Petrarch
The First Modern Scholar
and Man of Letters
A Selection from his Correspondence withBoccaccio and other Friends, Designed to Illustratethe Beginnings of the Renaissance.Translated from the Original Latin, togetherwith Historical Introductions and Notes
BY
JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON
Professor of History in Columbia University
WITH THE COLLABORATION OF
HENRY WINCHESTER ROLFE
Sometime Professor of Latin in Swarthmore College
SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker press
1914
TO
G. R. R.
AND
B. C. R.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
During the fifteen years which have elapsed since the appearance ofthe first edition of this volume a marked changed of attitude hastaken place among scholars in regard to the "Renaissance" and thenature and importance of the revival of classical literature. Thischange is briefly explained in the opening pages of the introductorychapter (which have been entirely rewritten), and the reasons given forassigning to the "Renaissance" a less distinctive place in the historyof culture than it formerly enjoyed. While this does not essentiallyaffect the value of Petrarch's letters and the interest and importanceof the personality which they reveal, it enables us to put him and hiswork in a more correct perspective.
There has, moreover, been added to Chapter VI (pp. 413 sqq.) acareful analysis of Petrarch's Secret. These confessions must beaccorded a high place in the literature of self-revelation; theyfurnish the reader a more complete and vivid impression of Petrarch'sintellectual life as well as of his strange and varied emotions thancan be formed from reading[Pg vi] the correspondence alone. He not onlyunderstood his complicated self but possessed in an unprecedenteddegree the power of conciliating the interest of others in his owntroubles and perplexities. In short, this new edition will serve atonce to rectify certain general misapprehensions and at the same timeto give a more adequate account of the truly extraordinary person withwhich it deals.
J. H. R.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
November, 1913.
PREFATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The purpose of this volume is essentially historical. It is not a pieceof literary criticism; it is only incidentally a biography. It has beenprepared with the single but lively hope of making a little clearer thedevelopment of modern culture. It views Petrarch not as a poet, noreven, primarily, as a many-sided man of genius, but as the mirror ofhis age—a mirror in which are reflected all the momentous contrastsbetween waning Mediævalism and the dawning Renaissance.
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