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. Translated from the Original Latin, together with Historical Introductions and Notes BY JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON Professor of History in Columbia University WITH THE COLLABORATION OF HENRY WINCHESTER ROLFE Sometime Professor of Latin in Swarthmore College _SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker press 1914 [Illustration: PETRARCH.] TO G. R. R. AND B. C. R. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION During the fifteen years which have elapsed since the appearance of the first edition of this volume a marked changed of attitude has taken place among scholars in regard to the "Renaissance" and the nature and importance of the revival of classical literature. This change is briefly explained in the opening pages of the introductory chapter (which have been entirely rewritten), and the reasons given for assigning to the "Renaissance" a less distinctive place in the history of culture than it formerly enjoyed. While this does not essentially affect the value of Petrarch's letters and the interest and importance of the personality which they reveal, it enables us to put him and his work in a more correct perspective. There has, moreover, been added to Chapter VI (pp. 413 _sqq_.) a careful analysis of Petrarch's _Secret_. These confessions must be accorded a high place in the literature of self-revelation; they furnish the reader a more complete and vivid impression of Petrarch's intellectual life as well as of his strange and varied emotions than can be formed from reading the correspondence alone. He not only understood his complicated self but possessed in an unprecedented degree the power of conciliating the interest of others in his own troubles and perplexities. In short, this new edition will serve at once to rectify certain general misapprehensions and at the same time to give a more adequate account of the truly extraordinary person with which it deals. J. H. R. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, November, 1913. PREFATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION The purpose of this volume is essentially historical. It is not a piece of literary criticism; it is only incidentally a biography. It has been prepared with the single but lively hope of making a little clearer the development of modern culture. It views Petrarch not as a poet, nor even, primarily, as a many-sided man of genius, but as the mirror of his age--a mirror in which are reflected all the momentous contrasts between waning Mediævalism and the dawning Renaissance. Petrarch knew almost everyone worth knowing in those days; consequently few historical sources can rival his letters in value and interest; their character and significance are discussed at length in the introduction which follows.