Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners

I

One of the techniques for describing the self that evolves during the later ancient period involves the real or imagined use of reading and writing. The notion of the self thereby becomes interdependent with the subject’s literary understanding. Augustine brings the method to perfection in the Confessions, and largely through his influence its importance grows during the critical period between ancient and early modern culture. By the end of the Middle Ages, the literary approach to the self occupies as important a place as the venerable concern with the self as an aspect of soul or mind.

Petrarch plays a major role in the last phase of this development, which takes place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. He describes relationships between reading, writing, and the self in unprecedented detail. His much discussed “modernity” and “individuality” are best understood in the context of his search for the manuscripts of ancient authors and his accompanying reflections on his own literary activities. His voluminous correspondence also bears witness to his desire to leave a predominantly literary portrait of himself for posterity. Even allowing for features of his approach which are his alone, it can be asked whether his manner of depicting the self belongs to a recognizable tradition of thinking. If so, who are his forerunners? What are the direct and indirect channels by which their ideas find their way into his books? Also, can chronological boundaries be placed around the development, which grows from modest ancient roots ¹ into a major medieval language for describing the self?

The chronology can be briefly traced through two quotations that are widely separated in time. The first is taken from Augustine’s De Utilitate Credendi: “Cum legerem, per me ipse cognovi. Itane est?” (When I read, it was I who gained knowledge through myself. Or was it?). ² These enigmatic words form a part of his review of his youthful reading of ancient poetry, especially Virgil, in Madaura and later in Carthage, written during the year of his ordination. He proposes that one learns nothing through the act of reading itself, just as in De Magistro, written two years earlier, he maintains that knowledge about realities cannot be acquired uniquely through spoken words. In both cases (in fact a single case), one does not gain information about things through linguistic signs but through a type of interior instruction whose origins can be traced ultimately to God. Furthermore, what one learns when one reads a potentially instructive text like the Aeneid or the Bible is what one has in mind beforehand, although that knowledge may be tucked away in the memory, far from conscious thought. When Augustine wrote the Confessions in 397–401, he transferred this manner of thinking to the problem of self-understanding. The reading of a book and the understanding of the self became analogous intentional activities. The autobiography thus emerged as a canonical document in self-education in which the figure of the reader was both utilized and transcended.

The second quotation by which this tradition’s chronology can be illustrated is from Part One of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode. Well aware of the tribulations of Augustine’s education, he also mentions that he was “nourished on letters” from childhood, and he too rejected the standard classroom experience. He was taught to believe “that by means [of books] a clear and certain knowledge could be obtained of all that was useful in life.” Yet, the more he acquired booklearning, the less he was convinced that this was the case: “I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance.” ³ In contrast to Augustine, to whom truth is revealed in a single book, he repudiates the entire “scholastic method,” that is, the typically medieval way of establishing valid knowledge by comparing and consolidating different interpretations of texts. He shares with Augustine a skeptical outlook as well as the theme of docta ignorantia. Yet his solution to the problem...