Book review: Petrarch: Everywhere A Wanderer, Christopher S Celenza (2017)

Although I studied Italian in my undergraduate days I had forgotten most of what I had learned about the poet Francisco Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch), but this elegiac work of literary biography goes some way toward remedying that absence.

“Elegiac” in subject – the remembrance of a giant of the Humanist project – as well as in tone. What I mean by this is that Celenza clearly has at his fingertips a deep reserve of learning that he uses in a careful and moderated way to create his stories about the birth of everything that we value today.

This is an unhurried and contemplative foray into lands that most people will have some passing familiarity with, but that to do justice to you need to have spent a considerable amount of time in reading and in quiet reflection. There is something monastic about Celenza’s style that for me was comforting and which made me feel at home in the places he sketches with his pen. This is not the flowery, popular kind of history that you get from writers like Peter Ackroyd.

Born at the beginning of the 14th century, Petrarch arrived in the world at a time when universities had existed for about three hundred years. Originally created as a response to the spontaneous gathering of teachers and students to discuss recently-discovered books and ideas (notably the works of Aristotle, and the ‘Corpus iuris civilis’, the body of Roman law), universities quickly became a part of the fabric of European society in the later Middle Ages. Petrarch, though he had Florentine roots and would end his life living in Italy, spent his youth and part of his life in Avignon, in southern France, where his parents were part of the court of the Pope, who had moved to France for political reasons. (The Sydney suburb of Vaucluse, where I grew up, was named after the region in France where Petrarch grew up.) His father was a notary, so Petrarch was familiar with writing from an early age.

Apart from writing vernacular poetry (like Dante Alighieri, who was a generation older than he was), Petrarch was also instrumental in the rediscovery of classical texts, notably in his case the writings of the Roman orator Cicero. And while he stood in his life at the beginning of the Humanist push to study classical literature, he was also very much against the kind of groupthink that he discerned in some university teachers he met in his daily routine, whose justification for the truth of an idea might merely be that it had been uttered at one time by Aristotle. Celenza hazards the notion that this critical (somewhat crotchety, at times) Petrarch was in favour of the kind of empiricism that Francis Bacon would extol, in the early 17th century, at the time of the birth of modern science.

Petrarch was not unthinkingly supportive of any one strand of learning, and remained a committed Christian all his life. He also wrote much in Latin, though today he is more well-known for his experiments with vernacular literature.

Celenza is keen to try to develop a personality in his book that fits a Petrarch who is recoverable today still in his writings. A deeply introspective man, the poet also keenly pursued fame. He was an early exponent of vernacular literature but in his day was as well known for his Latin writings. He was also impressed by images of greatness, and avidly sought to find ways to aggrandise his ancestral country, Italy, which had been carved up into separate city-states over time so that it was barely recognisable in comparison to its stature in classical times. And at the same time, he was devoutly linked to the woman we know as Laura, whose character held such fascination for the young poet, even after she died an untimely death.

For people who want to know more about the roots of modernity and technology, this is a good place to go for some important lessons about how you sometimes have to go back in order to reach the future, and about the seeming contradictions that can sometimes lie at the bottom of important historical events. Petrarch remains something of a paradox, but reading about his life can help to make the meaning of life in general clearer.