Justified True Belief

(●) The churchman who went hunting for lost Roman books in cathedral cupboards, and started Europe reading again. + Somewhere in the cathedral library at Verona, in 1345, a middle-aged Italian churchman opened a codex nobody had asked for in three hundred years. A codex is a book of the old kind, sheets of parchment written out by hand and sewn between boards, which is what every book was before printing. Inside this one was Cicero’s private mail. Not the speeches everyone knew. The letters: the complaints, the money worries, the political calculations, the grief over a daughter. Petrarch copied them out with his own hand, and then did something no one had ever thought to do. He wrote Cicero a reply, dated it, and told him where he had gone wrong. Cicero had been in his grave since 43 BC, and Petrarch knew that as well as anyone alive. That small strange act is the whole of him in miniature. Francesco Petrarca gave the Latin West back the habit of reading the ancients as people rather than as authorities, and the habit turned into a discipline, and the discipline eventually turned on the Bible itself. The line runs forward like this. Petrarch taught scholars to hunt down the oldest and best copy of a text and read the whole of it. Lorenzo Valla used that training to prove a famous papal document a forgery. Erasmus, who learned from Valla, printed the Greek New Testament in 1516. Luther and Tyndale made their translations from Erasmus’ Greek. All of it begins with a man who could not bear to leave a book unread. There is a second reason to know him, and it has nothing to do with manuscripts. Few Christians between Augustine and the moderns wrote at such length about the inside of their own heads, and he did not flatter what he found there. His most private book is a three-day cross-examination in which Augustine himself accuses him of loving fame and a woman more than God, and Petrarch, who wrote both sides, gives Augustine all the best lines. One more thing a reader tends to remember: he is the man who first called the centuries between Rome’s fall and his own a darkness, which is where the very idea of a "middle" age comes from.

(●) 1304 AD: Born in exile at Arezzo, and raised beside the popes at Avignon for a career in law. + He recorded his own birth with a notary’s precision: Arezzo, in the year 1304, "July the twentieth, on a Monday, at dawn." He came by that precision honestly. His father was a Florentine notary called Ser Petracco, one of the men who drew up the contracts, wills and property deeds a city runs on, and in the proscription of 1302, the political purge that also banished Dante, he had been driven out of Florence. That left the family with nowhere of its own, and the boy’s childhood is a list of addresses. A year at Arezzo, six on his father’s land at Incisa above Florence, a year at Pisa, and then, when the boy was eight or nine, the road north. They were going where the work was. In 1309 the popes had left Rome for Avignon on the Rhone, where they would stay for most of a century, and lawyers and clerks and fortune-hunters moved with them. Petrarch grew up in that boom town and hated it his whole life, calling it in the end the place "where the Roman Pontiff holds and has long held the Church of Christ in shameful exile." His schooling was the schooling of a boy pointed straight at a lawyer’s career: four years at Carpentras, and then four years of civil law at Montpellier and three more at Bologna, seven years of a training he was good at and did not want. In 1326 his father died, and the son dropped the law within weeks. His reason, given half a century later, is worth having in his own words: the dignity of the law was real, but he found it "habitually degraded by those who practise it," and it went against him to learn an art he would not practise dishonestly and could hardly hope to practise otherwise. That was not a quarrel he had only with the profession, either. It had been going on at home for years, and the best-known story of that household comes from Petrarch himself, in a letter of his last year to the Neapolitan jurist Luca da Penne (Letters of Old Age XVI, 1). Ser Petracco found the boy’s hidden poets and threw them on the fire, and then, watching him cry, fished two of them back out of the flames half burned. "Holding Virgil in the right hand and Cicero’s Rhetoric in the left, he held out both to me, smiling as I wept."

