Theological Origins of Modernity

notes to pages 50–52 305
26. Rerum senilium libri, 2 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore: St. Johns University
Press, 1992), V, 2 (1:162–66)(henceforth Seniles). See also Foster, Petrarch,
154–55.
27. Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. M. Domandi
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 127–28.
28. Seniles, V, 2 (1:162–66); XV, 6 (2:580).
29. Charles Trinkaus, Th e Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance
Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 55.
30. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1964), 6; Familiarum I, 7 (1:37–40).
31. Foster, Petrarch, 153. See also Charles Trinkaus, Th e Scope of Renaissance Humanism
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 260.
32. For example, while in Naples, Petrarch lived in the Franciscan monastery of San
Lorenzo and was shocked by the political authority exercised in the city by the
Franciscan spiritual Roberto da Mileto, a member of the Brethren of the Life
of Poverty, who was at odds with the other Franciscans and the pope. Petrarch
thought he was a hypocrite. Wilkins, Life, 40.
33. Petrarch, Th e Life of Solitude, trans. and intro. Jacob Zeitlin (Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 1924), 64.
34. Remedies, 1:1.
35. Fortune is not an independent force for Petrarch, but a manner of speaking about
the basic human condition in a world of strife and change. Trinkaus, Poet as Philosopher,
120.
36. Mazzotta, Worlds, 127.
37. Ibid., 7.
38. J. H. Whitfi eld, Petrarch and the Renasence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1943), 90.
39. Ibid., 40.
40. Wilkins, Life, 29.
41. Th is new idea of community eventually became the republic of letters.
42. Petrarch, “Ignorance,” 104; Remedies, 3:252. Aristotle, in Petrarch’s view, never
fulfi lls his initial promise in the Nichomachean Ethics of making man better: “It
is one thing to know, another to love, one thing to understand, another to will.
He teaches what virtue is. I do not deny that; but his lesson lacks the words that
sting and set afi re and urge toward love of virtue and hatred of vice or, at any rate,
does not have enough such power.” Petrarch, “Ignorance,” 103. He is comparing
Aristotle to Cicero and Seneca, and he almost certainly did not realize that he was
dealing with Aristotle’s lecture notes rather than his published works.
43. Foster, Petrarch, 155.
44. Petrarch, Th e Canzoniere (Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta), 2 vols., trans. Frederic
Jones (Market Harborough: Troubador: 2001), 2:3.
45. Trinkaus characterizes him as the fi rst to write subjective poetry. Poet as Philosopher,
2.
46. Mazzotta, Worlds, 44.
47. Mazzotta argues that Petrarch operates with a peculiarly modern notion of the
self as an isolated subject who refl ects on his memories, impulses, and desires in