Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Texts and Translations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Forms of translatio
- 1 Father of English Poetry, Father of Humanism: When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch
- 2 ‘The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen’: Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato
- 3 ‘But if that I consente’: The First English Sonnet
- 4 ‘Mutata veste’: Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch
- 5 ‘Of hire array what sholde I make a tale?’: Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer
- Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditynges’
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Father of English Poetry, Father of Humanism: When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Texts and Translations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Forms of translatio
- 1 Father of English Poetry, Father of Humanism: When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch
- 2 ‘The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen’: Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato
- 3 ‘But if that I consente’: The First English Sonnet
- 4 ‘Mutata veste’: Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch
- 5 ‘Of hire array what sholde I make a tale?’: Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer
- Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditynges’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At some point between 1370 and his death in 1374, Petrarch composed his Epistle to Posterity. The incomplete letter details his life, his nature and his achievements, and provides a valuable account of his sense of dislocation:
[Posteritati.] Fuerit tibi forsan de me aliquid auditum; quanquam et hoc dubium sit: an exiguum et obscurum longe nomen seu locorum seu temporum perventurum sit. […] Incubui unice, inter multa, ad notitiam vetustatis, quoniam michi semper etas ista displicuit; ut, nisi me amor carorum in diversum traheret, qualibet etate natus esse semper optaverim, et hanc oblivisci, nisus animo me aliis semper inserere. […] Honestis parentibus, florentinis origine, fortuna mediocri, et – ut verum fatear – ad inopiam vergente, sed patria pulsis, Arretii in exilio natus sum, anno huius etatis ultime que a Cristo incipit MCCCIV, die lune ad auroram […] kalendas Augusti.
[Francis Petrarch to posterity, greetings.] Perhaps you will have heard something about me, although this too is doubtful, whether a petty, obscure name would reach far into either space or time. […] I have dwelt singlemindedly in learning about antiquity, among other things because this age has always displeased me, so that, unless love for my dear ones pulled me the other way, I always wished to have been born in any other age whatever, and to forget this one, seeming always to graft myself in my mind onto other ages. […] I was born in exile in Arezzo in the year 1304 of this last age, which began with Christ, at dawn on a Monday, July [20], of honorable parents, Florentine in origin, of modest fortune, and, to tell the truth, verging on poverty, but driven from their homeland.
(Sen. XVIII. 1. 2. 8/672–4)Petrarch's father Pietro, a notaro known as Ser Petracco, was in October 1302 sentenced to ‘a heavy fine, the cutting off of a hand, banishment from Florentine territory, and confiscation of his property’ following fabricated charges which had been made against him. He fled with his wife Eletta to Arezzo, a city to the south of the family home at Incisa, whereto Eletta returned in early 1305 with her young son; as E. H. Wilkins notes, this was ‘the first of Francesco's many journeys’. Petrarch's sense of being ‘born in exile’, notwithstanding the important contribution it makes to his geographically itinerant lifestyle, is also linked to his conception of himself as being temporally dislocated, to his desire ‘to have been born in any other age whatever’.
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- Chaucer and Petrarch , pp. 35 - 68Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010