(●) 1327 AD: In an Avignon church on the sixth of April he saw a woman he would write about for forty years. + Everything anyone actually knows about Laura, Petrarch wrote on the flyleaf of his own copy of Virgil, twenty-one years after the fact, in the book where he kept the record of his dead. "Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues, and widely celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in my early manhood, in the year of our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at the first hour, in the church of Santa Clara at Avignon." Same city, same month, same day, same hour, 1348: she died, and the news took six weeks to reach him. That is the whole documentary record, a note written on the blank leaf of a book he happened to own. Not her surname, not the colour of her eyes, which the poems describe in detail and contradict. Giacomo Colonna, bishop of Lombez and a friend of his, once teased him that Laura was a pun on laurea, the poet’s laurel he wanted so badly, and that she did not exist at all. Petrarch answered: would to God it were all a pretence, and not a madness. Around the poems there was an ordinary working life, and it needs a word. He had come back from Bologna to Avignon and taken clerical orders, meaning that he entered the church as a cleric without ever taking charge of a parish or the souls in it. In his case that meant a place in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna and a series of canonries and benefices, church incomes attached to a post, that carried no congregation and no duties to speak of. It bought him what he wanted, which was time. And as soon as he could afford to, he spent the time out of sight: in 1337 he found a narrow valley fifteen miles from Avignon where the river Sorgue comes up out of the rock, bought a house there at Vaucluse, and moved his books in. Nearly everything he wrote was begun there. Two children were born to him in those years, a son Giovanni in 1337 and a daughter Francesca about six years later, and he never names a mother in any surviving line.

(●) 1336 AD: He climbed Mont Ventoux for the view, opened Augustine at the top, and came down without speaking. + On the twenty-sixth of April he and his younger brother Gherardo walked up the six thousand feet of Mont Ventoux, the bare limestone hump that stands over Provence, for no reason except that he had been looking at it since childhood and wanted to see what was up there. Nobody did that. Mountains in 1336 were things you crossed because a road went over them, and a man who walked up one for the pleasure of looking around at the top was doing something his neighbours would have found simply odd. At the summit he could see the Alps to one side and the sea toward Marseilles on the other, and the Rhone directly below. Then he pulled out the pocket copy of Augustine’s Confessions he carried everywhere, a gift from an Augustinian friar named Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, and opened it at random, the way Augustine himself, in a garden at Milan, had once opened Paul at random and been undone by the first lines his eye landed on. His eyes fell on the tenth book: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." He shut the book, told his brother not to ask, and said nothing at all the whole way down. The letter describing the climb is one of the most famous in European literature, and it is worth knowing that scholars have long suspected he wrote it years later and dated it back, shaping the day into a parable. That does not make it false; it makes it deliberate. The man who climbed the mountain for the view and the man who reproached himself for wanting the view are one person, whichever year he set it down.

(●) 1341 AD: Rome crowned him poet laureate on the Capitol, the first such crowning there since antiquity. + On one and the same day in September 1340, two invitations reached him at Vaucluse: one from the Roman Senate and one from the Chancellor of the University of Paris, each offering him the poet’s crown of laurel. The laurel is a wreath of bay leaves, the sign Rome had once put on the heads of victorious generals, and by 1340 it had been out of use for so long that nobody was entirely sure how the ceremony went. He wrote to Cardinal Colonna for advice, got an answer before the third hour the next morning, and chose Rome. He did not go straight there. He went first to Naples, to King Robert, the one monarch of the age he thought both learned and good, and asked to be examined. The king questioned him from noon until evening, and then for two more days, before pronouncing him worthy. What Petrarch showed him was the Africa, the Latin epic on Scipio he had begun in the hills above Vaucluse and would never finish. On Easter Sunday, the eighth of April 1341, he was crowned on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Much of the ceremony had to be invented for the occasion. Padua had crowned Albertino Mussato with laurel in 1315, but on the Capitol nothing of the kind had been done since antiquity. He was thirty-six, and he spent the rest of his life being rude about it. "The laurel, however, in no way increased my wisdom, although it did arouse some jealousy." Thirty-two years later he was blunter: the laurel "made me known only to be tormented," and without it he would have had "that best of all lives, as many deem, a life of obscurity and peace."

