Theological Origins of Modernity

notes to pages 63–69 311
brooding, and the society of a few chosen friends, more like the life of Horace and
Epicurus than that of the Christian mystics. Solitude, 55.
144. On the importance of intercourse with wise men through books, see Remedies,
1:2–3.
145. Trinkaus points out that Petrarch recognizes the danger of Carthusian overemphasis
on solitude in De otio religioso. Poet as Philosopher, 53. Petrarch’s implied
mistrust of the otium of the monks precedes Machiavelli’s and Bacon’s reversal of
the contemplative ideal. Whitfi eld, Petrarch and the Renascence, 107.
146. Solitude, 137.
147. Ibid., 301.
148. Ibid., 307, 310.
149. Kristeller, Renaissance Th ought, 170.
150. On this point see, Whitfi eld, Petrarch and the Renascence, 94.
151. In this respect he is the predecessor of Montaigne, as Zeitlin points out. Solitude, 58.
152. Whitfi eld, Petrarch and the Renascence, 120.
153. Ibid., 117.
154. To gain some idea of the power of this idea, one has only to examine Valla’s On
Pleasure, which presents an explicit and global defense of what might be called a
Christian hedonism.
155. Whitfi eld, Petrarch and the Renascence, 142–43.
156. Remedies, 2:226.
157. Ibid., 2:225.
158. Solitude, 139. See also 59.
159. “Ignorance,” 10.
160. Familiarum XVII, 1 (3:4).
161. “Ignorance,” 98.
162. Ibid., 99.
163. Familiarum IV, 1 (1:180).
164. “Ignorance,” 63.
165. Ibid., 105–6.
166. Foster, Petrarch, 168.
167. My Secret, 23.
168. Remedies, 1:32.
169. Bouwsma, “Two Faces,” 43.
170. See also “Ignorance,” 115.
chapter three
1. On this point see Joseph Trapp, Studies of Petrarch and His Infl uence (London:
Pindar, 2003). One measure of his infl uence was his impact on his contemporaries.
At the time Boccaccio met Petrarch, he was certainly the greatest living
writer of Italian. He fell so quickly and so fully under Petrarch’s spell that
he thereaft er wrote almost exclusively in Latin and began to study Greek.
Petrarch had a similar eff ect on many during the late fourteenth and fi ft eenth