Francesco Petrarca, commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was an Italian poet and humanist. His rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with inventing the 14th century Renaissance. Petrarch is often considered the founder of Humanism too. Because his father was in the legal profession, he insisted that Petrarch and his brother study law also. Petrarch however, was primarily interested in writing and in Latin literature and considered the seven years he studied law as wasted. He famously protested: “I couldn’t face making a merchandise of my mind,” as he viewed the legal system as the art of selling justice. He received minor orders in 1326 which enabled him to hold several benefices. His office in the Church prevented him from marrying, but he seems to have fathered two children. From 1330 to 1337 he travelled through many countries of Europe, visiting many scholars and copying classical MSS. In 1337 he settled down to a life of solitude at Vaucluse, in southern France, where most of his important poetical works were written.

On Good Friday, 1327 he met Laura in the congregation and fell madly in love with her. His bad luck, to become enamoured of a woman who did not return his affections, was the rest of humanity’s good fortune because in seeking to express his feelings for her, Petrarch gave definitive form to the sonnet and established himself as one of the greatest poets of all times. With his poems on Laura, who, in fact, inspired most of his famous poems, and his epic, Africa in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. On April 8, 1341, he became the second poet laureate since antiquity. In the following year he wrote the Secretum, consisting of three dialogues between himself and St Augustine who seeks to turn the poet’s mind from the transitory things of this world to the thoughts of eternal life. He was part of several political movements and was employed on several diplomatic missions. The last years of his life were spent again in retirement at Padua.

Petrarch is traditionally called the Father of Humanism and is considered by many to be the Father of the Renaissance. In his work Secretum Meum he points out that secular achievements did not necessarily preclude an authentic relationship with God. Petrarch argued instead that God had given humans their vast intellectual and creative potential to be used to their fullest. He inspired humanist philosophy which led to the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance. He believed in the immense moral and practical value of the study of ancient history and literature, that is, the study of human thought and action. Petrarch was a devout Catholic and did not see a conflict between realizing humanity’s potential and having religious faith. But he was greatly disturbed by the state of the Church, especially the Avignon Papacy against which he inveighed: “Avignon is impious Babylon, a living hell, a sink of iniquity. There one finds neither faith nor charity, nor religion nor fear of God, nor shame; nothing is true, nothing is holy; although the residence of the sovereign pontiff should have made it the sanctuary and stronghold of religion.” About the Cardinals of the papal court he wrote: “Whereas the apostles went barefoot, we now see satraps mounted on horses caparisoned with gold; already they eat with gold and soon they will have gold roads, unless God represses their insolent luxury. One would take them for kings of Persia, or Parthians who had to be revered, and whom one would not dare to approach with empty hands.” These words are repeated by the critics of the Church today almost verbatim.

A highly introspective man, he shaped the nascent humanist movement a great deal because many of the internal conflicts and musings expressed in his writings were seized upon by Renaissance humanist philosophers and argued continually for the next 200 years. The hallmark of Petrarch’s thought was a deep consciousness of the past as the nutriment of the present. His abiding achievement was to recognize that, if there is a Providence that guides the world, then it has set man at the centre.  Petrarch provided a theoretical basis for the enrichment of man’s life.