(●) 1345 AD: In a cathedral library at Verona he found Cicero’s private letters, and sat down to answer them. + He had been looking for them for years. What he found at Verona were the letters to Atticus, the lifelong friend Cicero told everything to, along with the letters to Cicero’s brother Quintus and to Brutus: the correspondence of a man in the middle of a collapsing republic, written with no thought that anyone else would read it. Petrarch copied the whole thing out by hand, which at his age he did for almost nobody, and said Cicero was worth a share of the little time he had left. What he read shook him, and it is not hard to see why. The Cicero of the philosophical works, the Cicero he had been reading since boyhood, counsels calm, retirement, and contempt for the political scramble. The Cicero of the letters is up to his neck in the scramble, flattering Caesar, courting Octavian, abusing Antony, and dying for it. That is the sort of discovery most readers absorb privately and say nothing about. Petrarch wrote him a letter: not an essay about him, a letter to him, closing with a dateline that has never stopped being quoted. "Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of the Adige, in Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy; on the 16th of June, and in the year of that God whom you never knew the 1345th." Nine more followed over the years: a second to Cicero, and then Seneca, Varro, Quintilian, Livy, Asinius Pollio, Horace, Virgil and Homer. To Homer he had to admit an embarrassment: "I am not so fortunate as to have learned Greek." He tried repeatedly, owned a Greek Homer and a Greek Plato he could not read, and paid a Calabrian named Leontius Pilatus to start turning the Iliad into Latin. Greek would have to wait for the generation after him.

(●) 1348 AD: In one year the plague took Laura and his patron, and half the world he wrote to. + The year before, he had thrown his whole reputation behind Cola di Rienzo, the innkeeper’s son who seized Rome in the name of the Roman people and promised to restore the republic. Petrarch told him that for his devotion to liberty men might well call him a Brutus and for his eloquence a Cicero, and urged him to build on what he had already laid down: "You have laid the firmest of foundations, in peace, truth, justice, and liberty; build upon these." Within months Cola had overreached and fallen, and Petrarch was left holding the letters: he had put his name in writing behind a man who turned out to be a catastrophe, and letters like his were copied and passed from hand to hand, so there was no quiet way to take them back. Then the Black Death came up through Italy and France. Laura died at Avignon on the sixth of April 1348 while he was away in Verona. Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, who had housed him for the best part of twenty years and treated him, he said, not as a lord and master but as a father or an affectionate brother, died in July. Over the following years the plague kept coming back for the rest: his son Giovanni in 1361, not yet twenty-five, his friend Francesco Nelli two years after that, and so many others that his letters of old age read at times like a casualty list.

(●) 1353 AD: He left Provence for good, and spent his last twenty-one years in Italy, mostly in other men’s houses. + A man who has buried that many people tends to move, and he did. He crossed the Alps in 1353 and never went back. What followed was Italian and restless: eight years in Milan under the Visconti, the family who ruled that city and most of Lombardy with it, and then Venice, and then Padua, and always as somebody’s guest. He was sent out as an envoy more than once in those years, to Venice, to the Emperor Charles IV, and to King John of France, and he was good at it, which is one reason princes kept him. It was at Mantua, in the winter of 1354, that Charles gave him an audience, asked him for his life story from the day of his birth, and then asked what kind of life pleased him best. "The life of solitude," Petrarch answered, "for no existence can be safer, or more peaceful and happy," and told the Holy Roman Emperor to his face that it went beyond "even the glory and eminence of your sovereign position." Nothing was settled there. A month later, riding out with the imperial party as far as the fifth milestone past Piacenza, he was still making the case, and neither man gave way. He knew perfectly well how it looked. He had spent his life writing about liberty and about the quiet of a valley in Provence, and here he was at table with the men who had put the free cities of Lombardy under one family. His friends in Florence told him so, and he spent years answering them, in letters that are better at wit than at argument.

(●) 1374 AD: He died in the night at Arquà, and was found the next morning over a book. + His last years were spent in a small house at Arquà in the Euganean hills south of Padua, with his daughter Francesca, her husband, and their children. He was still asking for manuscripts, still revising the letters he had been arranging for publication since the 1340s, still working at the Africa and the De viris illustribus and the Italian poems he pretended not to care about. When Giovanni Boccaccio, the younger Florentine who wrote the Decameron and who treated him all his life as a master, wrote urging him to rest his eyes and give up the night work, he refused: there is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. One last disappointment came in 1370, and it fell on the hope he had carried longest. Three years earlier Pope Urban V had actually brought the papal court back to Rome, after nearly sixty years of Avignon, and Petrarch, who had been writing to popes about exactly this since his twenties, thought he had lived to see it. Urban sailed for Avignon again in the autumn of 1370 and was dead within months. "My pen was in my hand," Petrarch wrote, "when he abruptly surrendered at once his exalted office and his life." The court came home for good in 1377, three years too late for him. He died in the night of the eighteenth of July 1374, and the date is conventionally given as the nineteenth, the eve of his seventieth birthday. A letter of Manzini de la Motta, written fourteen years afterwards on the first of July 1388, reports that he "closed his last day in his library" and "was found leaning over a book as if sleeping, so that his death was not at first suspected by his household." Which book it was, nobody recorded; the tradition that it was his Virgil grew later.

