The 14th century

Petrarch

The influence of Petrarch was profound and multifaceted. He promoted the recovery and transcription of Classical texts, providing the impetus for the important Classical researches of Boccaccio and Salutati. He threw himself into controversies in which he defined a new humanism in contradistinction to what he considered to be the barbaric influence of medieval tradition. He carried on an energetic correspondence that established him as a cultural focal point and would provide, even if all his other works were lost, an accurate index of his views and their development. As a theologian (he was an ordained priest), he advanced the view, held by many humanists who followed, that Classical learning and Christian spirituality were not only compatible but also mutually fulfilling. As a political apologist, he gave hearty support to Cola di Rienzo’s brief revival of the Roman Republic (1347). As a poet, he was the first Renaissance writer to produce a Latin epic (Africa, published posthumously in 1396), but he was even more important for his compositions in the vernacular. His Canzoniere, written from 1330 until his death in 1374, provided the model on which the Renaissance lyric was to take shape and the standard by which future works would be judged. His work established secular poetry as a serious and noble pursuit. His eloquent and forceful presence made him a personal symbol of his own ideas. Crowned with laurel, favoured by rulers, legates, and scholars, he became the human focus for the new interest in Classical revival and literary artistry.

It was, however, as a philosophical spokesman that Petrarch exerted his greatest influence on the history of humanism. In his prose works and letters he established positions that would be central to the movement, and he broached issues that would be its favourite subjects for debate. His idea of the poet as a philosophical teacher and thus as a champion of culture would inspire humanists from Boccaccio to Sir Philip Sidney. His endorsement of the study of rhetoric and his underlying notion of language as an informing principle of the individual and society would become crucial subjects of humanistic discussion and debate. His view of Classical culture, not as an isolated element of the past but as an authentic alternative to his own medieval society, was of equal historical importance. He helped to reestablish the Socratic tradition in Europe by specifying self-knowledge as a primary goal of philosophy. This attitude and his unfailing insistence on moral autonomy were early and important signs of the individualism that would become a Renaissance hallmark. He emphasized human virtue as opposed to fortune and thus set the stage for numerous famous treatments of this theme. He struggled repeatedly with the dilemma of action versus contemplation, establishing it as a favourite topic for humanistic debate. Petrarch did not invent these subjects, nor does he usually treat them with overwhelming power. Though stylistically brilliant, his work is ultimately limited by conflicting commitments to faith and to reason, to autocracy and to liberty.

Giovanni Boccaccio

Petrarch’s friend Giovanni Boccaccio created an opus that was even more revolutionary. His Teseida (1340–41) was the first classical epic to have been written in the vernacular, and it influenced the Italian epics of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. His De genealogia deorum gentilium (“On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles,” written c. 1350–75), a scholarly interpretive compendium of Classical myth, was the first in a long line of Renaissance mythographies. It includes a celebrated defense of poetry as a medium of hidden truth, a stimulant to virtue, and a source of mental health. He worked in support of his city during the troubled times that led up to the War of the Eight Saints against the Avignon papacy (1309–77). His prose style would become a benchmark for Italian expression in the Renaissance. His most memorable contribution to humanism, however, is probably the famous Decameron. Ostensibly this work is no more than a collection of 100 tales about love, but, subjected to the interpretive scrutiny that Boccaccio himself recommends in De genealogia deorum gentilium, the Decameron takes on a far more serious tone. The opening phrase “Umana cosa è” (“It is a human thing”) is deeply thematic, signaling the socially conscious tone of the stories to come. Through moral fable and direct address to the reader, he undertakes a reinterpretation of human experience based not on received doctrine but rather on perceived reality. Appealing repeatedly to reason and nature, and constantly implying the superiority of awareness to innocence (which he equates with ignorance), he declares war on institutional tyrannies of church and state, calling instead for a moral order built fairly and solidly on the potentialities of human nature. His 10 storytellers, who leave the plague-ravaged and chaotic city of Florence and reestablish themselves at delightfully landscaped villas, suggest the remaking of culture through disentanglement with the past, unprejudiced analysis, and enlightened imagination. Rightly considered to be the wellspring of Western realism, the Decameron is also a monument to Ciceronian humanism. Although it makes little mention of Classical thought, Boccaccio’s great work rings with a tone that was even more basic to the humanistic movement: an emphasis on the human capacity for self-knowledge and willed renewal.