Theological Origins of Modernity

notes to pages 54–57 307
Erasmus, Th e Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil Cheshire and Michael
Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Th is work was contemporaneous
with Machiavelli’s Th e Prince.
63. Africa, xv.
64. Ibid., 26.
65. Ibid., 34. Th is is a prominent theme in his work: “Nothing man does lasts forever,
nothing that pertains to man, save his immortal soul. Works shall fail, lands shall
decay, buildings shall fall down.” Remedies, 3:330.
66. Africa, 37.
67. Foster, Petrarch, 157. Africa was left unfi nished in 1345 and never published in
Petrarch’s lifetime. Mazzotta argues that Petrarch attempted to write political
poems, but, as their rhetoric failed, the failures gave him an alibi to retreat from
a ghostly, unrealizable world of history to the obsessive absorption with his own
private self, which was simultaneously empowered by love and powerless in love.
Mazzotta, Worlds, 139. Th is view of Petrarch, however, fails to see the multiple
ways in which the self he imagines remains in and part of this world, especially in
and with his friends.
68. Petrarch lays out this argument in his Trionfi or Triumphs, which were written
between 1340 and 1374. Th e fi rst details the triumph of carnal love (cupido) over
the human heart; the second the triumph of a chaste love (represented by Laura)
over cupido; the third the victory of death over chaste love; the fourth the triumph
of fame over death; the fi ft h the victory of time over fame; and the sixth
the triumph of eternity over time (with Laura reappearing in heaven). Foster,
Petrarch, 19. Th e Triumphs sum up Petrarch’s entire philosophical position. Th ey
restore the coherent order of the world as a hierarchical arrangement of values
from love of self to love of God in a linear and progressive movement. Mazzotta,
Worlds, 99.
69. Wilkins, Life, 170.
70. Foster, Petrarch, 160.
71. Georg Voigt, Pétrarque, Boccace et les débuts de l’humanisme en Italie d’après la
Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums, trans. Le Monnier (Paris: H. Welter,
1894).
72. Whitfi eld, Petrarch and the Renascence, 39.
73. Ibid., 85.
74. Foster, Petrarch, 169.
75. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret or the Soul’s Confl ict with Passion: Th ree Dialogues
Between Himself and S. Augustine, trans. William Draper (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1911), 112.
76. Trinkaus, Scope, 244.
77. Foster, Petrarch, 161. Cassirer remarks that the lyrical genius of individuality (Petrarch)
takes fi re at the religious genius of the individual (Augustine). Individual
and Cosmos, 129.
78. William J. Bouwsma, “Th e Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism
in Renaissance Th ought,” in Itinerarium Italicum (Leiden: Bill, 1975), 13.