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قراءة كتاب Petrarch The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters

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Petrarch
The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters

Petrarch The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters

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Petrarch

The First Modern Scholar

and Man of Letters

A Selection from his Correspondence with Boccaccio and other Friends, Designed to Illustrate the Beginnings of the Renaissance. Translated from the Original Latin, together with Historical Introductions and Notes

BY

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON

Professor of History in Columbia University

WITH THE COLLABORATION OF

HENRY WINCHESTER ROLFE

Sometime Professor of Latin in Swarthmore College

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker press
1914


PETRARCH.


TO
G. R. R.
AND
B. C. R.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

During the fifteen years which have elapsed since the appearance of the first edition of this volume a marked changed of attitude has taken place among scholars in regard to the "Renaissance" and the nature and importance of the revival of classical literature. This change is briefly explained in the opening pages of the introductory chapter (which have been entirely rewritten), and the reasons given for assigning to the "Renaissance" a less distinctive place in the history of culture than it formerly enjoyed. While this does not essentially affect the value of Petrarch's letters and the interest and importance of the personality which they reveal, it enables us to put him and his work in a more correct perspective.

There has, moreover, been added to Chapter VI (pp. 413 sqq.) a careful analysis of Petrarch's Secret. These confessions must be accorded a high place in the literature of self-revelation; they furnish the reader a more complete and vivid impression of Petrarch's intellectual life as well as of his strange and varied emotions than can be formed from reading the correspondence alone. He not only understood his complicated self but possessed in an unprecedented degree the power of conciliating the interest of others in his own troubles and perplexities. In short, this new edition will serve at once to rectify certain general misapprehensions and at the same time to give a more adequate account of the truly extraordinary person with which it deals.

J. H. R.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,

November, 1913.


PREFATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The purpose of this volume is essentially historical. It is not a piece of literary criticism; it is only incidentally a biography. It has been prepared with the single but lively hope of making a little clearer the development of modern culture. It views Petrarch not as a poet, nor even, primarily, as a many-sided man of genius, but as the mirror of his age—a mirror in which are reflected all the momentous contrasts between waning Mediævalism and the dawning Renaissance.

Petrarch knew almost everyone worth knowing in those days; consequently few historical sources can rival his letters in value and interest; their character and significance are discussed at length in the introduction which follows.

We have ourselves come to love the eager, independent, clear-sighted, sensitive soul through whose eyes we have followed the initial spiritual struggle of modern times; we would that others might learn to love him too.

In the preparation of this volume the editors have naturally availed themselves of the excellent edition of Petrarch's Epistolæ de Rebus Familiaribus et Variæ, by Giuseppe Fracassetti, 3 vols., 8°, Florence, 1859-63. For the Epistolæ de Rebus Senilibus, and the remaining Latin works, they have necessarily relied upon the lamentably incorrect edition of the Opera printed at Basle in 1581, for in spite of its imperfections it is the most complete collection of Petrarch's writings that we possess. The references in the foot-notes are, therefore, to the pages of Fracassetti's edition or of that of 1581, as the case may be. Much aid has been derived from Körting's standard work, Petrarca's Leben und Werke; from Fracassetti's elaborate notes to his Italian version of the letters; from Voigt's masterly analysis of Petrarch's character and career, at the opening of Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums; and especially from M. Pierre de Nolhac's scholarly and fascinating study, Pétrarque et l'Humanisme.

Part third of the present volume, upon Petrarch's classical studies, is the work of Mr. Rolfe, and the whole book has had the benefit of his acute and painstaking revision.

J. H. R.

BIRCHWOOD, JAFFREY, N. H.,

September, 1898.


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