :)) (II.13.6)

II.17 — a longish letter to his friend Boccaccio, who had advised him to stop working so hard at his literary pursuits now that he is old. Petrarch argues that his literary work is relaxing and he'd just die sooner if he started idling. There's an interesting passage (§21–4) where he refutes certain claims that people used to live longer in ancient Roman times than in his own day. This letter was also an inspiration to the translator of this book, Prof. Fantham, who worked on it in her retirement (vol. 1, pp. xlii, xliv, 581).

There are a few letters on the subject of Petrarch's coronation as poet laureate (III.2–6). He admits that there's an aspect of vanity to it, “[b]ut this is human nature” (III.4.7).

The pope offered Petrarch a job as a secretary, on the condition that he could write in a sufficiently plain style. He didn't fancy this idea, probably also because he'd have to live at Avignon, which he hated, so he failed the test on purpose: “So when asked to compose something that would make it clear I could fly close to earth and fit myself to simple statements [. . .] I made every effort to unfurl the wings of my poor wits [. . .] what I composed was unintelligible to a majority of them” (III.10.14–15). :]

In III.12, Petrarch thanks a Byzantine diplomat who had procured a manuscript of Homer's works in Greek for him. He also describes his not very successful attempts to learn Greek; he studied with a Greek from Calabria, Petrarch teaching him Latin while learning (or trying to learn) Greek from him (§7–9).

III.14 — Petrarch encourages his correspondent to persist in his study of law, mostly on the argument that it's a waste of time to switch professions halfway through learning them (§36–7). He is, of course, aware that the situation is a bit ironic since he himself used to study law, at his father's instigation, but disliked it and gave it up (§3–4).

III.16 — Petrarch defends himself against accusations that he is jealous of Dante's fame; but I couldn't help feeling that he looks down a little on Dante because the latter concentrated his literary efforts on Italian rather than Latin. Petrarch's father and Dante had both been exiled from Florence at the same time (§7).

III.18 — some ideas on how to imitate other authors (especially ancient ones), always a topic of interest for neo-Latin writers. “I am a man pleased by resemblances, but not identity, and the resemblance itself should not be too close” (§20).

After a tirade against astrologers: “Shun doctors, flee from astrologers; the former harm your bodies, the latter your spirits.” (III.20.132)

III.23 — a long letter with an allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid. It reminded me a little of the just-so stories that Boccaccio invented to explain ancient myths in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.

In IV.4, while inveighing against lust, Petrarch includes a delightful rant against incest. “Certainly we read that many men had intercourse with their sisters and slept in the arms of their unhappy mothers.” (§4) (Nowadays we usually don't read about such things but watch them on Pornhub instead, and the (step)mothers involved are usually quite happy :P) He goes on to list a few concrete examples, and then points out that even horses are more chaste than people in this regard, because in the few instances when horses have been tricked into incest, they were not happy about it: “we read in the old writers that a horse was forced by the trick of his groom to have intercourse with his* mother: when he had finally thrown off the cover and recognized his mother he instantly cast himself down as if rejecting this crime and breathed his last breath as if a criminal.” (§5) [*Given the context we can at least be reasonably sure that “his” refers to the horse and not the groom — whew :))] What kind of sick pervert gets his jollies from tricking a horse into incest? :))) Well, the translator's note 6 on p. 665 says that the motive was “to concentrate the bloodline of a champion through inbreeding”.

He then moves on from incest to adultery: nowadays “a young man who has not achieved a successful adulterous relationship [. . .] is thought by his peers to be a poor failure” etc. (§8). :))

On a more wholesome note, in IV.6 Petrarch urges two of his friends to reconcile after a quarrel; in IV.7 he advises Pandolfo Malatesta to marry, more for the sake of his country and dynasty (§8) than because Petrarch would think that marriage is a very good idea in general (see also IV.8 on that). He never got married himself, admired his Laura from afar, and had a couple of illegitimate children whose mother's name has been lost to history (vol. 2, pp. 565–6), and apparently gave up sex some time in his forties (vol. 2, note 7 on pp. 710–2). :S

In a number of letters (IV.8–12) he extols a plain and moderate lifestyle with an emphasis on virtue rather than pleasure. In the process of doing so, he has a few funny remarks on how highly valued cooks are nowadays, which he sees as a sign of excessive, decadent luxury: “among our ancestors the cook was the cheapest of all slaves, but now he is head of the household. You ask why? You will find no answer except gluttony” (IV.8.21). “The cook [. . .] was once the cheapest of slaves among our ancestors, but finally began to be valued when Asia had been conquered” (IV.11.2) I wonder what he'd say about the celebrity chefs of today :)

There is a longish rant (IV.14) that contrasts the austere military discipline of the ancient Romans with the laxity and decadence of the various companies of mercenaries that were dicking around Italy in Petrarch's own day (and getting nothing done except prolonging the endless warfare that characterized so much of Renaissance Italian history). “You would not think you were entering a camp of men but brothels of whores and booths of gamesters and cookshops.” (§14) :)) By contrast, he praises the English for their recent successes in the Hundred Years' War: “When I was a young man the men of Britain [. . .] were thought the most timorous of all barbarians; now that race is most warlike and has laid low the Gauls” (§2).

