Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters / A Selection from His Correspondence with Boccaccio and Other Friends, Designed to Illustrate the Beginnings of the Renaissance

by Francesco Petrarca

The entire prose correspondence of Petrarch falls into four divisions. The largest group, the one that he discusses in the Preface given above, embraces three hundred and forty-seven letters, which were written between the years 1332 and 1362.[27] To this collection, which filled the "not too huge volume," he decided to give the unassuming general title of De Rebus Familiaribus, by which he meant to imply that every-day topics were therein discussed with his friends, with no especial attention to style. He evidently wished to avoid any possible inference that he supposed that so miscellaneous and heterogeneous a mass of work could possess real literary form and merit. The title may fairly enough, if not literally, be translated Letters of Friendly Intercourse.

A second and much smaller collection was formed from those which could not be included in the main volume without unduly increasing its bulk.[28] About seventy of these have been re-discovered, and constitute the so-called Miscellaneous Letters (Epistolæ Variæ).

But the editing of this earlier correspondence did not bring the work to a close; the love of his friends admitted no conclusion to the task. "Their messages," he declares, "will still continue to come and I must continue to reply to them." Consequently a new division of the correspondence was formed, the important Epistolæ de Rebus Senilibus,—Letters of Old Age,—which were written during the last twelve years of the poet's life. A short dedication to "Simonides" (i.e., Francesco Nelli) is prefixed to them.[29] There are one hundred and twenty-four in this group, some of them very long.

Lastly, there is a little group of about twenty letters, some of which contained such frank strictures upon the régime of the popes at Avignon that Petrarch found it expedient to put them by themselves and to suppress the names of those to whom they were addressed. These, the Epistolæ sine Titulo,[30] are so acrid in tone, and so unmeasured in the abuse which they heap upon the degraded churchmen, that their author has sometimes mistakenly been reckoned as a forerunner of the Reformation; but, as we shall see, he had no thought of questioning a single dogma of the Catholic Church.

Of the Letters of Friendly Intercourse, scarcely half appear in the most complete of the older printed editions,[31] but they have, not long since, been edited in full by Giuseppe Fracassetti, who includes no less than one hundred and twenty-eight never before printed. The Epistolæ Variæ—Miscellaneous Letters—are also to be found in his excellent edition.[32] The Letters of Old Age were early printed in their entirety, but unfortunately have not been reproduced since 1581. If one would read them in the original he must still turn to the miserable Basle editions of the works, which would almost appear to have been printed by persons unfamiliar with the rudiments of Latin, so numerous and incredible are the typographical errors which not only try the reader's temper but often entirely obscure the meaning.

How far Petrarch modified the original form of the letters in editing them is an important question, but one upon which we have but little information. He says in the Preface that the unworthy expedient occurred to him of suppressing such letters as exhibited his past weakness, or so changing their order that he should at least appear in a more favourable light. But this, he decided, would be quite useless, since his friends possessed the properly dated originals. On the other hand, he certainly destroyed a large number of his papers. What canons he adopted in his selection we cannot determine, but obviously the temptation to exclude those which might seem to place him in a false position must have been almost irresistible. Moreover, he did not hesitate, as we have seen, in order to avoid repetition and monotony, to so alter the language that he felt it necessary to ask his friends, in some instances, to destroy their original copies lest they should be hurt by the changes he had made.

There seems to be no doubt that the Letters of Friendly Intercourse are arranged in the codices, and published by Fracassetti, in the order in which Petrarch first placed them. His intention was to observe chronological sequence, for he says explicitly that with the exception of the letters to dead authors, which he put together at the end of the volume, almost all the rest remained in the order in which they were written.[33] While this is true in general, there are many obvious exceptions. Unfortunately he did not ordinarily indicate the year, but only the day and the month upon which he wrote. It is very probable, therefore, that in arranging the letters years later he was often unable to determine just where a letter belonged. Fracassetti has devoted a great deal of attention to establishing the dates, where it is possible,[34] and has in this way done much to make the course of the poet's life clearer.

There is but one letter among those which have been preserved to which an earlier date than 1331 can be ascribed. The series begins, therefore, in Petrarch's twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth year. Some ninety of the letters were probably written before he was forty, but the great bulk of them belong to his later years. Almost one-half of those included in the various collections were composed after he had reached fifty.