What He Taught

(T1) The ancients are not authorities to be quoted, they are people to be answered. + Think of the difference between a reference letter and a real one. A reference gives you three approved sentences about a man. A real letter gives you the man: what he wanted, what he was afraid of, who annoyed him on a Tuesday. Petrarch’s whole method comes from insisting on the second kind. The schools of his day did quote the ancients constantly, but in fragments. A master would keep a book of extracts, a sentence of Seneca here, a line of Virgil there, hauled in to settle a point, and nobody much minded that the sentence had been cut out of a paragraph whose argument ran the other way. Petrarch thought the difference always showed: a reader can tell when a man "has drunk deep from a full fountain, and when he has taken only a hasty sip." What he wanted instead was the whole work, in the best copy that could be found, read from the first page to the last, in the author’s own Latin rather than a summary of it. This is what later got called humanism, and the word needs its plain meaning restored. The studia humanitatis were simply a course of study: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, the subjects that were thought to form a human being rather than train a technician. It was not a rival religion and Petrarch was not a secret pagan. He was a churchman who thought the best Latin ever written was worth reading properly, and who would rather argue with Cicero than cite him. He paid for the conviction in the ordinary currency of scholarship, which is legwork. He walked into the libraries at Liège and Verona and asked what they had on the shelves. He badgered friends across Europe for copies, and when he met a language he could not learn, he hired a translator rather than pretend the books in it did not exist. About how that last part ended he was perfectly honest. He never did learn Greek.

(Q) "I long had known how excellent a guide you have proved for others; at last I was to learn what sort of guidance you gave yourself." + Source: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (Familiares) XXIV, 3, to Marcus Tullius Cicero (Robinson and Rolfe translation). Written at Verona in June 1345, soon after he found the letters, and the first of the ten letters he would address to ancient writers a thousand years and more in their graves. Petrarch goes on to scold Cicero for wasting his old age in "incessant wrangling," and closes with the dateline that gives the whole exercise away: "in the year of that God whom you never knew the 1345th." He loved the man, and he knew exactly what separated them.

(T2) Learning that leaves a man no better has missed its point. + Four friends in Venice, all of them fond of him, concluded after long discussion that Petrarch was a good man but an ignoramus. They meant it technically, and by their own measure they were right. A serious education in 1367 was built on Aristotelian natural philosophy, which was the medieval name for the study of how the physical world works: the elements things are made of, the motions of the heavens, the parts and habits of animals, all of it worked out of Aristotle and argued over in Latin. Petrarch could not handle any of that. He could not hold his own in a formal disputation either, the public argument-match the universities ran as their chief exercise, where one man defends a thesis and the rest come at him in turn. He simply did not know what the schools knew. He wrote a book in reply and called it On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, and the title is not entirely a joke. His complaint was never that logic is worthless. Dialectic, the art of testing an argument by its form (all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal), he called a proper part of anyone’s training, a ladder for people climbing. His complaint was about grown men who never got off the ladder. He retold with relish the story of the quibbler who cornered Diogenes: "What I am, you are not. But I am a man. Therefore you are not a man." The trick sits in the opening line, the major premise, which is the wide claim a syllogism starts from before it narrows to a conclusion. Diogenes answered that the conclusion was not true, and that if the man wanted it true he should have started from the other end, putting Diogenes in that first line instead of himself. Run it that way and it comes out: what Diogenes is, you are not; Diogenes is a man; therefore you are not a man. The reasoning is just as tidy going backwards, and the man it now insults is the one who started it. Underneath the jokes is a real claim about what knowledge is for, and he made it about the best book the other side had. Petrarch had read Aristotle’s Ethics and granted that it defines virtue and divides it more acutely than anything else he knew. He also said, flatly, that the lesson lacks the words that sting and set a man on fire for virtue, so that he came away no more willing to be good than when he started, while Cicero and Seneca, the lesser philosophers, left him wanting it. It is better to will the good, he concluded, than to know the truth. That is a sentence a Christian can say, and Augustine had made the same point long before him, but in the fourteenth century it sounded like an attack on the university itself.

