Petrarch

The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters

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.