Petrarch’s Epistolary Ego and the Authorizing Maternal

In 1345 the poet and humanist Petrarch uncovered a manuscript that had lain forgotten for half a century: a codex containing the epistolary collections of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Petrarch spent weeks copying the text; five years later, he began to arrange his own letters, assembling by the end of his life four collections containing more than five hundred epistles. Taken as a whole, the extensive epistolary presents an idealized intellectual autobiography.