Petrach and Boccaccio: Sarah Bakewell (1348)
Sarah Bakewell, author of ‘Humanly Possible’
Today the bestselling and prize-winning author Sarah Bakewell takes us back to the mid-fourteenth century. This was a time of great hardship when politics was violently fractured and when the plague was ripping across Europe.
But at this singular moment in Western history two figures of genius, Petrarch and Boccaccio, started their pioneering literary careers. In doing so they became, as Bakewell explains, ‘the first of the great literary humanists’.
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Even today ‘humanism’ is a difficult term to define. To different people the word conjures wildly different meanings – from a rejection of the supernatural; to a more individualised, humane conception of the world; to a worldview that centres on the ties that connect us, rather than those forces which break us apart.
While this debate ebbs on, what most can agree on is that the movement in the West can trace its source back to some definite moments in the late Medieval Age. One of these was the birth of Francesco Petrarca, commonly known as ‘Petrarch’ in English, in Tuscany in 1304.
Petrarch was a hugely driven character with an obsessive interest in the intellectual life of the ancient world. Although his boyhood years were full of upheaval – his family were forced to flee persecution and he ended up living for spells in Avignon and later Carpentras in France – the writings of figures like Cicero or Virgil remained constantly with him.
Francesco Petrarca or ‘Petrarch’ 1304-1374 (Wiki Commons)
Reaching adulthood Petrarch carved out a new sort of life for himself. He worked as something like a freelance writer for a series of different patrons, turning out literary work to please them and simultaneously building a circle of like-minded friends. Together these friends would swap the news of their latest literary productions, along with (more excitingly) reports of any recent manuscript discoveries.
This last point was a fundamental one. Petrarch worldview was very different from ours today. He felt very much as if he was living in a ‘Dark Age’, a time when human societies had made a definite step backwards since the glorious days of the Roman Empire. One of his key motivations was recovering the relics of this long-lost time, something he was able to do by hunting through the archives of religious houses to see if there was anything to be found and recovered.
Petrarch’s ability and energy brought him a reputation that many sought to emulate. And in the late 1340s he was joined in his literary quest by another Italian.
Giovanni Boccaccio was nine years younger than Petrarch. Born in (or around) Florence and raised in an intellectual environment that had recently been charged by the work of Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio had seemingly been destined for a life as a lawyer. But by the 1340s all this had changed and he, too, was setting out on the type of life that Petrarch had pioneered.
As Sarah Bakewell explains in this episode, Petrarch and Boccaccio’s work was culturally significant important. Looking back at their biographies, it is clear, she points out, that something new was stirring in Italian culture. What would begin rather modestly in the early fourteenth century would swell over the decades and centuries ahead to become the movement we today think of as the Renaissance.
But this was a movement that arose from very uncertain origins. The Italy of the fourteenth century was a century of bickering city states. Christianity was the dominating and smouthering force. Most physically dangerously of all for figures like Petrarch and Boccaccio was the dreadful plague that arrived in Europe in 1347 and then broke across the continent in a deadly wave. It was a testing moment, but it was one in which ‘humanism’ had its origins.
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Sarah Bakewell’s new book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking*, Enquiry and Hope. It will be published next week.
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Show Notes
Scene One: 1348. Parma. The Black Death spreads around the Italian peninsula as well as much of the rest of Europe. The writer Francesco Petrarch, living in Parma, does not catch it, but many of his friends die, including "Laura", the woman who inspired many of his most beautiful love sonnets.
Scene Two: 1349. Parma, Padua and Florence. This first outbreak of the disease recedes (though not for long). Driven by a pervasive sense of loss, Petrarch - now mostly living in Padua - starts gathering copies of the letters he had written to friends over the years.
Scene Three: 1350. Florence. Petrarch and Boccaccio meet. Petrarch is passing through Florence, visiting the city of his exiled family's origins for the first time in his life.
Memento: A cutting from one of Petrarch experiments with one his laurel bushes.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Sarah Bakewell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan
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About Sarah Bakewell
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the "hippie trail" through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex, and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a full-time writer.
Her books include How to Live: a life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Prize, and At the Existentialist Café, a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. She was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She still has a tendency to wander, but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.
Featured images
Guy de Chauliac bandaging the leg of Pope Clement VI at Avignon, while Petrarch, his enemy, jealous of his influence, watches him, ca. 1348. Oil painting by Ernest Board.
Florence as imagined in 1348 during the Black Death
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