The Historical Petrarch

Author(s): Craig Kallendorf

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 130-141
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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 AHR Forum
The Historical Petrarch

CRAIG KALLENDORF

WHEN WE SURVEY the many books and articles produced by Hans Baron in his long
and distinguished scholarly career, we cannot help but be struck by the fact that his
interest in Petrarch lasted for decades. Much of Baron's early work was gathered
into The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, in which Petrarch was treated as a
precursor of civic humanism whose early republican sentiments gave way to an
enthusiastic imperialism in his later years. From Baron's perspective, the movement
toward imperialism can only be seen as a step backwards,since it led Petrarch away
from the decisive fusion of civic humanist attitudes that would take place two
generations later in the Florentine republic.1As a result, Baron's conclusion is that
Petrarch remained more medieval than we had thought-in Baron's words, he is
"neither 'medieval' nor 'Renaissance,' but (if I may use the figure) rather a Moses,
first to see a new land, but not granted to enter it."2
Beginning with the earliest reactions to the Crisis, Baron has been criticized for
undervaluing Petrarch's originality3-a position that follows logically from his
broader understanding of the development of Italian humanism but that takes little
account of the prevailing tendency today to posit Petrarch as "the first modern
man."4 More important, however, is the fact that the evolution Baron sees in
Petrarch's thought has not won universal acceptance. The evidence is unusually
difficult to evaluate, which has led to several different interpretations to supple-
ment Baron's. Carlo Steiner, Thomas Bergin, and Alice Wilson have argued that
I Hans Baron, The Crisisof the EarlyItalian Renaissance:Civic Humanism and
RepublicanLibertyin
an Age of Classicismand Tyranny,rev. edn. (Princeton, N.J., 1966), 47-61, 119-20. Some of the relevant
points are also developed in Baron, "The Evolution of Petrarch'sThought: Reflections on the State of
Petrarch Studies," in From Petrarchto Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature
(Chicago, 1968), 7-50.
2 Hans Baron, "Moot Problems of Renaissance Interpretation:An Answer to Wallace K. Ferguson,"
Journal of the Historyof Ideas, 19 (1958): 28.
3This point is made, for example, by Wallace K. Ferguson, "The Interpretation of Italian
Humanism: The Contribution of Hans Baron,"Journal of the Historyof Ideas, 19 (1958): 14-25.
4The phrase can be traced back to Renan, but it received a striking and influential elaboration in
the introduction to Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarqueet l'humanisme (1892; rpt. edn., Paris, 1907); see also
Joseph G. Fucilla, "The Present State of PetrarchanStudies,"Aldo Scaglione, ed., Francis Petrarch,Six
CenturiesLater:A Symposium(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 31-32. In a paper originally delivered in 1960
but not published until a decade later, Baron did acknowledge that there is "something distinctly
'modern'" in Petrarch's interest in the human elements of the personalities of the great men of
antiquity; see Hans Baron, "Petrarch:His Inner Struggles and the Humanistic Discovery of Man's
Nature," in J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale, eds., FlorilegiumHistoriale:Essays Presentedto Wallace
K Ferguson (Toronto, 1971), 45-46.

130

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 The Historical Petrarch 131

Petrarch retained his belief that the republic was superior to the empire, both in
ancient Rome and in his own day5;Bonaventura Zumbini, Giulio Augusto Levi, and
Rodolfo De Mattei have concluded that, like Dante, Petrarch was a consistent
admirer of the empire and its founder, Julius Caesar6;and Janet Smarrhas adopted
the one remaining position and argued that as far as Petrarch was concerned,
politics was of little importance-that is, "empire or republic does not matter."7I
looked closely at this problem several years ago in another context,8 and I would
like to revisit the issue briefly now and place my findings in relation to the larger
issues raised by Baron in his study of Petrarch.
A major source for Petrarch's republican sentiments is Africa, his epic poem
recounting the victory of Scipio Africanus over Hannibal in the Second Punic War.
Near the end of Scipio's dream in Book 2, we find a parade of heroes in which the
speaker, Scipio's father, refers to Julius Caesar in most unflattering terms:

Ah, happy conquerorcould he but learn

to set due limits on his flashingblade.
For this the wretchedman lacks wit and will;
he lays in madness his victorioushands
upon the state, and laurels won abroad
with blood of fellow Romans he defiles,
in strife unseemlysullyingdeserved
triumphs.Ah, shame to mar such high renown
with folly infamous!How brazenly
the lust for office sweeps all else aside
so that the power may lie with one alone!
He for the first, and giving sad example,
will loot the Treasurywith rapacioushands
and bind the hapless Senate with new laws!

(Africa2.228-37)

The emperors who follow Augustus fare no better:

But of the herd that follows, what's to say?

the shame of their forbearsand to the world
a laughingstock.For them the Stygiancaves
and Tartarusstand ready.

(Africa2.263-65)9

SCarlo Steiner, "La fede nell'Impero e il concetto della patria italiana nel Petrarca,"Ingiornale
dantesco, 14, no. 1 (1906): 8-34; and Petrarch'sAfrica,trans. and annotated by Thomas Bergin and Alice
Wilson (New Haven, Conn., 1977), x.
6 Bonaventura Zumbini, Studi sul Petrarca (Florence, 1895), 161-255; Giulio Augusto Levi, "II
concetto monarchico del Petrarca,"Da Dante al Machiavelli(Florence, 1935), 105-17; and Rodolfo De
Mattei, Insentimentopolitico del Petrarca (Florence, 1944), 67-84, 103-28.
7 Janet Smarr, "Petrarch:A Vergil without a Rome," P. A. Ramsey, ed., Rome in the Renaissance:
The City and the Myth (Binghamton, N.Y., 1982), 135.
8 Petrarch's approach to this problem is considered in relation to Dante Alighieri and Cristoforo
Landino in Craig Kallendorf, "Virgil, Dante, and Empire in Italian Thought, 1300-1500," Vergilius,34
(1988): 44-69.
9 Quotations from Africa are taken from the English translation by Bergin and Wilson, Petrarch's
Africa, 30-31, 32.

