Theological Origins of Modernity

304 notes to pages 48–50
were simply invented. In my view the status of the letters should not disqualify
them. Th ey should be treated in the way all autobiographical material is treated,
with skepticism on details but with a general trust that the author is not inventing
himself out of whole cloth. Many of these letters appeared while the persons
involved were still alive, and there is little confl icting testimony about their
veracity.
9. Petrarch served mostly in a secretarial capacity and never accepted a position
that involved pastoral duties. Petrarch’s brother, by contrast, continued to lead a
secular and rather dissipated life until 1343 when, much to Petrarch’s surprise, he
entered a Carthusian monastery.
10. Aft er his discovery in 1345 of Cicero’s Letter to Atticus, “the personal (not private)
letter was henceforth to serve as the chief medium through which he sought to act
on the world of his time.” Foster, Petrarch, 159.
11. Wilkins, Life, 183. Other works were of course later discovered and added to this
corpus, especially the works of Greek poets and philosophers who were only
poorly known by Petrarch, but many of the classical works that we today still
consider most important were fi rst resurrected by Petrarch.
12. Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, trans. with commentary by Conrad
H. Rawski, 5 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3:4. See also
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Th e Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press,
1993), 89.
13. Remedies, 3:8.
14. Ibid., 3:10.
15. Ibid., 3:10–12.
16. Ibid., 3:10.
17. Envy is a persistent poison. Petrarch, “Ignorance,” 49.
18. Remedies, 1:238. Th e wheel here is the wheel of fortune, a widely used medieval
and Renaissance image.
19. Ibid., 1:234, 284. In a 1352 letter to Stefano Colonna, he surveys the world and fi nds
some promise of peace and freedom only in Venice and Paris. Familiarum XV, 7
(2:267, 269).
20. Remedies, 1:38. He wrote to his brother Gherardo: “Divide the day into hours, and
the hours into minutes, and you will fi nd the desires of a single man more numerous
than the number of minutes.” Familiarum X, 5 (2:70).
21. Remedies, 1:286.
22. Ibid., 1:294.
23. Petrarch, Book without a Name: A Translation of Liber sine nomine, trans. Norman
P. Zacour (Toronto: Pontifi cal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973), nos. 2–5,
9, 14. See also Petrarch, Bucolicum Carmen, trans. Th omas Bergin (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1974), 74–113; and Ernst Hatch Wilkins, Studies in the Life
and Works of Petrarch (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1955), 48. Th is
corruption is graphically portrayed by Petrarch’s friend and follower Boccaccio in
his Decameron.
24. Familiarum IV, 1 (1:288).
25. Foster, Petrarch, 154–55.