Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Peter Damian: Two Models of the Humanist Intellectual

This article focuses on Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca's different approaches to the interpretation of a preeminent figure of medieval religious thought, Saint Peter Damian. Following Petrarch's request of information about the saint, Boccaccio wrote a Life of Saint Peter Damian, in which the author transformed a medieval hagiographical source into a narrative modeled on his humanistic ideal of intellectual. Petrarch included Peter Damian among the exemplary figures of solitude in his De vita solitaria without utilizing Boccaccio's biography. The distance between the two connected treatments of Damian's biography reveals Petrarch and Boccaccio's different conceptions of the role of the intellectual in the Christian society in early Humanism.