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

Petrarch called himself the first in centuries to read Cicero properly. He wasn't boasting. These letters, exchanged across the mountains between him and Boccaccio in the mid-fourteenth century, document something genuinely new: a scholar who worshipped Roman ruins, copied forgotten manuscripts from crumbling monasteries, and believed that reviving classical learning could transform humanity. Here you find Petrarch not as a marble statue, but in his sweaty, anxious, exhilarated humanity. He complains about gout, begs Boccaccio to visit his mountain retreat, frets over his scattered library, and reflects on why he cannot stop reading Augustine even as he devours Virgil. The correspondence traces the exact moment when European intellectuals began to see themselves as heirs to antiquity rather than mere survivors of its fall. Boccaccio, younger and equally obsessed, writes with a different urgency, caught between devotion to his master and his own emerging genius. Together they invented something we now call humanism, though at the time they simply called it reading, thinking, and telling their friend about it. This selection captures the electricity of intellectual discovery in real time, before the Renaissance had a name.