How important was Petrarch to the Emergence of Renaissance humanism?
How important was Petrarch to the Emergence of Renaissance humanism?
During the Renaissance period, Francesco Petrarch was a famous Italian writer and poet. He took the forefront among many of his contemporaries in the inauguration of the ‘revival of antiquity’, also known as the humanist movement. Humanists were the scholars and writers in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who aimed to emulate and recover the ancient literature. Their enthusiasm in the classical world and culture shaped the artistic and literary production in Europe.
Petrarch had a passion for antiquity, and his works had the immense impact in the humanist movement. Petrarch wrote many works including books and poems such as The Secret that offers his justifications for the anticipated revival of antiquity that he ever wrote. These works shaped and defined the European culture during the era of Renaissance. Petrarch played a significant role in the dissemination of humanist concepts, practices and ideas that promoted enduring of the historical significance of the prevalent Renaissance humanist movement.
Petrarch was a significant figure in the adoption of and prevalence of the humanist movement. One of the important avenues where his work surfaced in the humanist movement was during the crown for poet. The people of Rome and the senate proclaimed him as the poet during a ceremony at the Capitoline Hill in 1341. Petrarch wrote and worked on artistic work and poetry to come up with voluminous works in Italian and Latin. Most of the themes in his works include struggles of self-discovery, sublimated desires and authorship costs.
The efforts of Petrarch to promote the humanist movement during the renaissance began with his strive to recover the cultural and literary standards expressed in the existent classical texts. Previous writers Italy like Albertino Mussato and Lovato dei Lovati acknowledged the distinctiveness of the existence cultural and classical genres, vocabulary and styles. However, Petrarch surpassed these artists both in the range of activities that he pursued in order to recover the past Roman acts. In his work, he sought to enhance his love for antiquity including the early Christian cultures. Petrarch collected, read and edited the ancient texts critically and enthusiastically.
He revived the classical genres, especially the personal letters and dialogs. He employed his correspondence together with other writings to cultivate a community of individuals that shared his passion for antiquity. Moreover, he reiterated on the ethical values of classical studies through arguing for connections between eloquence and virtue. Petrarch placed humanist studies through critical emulation and reading of the existent classical literature.
Through his introduction of the humanism aspects, he employed various practices that involved the collection of various forms and versions of ancient texts, comparing the texts and using these comparisons to come up with the best versions of the same. He also translated the texts and from Latin and annotated the texts to assist the modern readers to understand them better . Petrarch developed different materials to teach various classical stylistic norms to the students learning Latin. He compiled dictionaries and other forms of aids to readers, exposed forgeries and imitated the genres through rhetorical styles, classical texts, figures of speech and vocabulary.
In other words, humanism was a way of availing the past to the present. Therefore, Petrarch’s passion for antiquity facilitated the manifestation of the past into the current.
Before the role of Petrarch fully surfaced in humanist activities, there were ancient norms that people followed especially in the Italian society (Rebhorn 411-412). The Italian writers found had their ways of recovery and emulation. The new forms of enthusiasm for the antiquity surfaced in the northern and central Italian peninsula. In spite of the invasions and disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, some of the cities had lost their urban heritage. The civic traditions and senses of connection among these cities of the ancient roman world survived. Additionally, the cities sustained their central roles as cathedral cities or cities of bishops. In the later years, the cities became the administrative units within the existing territory.
The Episcopal cities under the control of distant emperors emerged with other allegiance relationships that developed in the consequent years following the collapse of Rome. The ancient Italian regions had feudal systems. In the northern Italy, the feudal system did not last long as compared to other cities in Europe. However, the feudal relationships overlapped with the existent ecclesiastical and urban structures of authority.
The political, ideological context of the age of renaissance in ancient Italy included the Kingdom of Naples, Papal States, Republic of Florence, Republic of France and the Lordship of Milan. In the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, there was a rebellion on the island of Sicily. This conflict broke out in the mainland of the Italian peninsula. In the Papal States, the territories comprised of different lands that were granted legally to the papacy over the current centuries by different rules.
The pope ruled the Papal States and acted as the temporal monarchs of the states. The local nobility overran the Papal States during the papacy of the absence of Rome and the period of the Great Schism. The states were consolidated by the papacy around the fifteenth century. Papal States elected the monarchs. There was Avignon papacy among the states that declined because of the plagues.
In northern Italy, there was a series of independent city-states that emerged in various territories around the Byzantine Empire. Most of the predominant city-states merged to become the Republic of Venice. In the northwest and the center, the states of Tuscany and Lombardy technically formed part of the existent Regnum Italicum. In the Italian city-states, many of the city-states in Tuscany and Lombardy set up their governments to handle the political affairs.
Each of the civitas or city-states would elect officials called the podesta who would invest in the power of ruling for short periods. These leaders would also work with the communal councils. In the libertas, the city-states of the northern region acquired strong autonomies and defended themselves against their enemies.
The communes proclaimed the liberals and their liberty, which meant that first, the liberty was in the sense of ready freedom from outside control. That is; the individuals and the city-state3s did not want to be subject to the will of external policies. Second, the liberty was an avenue of getting and referring to the prevalent laws or constitutional arrangements and agreements on the republican commune.
Crisis and collapse in the communes was another factor in the ancient Italian systems. Many of the republican constitutions declined because they struggled to overcome the internal conflicts and divisions within the civitas. Additionally, there was no good governance in the communes as the governments declared principal occupations to conserve the cities. Violent feuding, property confiscations and political expulsion were among the results of the crises and collapses.
The range of the texts written by Petrarch suggests the depth of his commitment to humanism. He wrote poems and analyzed different classical texts. One of the poems written by him was the imitation of Virgil. Additionally, he wrote dialogues that imitated and formally modeled Cicero. It was easy and possible for him to assemble different classical work because of his distinctive knowledge and commitment to antiquity and stylistic conventions. He sought to represent the ancient past to the current society. In some of his pieces of work, he would use stylistic conventions to depict the ancient cathedral cities, papal cities among other. He would also depict some of the kingdoms including the kingdom of Florence among others.
For Petrarch, the community always created a reason for attachments and survival. As such, he sought to represent the humanist activities that revolved around the human life. He had an extraordinary capability to image happenings of the past as a place that was very different from the present. He had a better understanding of how different the pagan Rome was from the existent Christian age. Moreover, he believed that other classical authors, through the efforts of writers and scholars would speak fruitfully to their contemporaries.
Petrarch played a key role in humanism during the renaissance period through his ability and pieces of work. He influenced people to start relating the activities of the past to current happenings and predict the existence or occurrence of the same in future
Bibliography
Panizza, Letizia. Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch's De Remediis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Rebhorn, Wayne A. Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.
