Prof. G. Steinberg Study Sheet
Petrarch
We owe Petrarch a lot both good and bad. Petrarch is generally seen as the first truly Renaissance figure. He was the first major figure to look back on the ancient past and perceive it as removed from the present. He thought of time as a line that can be measured and divided into sections. He viewed history as divided into the ancient world, the "Middle Ages," and the present. The ancient world seemed to have accomplished so much compared to the Middle Ages and the present in art, in science, in politics. Petrarch wanted to recapture those ancient accomplishments. He and others like him called for a rebirth of ancient learning, and that's how the Renaissance got its name ("renaissance" is French for "rebirth"). Petrarch studied classical Latin with great care and became a renowned scholar of the language (as well as of ancient Greek). He despised many of his scholarly contemporaries for not having a very good grasp, in his eyes, of Latin grammar and vocabulary, and he really worked hard to improve understanding of the language through his meticulous linguistic research. Petrarch also tried to revive classical Latin literature by writing a Latin epic (called the Africa ) in imitation of Virgil. Like Dante before him, Petrarch relied a great deal on Virgil as a model of a great poet. Before Dante and Petrarch, Virgil was much honored and admired, but Ovid was the poet that most people actually imitated. Dante began the first steps in replacing Ovid with Virgil as the model of the poet, but Petrarch was the one who would bring the changeover to complete fruition. Petrarch was appalled (as, to a lesser extent, Dante had been before him) that writers no longer aspired to the kind of grand, ambitious writing to which Virgil had aspired. The lack of epic grandeur in his contemporaries seemed to Petrarch just another sign of how degraded humans had become since the days of ancient Greece and Rome. | |
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