(Q) "Dialectics may form a portion of our road, but certainly not its end: it belongs to the morning of life, not to its evening." + Source: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (Familiares) I, 7, to Tommaso da Messina (Robinson and Rolfe translation). A friend had written that an elderly logician was furious at Petrarch for supposedly condemning his art. The reply is a young man’s letter, funny and a little cruel, and it ends with the distinction that matters: "it is not the liberal arts which I condemn, but only hoary-headed children."

(T3) A man can see the good, want it, and still not choose it. + Everyone knows the experience of standing in a kitchen at eleven at night, wanting to go to bed, believing sincerely that going to bed is the right thing, and not going to bed. Petrarch built a book out of that gap, and set Augustine in it to interrogate him. The Secretum is three days of conversation between a character called Franciscus and a character called Augustinus, with a silent woman named Truth standing by. Petrarch wrote every word of both parts, never published it, and kept revising it for a decade. Augustinus opens by telling him that nobody falls into misery unwillingly, and that the reason his repentance never takes is that he wants to want to change rather than actually willing it. Franciscus protests, dodges, cites authorities, and loses. Two things hold him, Augustinus says, and he names them: love and glory. They are chains, but they are made of gold, and a man staring at gold shackles admires them instead of filing them off. Petrarch also gives Augustinus the medieval name for his own worst condition, accidia, the sullen heaviness that is not quite grief and not quite laziness, in which a man sits and chews on his own misery and finds a bitter pleasure in it. The end of the dialogue is the part nobody forgets, because Petrarch refuses to give himself a conversion. He agrees with everything Augustinus has said, thanks him warmly, and then says he cannot stop yet, he has work outstanding. It is the pattern of Romans 7 in a fourteenth-century Italian voice. That is the chapter where Paul says he does not do the good he wants and does the evil he does not want (Romans 7:19): the same gap, described by an apostle rather than a poet. And the man who wrote the dialogue was not confessing a single lapse. He was describing his life.

(Q) "We are falling into our old controversy. Want of will you call want of power." + Source: Petrarch, Secretum (Petrarch’s Secret) III (Draper translation). Franciscus has just admitted that it would be safer to attend only to the care of his soul, and added that he has not the strength to give up his studies. Augustinus refuses the excuse in eight words, and then prays for him anyway: that God will order his steps, "even though they wander," into the way of truth.

(T4) Glory is the shadow of virtue, and a man chasing his own shadow is running the wrong way. + Petrarch wanted to be famous the way other people want air, and he knew it, and he wrote as searching an analysis of that appetite as anyone had written since Augustine, and it did not cure him. That combination is what makes him useful. The argument he puts in Augustine’s mouth is not that fame is worthless. It is that fame is a shadow: a real thing, cast by a real body, which arrives on its own if you stand in the light and cannot be caught if you chase it. Chase it and you will be the man running back and forth at noon trying to grab the dark shape at his feet. Petrarch then lets Augustinus press the arithmetic, and the numbers are not flattering. Your name will be known in a corner of one continent. It will last a few generations before new men crowd it out. The earth itself is a point, the ages are long, and eternity is not simply a longer version of the same thing. All of that comes out of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, the passage where a Roman general is carried up above the world in a dream and shown how small the empire he is so proud of looks from up there. Petrarch loved it, and here he is turning it on himself. What Scripture adds is a sharper question, and it is not how long fame lasts. It is whose approval you are working for. "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" (John 5:44). Petrarch never quite answers that one. He records it as a wound rather than a solved problem, which is one reason readers have trusted him for six hundred years.