A very interesting factoid from translator's note 2 on p. 679 of vol. 1: we usually hear that Diogenes lived in a barrel, but apparently that's just an approximate translation; it was actually “a pithos, or round earthenware jar”.

IV.15 — Petrarch writes to cardinal Colonna to express condolences on the death of the latter's brother, who had been a friend of Petrarch's. He points out that at least you don't need to worry that anything bad will happen to him now (§21–2), plus you will see him again in the afterlife eventually. “Do not think your brother dead, for he lives, but we are dying each day without noticing it, and we fear the beginning of true life like death — sheer blindness!” (§39)

V.4 — Petrarch writes to one Paganino, advisor to the ruler of Milan, advising that it's better to live in stability and friendship with your neighbours than to try to expand and dominate them by force. There are also two much longer letters giving advice, in the mirror-of-princes style, to the new king of Naples (V.5) and the ruler of Padua (V.6). The latter surprised me a little by also including his opinion on a few oddly specific and local issues, e.g. on the draining of marshes (§47–8) and on whether pigs should be allowed to graze freely in the city (§44–6; the translator's commentary summarizes this last issue very delicately as “unusual traffic problems” :)); vol. 2, p. 616).

A nice bit of casual misogyny from VI.1: “All women conform to one law: they want foolish things and absurdities.” :))) The context here is that his addressee's mother had wished that he would have a long life and be wealthy, while his father had wished that he would be eloquent and renowned, and Petrarch clearly approves of the latter much more than of the former.

The following interesting passage is probably an allusion to the medieval and early modern folk traditions that transformed vague memories of the ancient poet Virgil into stories that presented him as a magician: “I myself, more hostile to divination and magic than any other living man, am sometimes called a wizard [nigromanticus] because of my affection for Vergil.” (VI.5.29)

There are a few letters occasioned by political turmoil in Rome: Petrarch initially expressed support for Cola di Rienzo, the self-styled tribune (VI.4), but later withdrew it (VI.5). Subsequently he wrote a long letter arguing that the people of Rome should get a share of political power as well, rather than the city being ruled only by noblemen, foreign prelates and the like (VI.6). In doing so, he draws on many examples from the early history of ancient Rome. “Have we lived merely to sink to this, [. . .] that [. . .] the question should be raised whether a Roman citizen may be elected to the Senate, when we can see foreign-born men ruling for so long and so many Proud Tarquins on our Capitol?” (VI.6.12)

VI.8 — Petrarch writes to the doge of Venice, urging an end to their war against Genoa. His argument is that this is almost like a civil war and that Italians should stick together; but the doge replied with “a clear explanation of the economic reasons that made a war between Venice and Genoa unavoidable” (translator's comment, p. 636 of vol. 2).

There are several letters concerning Emperor Charles IV (VI.9–12). Petrarch hoped he would bring peace to Italy, but Charles only visited Rome briefly for his coronation and then returned north of the Alps. In VI.11, Petrarch describes his meeting with the emperor when the latter visited Italy. I was impressed by how cheerful and informal a conversation they had; it included a friendly disputation on the subject of whether Petrarch's plans for a solitary life are a good idea or not (§18–21).

In VII.1, Petrarch rebukes a particularly greedy cardinal. “For whom are you building up treasure, except for the devil and his minions, who watch you attentively, count your days and most greedily await your inheritance, planning to set up most grateful trophies inscribed with your names on the threshold of Tartarus from the spoils of the poor you have plundered?” (§17) :))

There are a few letters about religious subjects, e.g. VII.3 “to a friend wavering about the Catholic faith”. I was not particularly impressed by this one; as far as I can tell, there's not a single argument there that would make any sense unless you were already a believer. Talking about how merciful god is and what sacrifices he had made for mankind is completely nonsensical from an atheist's perspective. Well, I suppose that as long as Petrarch's friend was merely wavering a little and hadn't actually lost his faith yet, the letter was perhaps persuasive to him.

