Petrarch 1304 – 1374

Francesco Petrarch was an Italian scholar, poet, and one of the founders of Renaissance humanism. His rediscovery of a lost cache of Cicero's letters at Verona helped to inaugurate the recovery of classical literature, and his Latin works Africa, On the Solitary Life, and the Secretum, an interior dialogue with Augustine, articulated a new vision of the examined human life. The Italian Canzoniere, three hundred sixty-six lyric poems addressed to his beloved Laura, shaped European poetry for centuries. He coined the term Dark Ages to describe the centuries between classical antiquity and his own.

Francesco Petrarca — Petrarch — was born in 1304 in Arezzo, where his father, a Florentine notary, had been exiled in the same political crisis that drove out Dante. The family moved in his childhood to Avignon, then the seat of the papal court, and Petrarch was sent to study law at Montpellier and Bologna. He abandoned the law on his father's death in 1326 and turned to letters, supporting himself with minor ecclesiastical benefices and the patronage of the Colonna and later the Visconti.

His Latin works include the epic Africa, the autobiographical Secretum, the moral treatises On the Solitary Life and On the Remedies for Either Fortune, the historical Lives of Illustrious Men, and the great collections of Familiar and Old-Age Letters. In Italian, the Canzoniere — the 366 poems to Laura — and the allegorical Triumphs founded the European lyric tradition. He was crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341 after a public examination by King Robert of Naples.

Petrarch is conventionally regarded as the father of humanism: his rediscovery of Cicero's letters at Verona in 1345, his patient cultivation of a personal voice in Latin, and his polemic against the scholastic curriculum opened the way to the Renaissance recovery of antiquity. He coined the phrase 'dark ages' for the centuries between Rome and himself. He died at Arqua, near Padua, in July 1374.