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In his Familiares and Seniles Petrarch provides his own best commentary on his literary work and on his sentiment as an Italian writer.1 Carefully collected, revised , edited, and arranged, these letters project the site of his work as one of continual displacement. The introductory letter of the Familiares addressed early in 1350 to Ludwig van Kempen, familiarly called “Socrates,” a Belgian musician at the papal court of Avignon, concerns time and its disruptions that hamper, ravage, and deform his work. But it equally and perhaps more profoundly concerns space and its dislocations that separate the poet from a community defined as protonational. Petrarch’s incipient humanist sense of temporal alienation, his sense of remove from the ancient past, appear to heighten his identity as an exile, a traveler, a wanderer.2 But an even sharper sense of his spatial disjuncture, first in southern France and then in northern Italy, throws into bold relief his need for a social, cultural, and above all geopolitical site upon which to construct a public and therefore a class- and gender-defined pan-Italian identity. Familiares 1.1 dramatizes the poet’s personal and professional confrontation with deep loss. Composed probably at Padua in the wake of the Black Death, the letter evokes the devastation of 1348.3 Famine, plague, loss of life, demographic decline, economic upheaval, and public unrest have caused social turmoil , but a keen sense of fleeting time causes even greater psychological turmoil . Needing to edit his letters “scattered [sparsa, echoing the adjective that describes his Italian poetry, Rime sparse] and neglected” (3/241), Petrarch sees a replication of the humanist hermeneutic in his own writing.4 Over time his 23 Petrarch as Commentator The Search for Italy 1 letters disclose “the changed nature of my own understanding (intellectus mutata )” (4/242). Tricks of memory (“I could hardly recognize certain letters”) prompt him to revise his Familiares toward a goal that would later be identified with “humanist” scholarship: to bridge the distance between past and present by making the past comprehensible to the present. Petrarch stares into an abyss of time frozen by an event in 1345 which inspired him to collect these letters. In that year Petrarch had discovered at Verona Cicero’s long lost letters to Atticus, at once changing his perception of Cicero and unsettling his faith about the past. Recording petty quarrels and parochial invective, these letters belie Cicero’s great public reputation.5 They move Petrarch “in a fit of anger” to write to Cicero “as if he were a friend living in my time, . . . forgetting as it were the gap of time [quasi temporum oblitus]” (13/249).6 Petrarch’s passage through this trauma of re-cognition makes him “stronger [securior] out of that very state of despair,” and it helps his style to grow sinewy, muscular, febrile, “more vigorous [nerviosior]” (13/250). Physical and intellectual experience merge at the site of his humanist activity. Summoning the concrete spatial dimension of the humanist project, Petrarch works to “gather together [recolligo] his writing in “the form of a book” (13/250). The room where he is ready to incinerate unfit texts seals him off from a world of real or imagined communities that take shape according to social, cultural, and political needs. This interior site is cluttered with unsorted texts but is not lacking in design, since here Petrarch has arranged “little bundles [sarcinulas]” of books for an impending journey (3/241). The writer’s self-identification as one about to become a “wanderer” (migraturus ) projects a different space (3/241).7 On the one hand, travel expands the writer’s mind, range of topics, and available audience. It introduces him to “countless famous men [notos]” who will receive his letters (9/246). On the other hand, Petrarch addresses so many diverse audiences that he loses his focus, at times repeating words, inflecting them differently for different readers, contradicting or denying what he has written elsewhere. The result is confusion. The composite volume of his writing has become “a deformity [deformitas]” (10/247). More insistently, travel deprives the writer of a material res publica, the site of heroic activity and participatory local community. Petrarch associates his epistolary style, “plain, domestic, and friendly [mediocre domesticum et familiare ],” with that of Cicero’s letters, not the “almost torrential [exundans] kind of eloquence” which the Roman writer elsewhere deployed “against his enemies and those of the Republic” (6/244). Puns and wordplay sap Petrarch’s style...

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