(Q) "One would surely think that man a fool who at midday should run here and there in the blaze of the sun, wearing himself out to see his shadow and point it out to others." + Source: Petrarch, Secretum (Petrarch’s Secret) III (Draper translation). Augustinus has just handed him the rule to live by: "follow after virtue and let glory take care of itself." The picture of the man at noon comes straight after it, and it is aimed at a poet who had already spent years arranging his own letters for readers not yet born.

(T5) His own Italian could carry what he had believed only Latin could carry. + He expected to be remembered for the Africa, a Latin epic in nine books about a Roman general, which he never finished and almost nobody has read. He called his Italian poems nugae, trifles, and gave the collection a title that is nearly an apology: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments of things in the vernacular. The vernacular simply means the language people actually spoke at home and in the street, as against the Latin of the church and the schools, which was learned out of books. Posterity read the trifles and let the epic alone. There are 366 of them, one for every day of a leap year, arranged by him over nearly forty years into two halves, Laura living and Laura dead. Most are sonnets: fourteen lines broken into an eight-line question and a six-line answer, a shape so completely stamped by him that English still calls it the Petrarchan sonnet. Wyatt and Surrey carried it into English under Henry VIII, and from there it went everywhere. Sidney, Shakespeare, and in the end the love song on the radio, which still works the way his poems work, by praising a woman and worrying about the praising in the same breath. What made the poems new was not the love, which the troubadours had done, but the divided man doing the loving. The speaker is one person in two minds on the same page, praising the woman and reproaching himself for praising her, freezing and burning in the same line. And the book is shaped as a confession, not a celebration. It opens by telling the reader that all this was youthful error, and it ends, after 365 poems about a woman, with a long prayer to the Virgin Mary asking for peace at last. Whether the man ever got there he would not say. He put the question at the front of the book and left it standing.

(Q) "And of my vanity the fruit is shame, Repentance, and a knowledge strong imprest, That worldly pleasure is a passing dream." + Source: Petrarch, Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) 1, closing lines (Nott translation, in the Bohn edition of 1859). The first poem in the book, written last, is the old man’s verdict on everything that follows it. He asks his readers for pity and pardon, admits he was for years the talk of the town, and then delivers the line that has been quoted ever since in Italian: che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.

(Q) "I desire that death find me reading and writing, or, if it please Christ, praying and in tears." + Source: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age (Seniles) XVII, 2, to Boccaccio, Padua, 28 April 1373 (Robinson and Rolfe translation). Boccaccio had written affectionately telling him to stop working, rest his eyes, and enjoy the fame he had. Petrarch refused the advice at length and with obvious pleasure: "Continued work and application form my soul’s nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live." Fifteen months later his household found him in his library, over an open book.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His habit of hunting manuscripts became a discipline, and the discipline eventually reached the New Testament. + Petrarch found books. The men who came after him found more, and then learned to ask a harder question than where a text was: whether it said what it claimed to say. The first of them was a civil servant. Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence from 1375, built one of the great private libraries of the century and went hunting for the books Petrarch had owned. In 1392 he got Petrarch’s own copy of Cicero’s letters to Atticus transcribed at Milan, and with Petrarch’s manuscript long since lost, that transcription is what the text of those letters rests on. Poggio Bracciolini did his hunting in the spare hours of a working trip. He was a papal secretary at the Council of Constance, the great church council that sat from 1414 to 1418 to put an end to the scandal of rival popes, and while the sessions ground on he went through the monastery cupboards of the region. Out of the abbey of St Gall in 1416 he brought a complete Quintilian, the Roman handbook on how to teach speaking and writing, which until then had been known only in torn and partial copies. Out of somewhere in Germany the year after he brought Lucretius. Then Lorenzo Valla took the method one step further, and the step is the one that matters here. Finding a text is a matter of walking and asking. Judging a text is something else. In 1440 he examined the Donation of Constantine, the document on which the papacy’s claim to temporal rule in Italy partly rested, and showed from its Latin alone that no fourth-century Roman had written it: the vocabulary was wrong, the titles were anachronistic, the whole thing was a forgery some centuries younger than it pretended to be. That was a papal document. What Valla did next was to turn the same eye on the Bible. He went through the Latin Vulgate, the translation made by Jerome in the fourth century and used as the Bible of the Western church ever since, comparing it clause by clause against Greek manuscripts and noting the places where the Latin had drifted from what the Greek actually said. Those notes stayed in manuscript for the rest of the century. Then Erasmus found a copy of them in the abbey of Parc, just outside Louvain, in 1504, printed them at Paris in 1505, and in 1516 published the Greek New Testament itself with a fresh Latin translation beside it. Luther translated from its second edition while hiding at the Wartburg, the castle where his prince kept him out of the emperor’s reach, and Tyndale from its third while in exile. The rallying cry of the whole enterprise, ad fontes, back to the sources, is Petrarch’s instinct turned into a programme: if you want to know what a text says, go and read the oldest and best copy of it yourself.

