Res Seniles, Libri I-IV, and: Res Seniles, Libri V-VIII (review)

As a latecomer to the world of the humanists I never cease to be astounded by the number and calibre of their Latin works yet to receive modern critical editions. The Res Seniles, the letters of Petrarch's last years, are a case in point. Ten years ago you would have had to go to a sixteenth-century edition or make do with an English translation (Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Only in the last decade, marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Petrarch's birth (birthdays were significant for Petrarch), have there appeared two modern editions with facing translations and brief notes: the four-volume 'Les Belles Lettres' edition of E. Nota et al. (Paris, 2002-2004) and the two volumes here under review.

It is safe to say that Rizzo and Berté's is the first reliable critical edition and a work of impeccable scholarship. The newly constituted Latin text is based on six manuscripts, selected from twenty, and the editio princeps (Venice, 1501). One of the six, never used before, spent a period in Australia in the possession of L. J. Fitzhardinge, part of whose collection is now in the National Library of Australia. The twenty 'canonical' manuscripts present the collection put together by Petrarch, but not finished as he would have wished, before his death in 1374. For some letters there are also a pre-revised tradition and/or an intermediate tradition (Vol. 1, pp. 14-23). It is fortunate that the intermediate version of Sen. 6.8 exists since it allows us to see Petrarch making use in the revised version of his new acquisition of Leonzio Pilato's Latin translation of Homer. The copy of this was finally received from Boccaccio in early 1366 (Sen. 6.2). Contrary to what is often thought, it was Boccaccio, not Petrarch, who instigated this translation (note to Sen. 3.6.21).

There are so many interesting aspects of these letters that it is hard to choose between them. The recipients of the letters cover a broad spectrum from intimate friends to condottieri, cardinals, the Pope, Urban V and the Emperor Charles IV (Vol. 1, p. 12 with n. 14). Boccaccio receives the most. Particularly striking is Sen. 1.5, in which Petrarch urges Boccaccio not to give up literary pursuits and give away his books, as he has been warned to do in the death-bed prediction of a certain Peter, famed as a saintly man.

In Sen. 2.3, to Francesco Bruni, just appointed apostolic secretary to Urban V, Petrarch is advising him how to become a good writer through labour, application and striving for the new, when he breaks off, in the dead of night, to watch, from his window in the Palazzo Molin dalle due torri on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, the departure for the east of an enormous merchant ship. The experience is immediately incorporated into the letter in which it is not, after all, so very out of place. Sen. 4.5 gives important insight into Petrarch's understanding of the Aeneid. Sen. 5.1 contains a fine description of the city of Pavia and 5.5 and 5.6 a moving account of Petrarch's travails with his young secretary, whom he had treated as if he were his own son, and whose desire to move on he took as a betrayal. Giovanni Malpaghini eventually taught rhetoric at the Florentine Studio, his students including such important figures as Poggio...