VII.6 is a long letter to Pope Urban V, urging him to move the seat of the papacy from Avignon back to Rome. Some of the arguments that were apparently involved in this debate struck me as a bit ridiculous, e.g. which town has a more pleasant climate (§224) and better food (§229) :) To my shock, Petrarch also calls for a crusade, not against the Turks, but against the Greeks: “the Turks are enemies, but the Greeks are heretics, worse than enemies” (§289). Even more ignobly, his argument is basically one of convenience: “our enemies, who now occupy Jerusalem” are hard to reach, but “there is nothing between us and these Greeklings except our own sleepiness and sloth [. . .] they are powerless [. . .] I guarantee that with two Italian cities [. . .] they will quickly [. . .] either overthrow that unwarlike empire or bring it back under the yoke of the Church” (§294–6). Wow. I always thought that it was despicable and disastrous when the western christians took Constantinople in 1204, but evidently Petrarch thought that it would be great to do it again. :(

Anyway, the pope did in fact move the papacy to Rome; there's another letter from Petrarch (VII.7) thanking him for this and responding to arguments that had been put forth by Frenchmen objecting to the move. This reminded me a little of one of his invectives on the same subject (see my post from some time ago); again he pretends that Italy = ancient Rome, the pinnacle of civilization, and France = ancient Gaul, filled with hairy and stupid barbarians. “In terms of common behavior I admit the Gauls are witty fellows of elegant gesture and speech, who gladly sport, cheerfully sing, often drink and hungrily party together. But true seriousness and real morality was always to be found among the Italians” (§100–1).

There's an interesting sequence of ‘letters to the ancients’, addressed to various ancient authors. He wrote two letters to Cicero (VIII.2–3), who lived in politically very turbulent times and often had to change his opinions about certain people or shift his loyalties a bit; Petrarch reproaches him for this, perhaps a bit unfairly so, given Cicero's circumstances (vol. 2, p. 677). In another letter (VIII.4) he upbraids the philosopher Seneca for serving, and even flattering, emperor Nero, that insane tyrant. He doesn't, however, say anything about the thing that always bothered *me* the most about Seneca: namely that he preached stoicism while being filthy rich himself and wallowing in luxury, the damned hypocrite. Petrarch also writes to Varro (VIII.5) and Livy (VIII.7), expressing regret that so much of their work has been lost. There is also a long letter to Homer (VIII.8), dealing partly with the question of whether later poets had failed to properly acknowledge the influence of Homer's work on theirs, and partly with the recent efforts to study Homer's work in Italy and translate it into Latin. In Petrarch's time, it seems, the devotees of Homer in Italy could pretty much be counted on the fingers of two hands (though not of one).

I liked the following passage, which combines two of Petrarch's favourite subjects: complaining about the loss of ancient literature and complaining about other nations. “The products of Homer's wakeful nights have largely perished”, he says, even among the Greeks “who, to avoid yielding to us in any matter, outdo our neglect in literature too: they have lost a great many books of Homer, like losing the light of one of their eyes” (VIII.9.12).

The collection ends with two autobiographical letters. One is a long letter to a friend (IX.1) and consists partly of reminiscences about Petrarch's life, partly of lamentations about how much worse nearly everything is now than it was in Petrarch's youth. He is aware that this is a stereotypical complaint of old people, but argues that in his case things really are objectively worse: plague epidemics, marauding bands of unemployed mercenaries, earthquakes, etc. As an example, he says that the markets of Venice are now overflowing with slaves from remote Scythia: “while once a vast quantity of corn each year was imported to this city by ship, the ships now come loaded with slaves, whom their wretched parents are selling, being overwhelmed by starvation” (§127). According to translator's note 57, this refers to “regions northeast of the Black and Caspian seas [. . .] Slave trade with these regoins greatly intensified with the Mongol invasions since the thirteenth century” (vol. 2, p. 705–6).

In §151 of the same letter, he mentions that in trying to visit the emperor, he had to “seek him out in the remotest barbarian region”; according to the translator's note, this turns out to have been in Prague :))

The second letter (IX.2) is addressed “to posterity” and is a kind of short autobiography. It includes an interesting description of the process that led to him being crowned poet laureate by king Robert of Naples; it included a sort of examination lasting three days: “I came to Robert, that supreme philosopher and king [. . .] so that he would pass judgment in person of how I seemed to him. [. . .] In short, after countless verbal exchanges on various topics and after I had shown him my Africa, which so delighted him that he asked as a great tribute that I should dedicate it to him [. . .], he appointed a fixed day for the hearing I had come to seek [. . .] When he had explored my ignorance over three days he judged me worthy of the laurel on the third” (§28–9).