(†) He handed Christian Europe back the Confessions as a book about the reader. + Augustine’s Confessions had never been lost. It sat in monastic libraries throughout the Middle Ages and was quoted constantly, mostly for its doctrine: what it says about time, about memory, about the will, about grace. What Petrarch did was carry a small copy of it in his coat and read it as a description of himself. That sounds like a small thing and it was not. There is all the difference in the world between a book you consult and a book that reads you, and the second kind is the kind a person carries in a coat. The pocket Confessions on the summit of Mont Ventoux, opened at random and taken as though it had been addressed to him personally, is the beginning of a way of reading that ordinary Christian readers have used ever since. The Secretum is the same move made into a book: Augustine brought forward nine centuries to sit across a table and conduct a cross-examination, with the reader listening in. Nothing quite like it had been written since Augustine himself, and after Petrarch it never stopped. Montaigne, writing his Essays two hundred years later, kept Petrarch’s Italian verses close enough to hand to quote them again and again. The Christian value of this is not that self-examination is new, since the Psalms are full of it and every confessor’s manual in Europe required it. A confessor’s manual, though, is a checklist a priest works through with you, and nobody has ever read one for pleasure. The value is that Petrarch made self-examination into literature a layman would pick up on his own. He showed that a man could put his own divided heart on paper without either excusing it or performing his repentance, and that doing so was not vanity but honesty, provided the man was willing to lose the argument.

(†) Where his own record convicts him: he preached contempt of glory in books built to make him famous. + The case against Petrarch does not need a hostile witness. He made it himself, in the Secretum (T3, T4), and then went on living the way the book said he should not. What follows is mostly a matter of holding his own writing up against his own record. - The appetite he diagnosed, he fed. He accepted the laurel at thirty-six after arranging his own examination by a king. He spent thirty years collecting, revising and polishing his letters for publication, which is why we have them, and he wrote an autobiography addressed to readers not yet born. A man may do all that innocently. A man who has written four pages on glory as a shadow has less excuse than most, and Augustinus in his own dialogue tells him so: you are wearing yourself out on things that concern other people and neglecting what is your own. - He took the church’s money and did none of the church’s work. He held canonries and benefices at Lombez, Pisa, Parma, Padua and elsewhere, refused a papal secretaryship and a bishopric, and said openly that he wanted the income without the duties because duties would cost him his freedom and his books. He was not unusual in his century. He was unusually articulate about it. - He was a cleric with two children. A son in 1337 and a daughter around 1343, born while he was in orders and living on church income. He loved the daughter, grieved the son, and had the children legitimated. About their mother he says nothing at all in a single surviving line, and a man who spent thirty years polishing his letters for posterity chose that silence as carefully as he chose everything else. - He wrote for liberty and lived with tyrants. The eight Milanese years were spent under the Visconti, who had broken the free cities of Lombardy, and his Florentine friends said so to his face. Boccaccio put the charge to him directly, and his defence is a good line and not a full answer: "I have lived nominally with princes, in reality, the princes lived with me." - His contempt for his own age could be simply unjust. He wished he had been born in another century, dismissed the learning of men who knew things he did not, and in one letter called down God’s curse on young Italians for the cut of their clothes. There is a difference between loving what is old and despising what is present, and he did not always keep it. He would not have disputed the list. "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing" (Romans 7:19) is the text his own book is written under, and the reason to read him is not that he solved it. It is that he would not pretend he had.