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132 CraigKallendorf

In Book 3, Laelius also presents a triumphal vision of Roman history in which he

argues that Rome remained strong as long as liberty was protected under her
republican institutions (lines 773-74).
Baron claims, however, that the failure of Cola di Rienzo's effort to revive
republican institutions in Rome led to a change in Petrarch's political sympathies,
so that by the early 1350s Caesar surpassed Scipio as praiseworthy hero. De viris
illustribus,for example, began with a focus on Scipio, but Petrarch continued to
work on it in the 1350s and 1360s, during which time Caesar took a prominent
place. And there are plenty of favorable references to Caesar in the letters of this
period: Caesar ruled gently and loved peace (Familiares 19.18), he was moderate in
victory and killed by ungrateful men to whom he had shown kindness (Familiares
14.1), he used his natural gifts and great learning to develop moderation (Familiares
17.3), and so forth. Indeed, Petrarch's De gestis Caesaris shows little trace of any
anti-imperial bias.10
So far, Baron's interpretation is defensible; the problem is that when we return
to the sources and look more closely, things prove considerably less tidy than Baron
would have us believe. For example, between the condemnations of Julius Caesar
and the later emperors quoted above from Africa is a description of Augustus that
praises his military conquests and concludes by declaring him worthy of deification
(2.262-63). Later, in Book 8, Lentulus presents a digression on how Rome's
republican institutions held her back in her pursuit of greatness:

Your championsof other nations knew

no rival to beset them; envy'sbane
did not afflict them in the midst of trials,
and their pursuitof glorious exploits
was not retardedby an idle year.
No enemy at home could interrupt
the term of their command,nor did their folk
forbid them to break camp. No senate's word
recalled them as they stood to win a war.

(Africa8.575-81)X1

The system of dual magistracies and mutual restraints had been explicitly praised by
Lentulus in Africa 3.775-80, yet here Petrarch suggests that Scipio would have
accomplished even greater things under a different political system. Africa, in short,
is not an unequivocally republican poem.
A closer reading of some of the allegedly pro-imperial writings postdating Cola's
failed revolution discloses similar ambiguities. For example, in 1351, Petrarchwrote
Familiares 10.1, a letter to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, exhorting him to
return to Rome and govern there. At one point, he refers to Rome as "head of the
10 Baron, "Evolutionof Petrarch'sThought,"28-40. The standard edition of the Familiares is edited
by Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco in the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Francesco Petrarca,
vols. 10-13 (Florence, 1933-42). The biography of Caesar appears in Historia Julii Caesaris, C. E. C.
Schneider, ed. (Leipzig, 1827). A condemnation of the republican hero Brutus, in turn, is found in the
Secretum, in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi, eds.
(Naples, 1955), 118.
11 Bergin and Wilson, Petrarch's Africa, 203.

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 The HistoricalPetrarch 133

monarchy," even though he also refers to it in the same letter as a "republic."

Similarly, he associates Charles favorablywith Julius Caesar, then refers to Brutus
a little later as "firstauthor of liberty."When Petrarch gives two examples of those
who seized their opportunities decisively, Alexander the Great and Scipio, the great
hero of the Roman republic, we can only conclude that the letter is neither
unequivocally pro-republican nor unequivocally pro-imperial.
I do not, with due deference to Janet Smarr,believe that Petrarchwas indifferent
to politics; rather, I believe that an insensitivity to the context in which these
political sentiments are developed has led many of Petrarch's modern readers to
seek a consistency that is not to be found in this area. Africa, for example, was
designed to praise the virtues of Scipio according to the principles of epideictic
rhetoric,12so that Petrarch also tends to praise the city that nurtured him and its
own institutions. Since these happened to be republican at this time, there is a
certain republican bias that Baron and others have rightly noticed. But the poem
praises Scipio, not political institutions as such, and when Rome and its institutions
prevent Scipio from exercising his virtue, as in the passage quoted above from Book
8, then these same institutions are open to condemnation as well.
Indeed, once we remind ourselves of how important rhetoric in all its manifes-
tations was to the development of early Italian humanism, it becomes easier to
understand how modern scholars interested in Petrarch'spolitical ideas could come
to such radically different conclusions. As Victoria Kahn has shown, Renaissance
humanists recovered from classical rhetoric the ability to argue both sides of almost
any question, to adjust attitudes to circumstances, and to see the ambiguities in
complicated problems.13Thus when the need to praise Scipio demands a republican
bias, Petrarch provides it, but he is perfectly willing in the same work to criticize the
republic when circumstances demand that. Likewise, when Petrarch is exhorting
Charles IV to return to Rome and govern there (Familiares 10.1), he does so from
a suitable pro-imperial beginning place but not from a consistently pro-imperial
stance. The rhetorical texture of Petrarch'swriting, in short, complicates consider-
ably any effort to find a consistent pattern, evolutionary or otherwise, in Petrarch's
political thought.
Insensitivity to these rhetorical principles, I believe, has led Baron to oversimplify
Petrarch's attitudes to republicanism and to find an evolutionary progression that I
do not think is there. The merit of his approach lies in the effort to anchor his
analysis in a larger study of the development of Italian humanism, but at this point
it is clear that his interpretation of the evidence is only one of several possible ones.

12 I have developed this point in Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgiland EpideicticRhetoric
in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, N.H., 1989), chap. 2: "Francesco Petrarca: Scipio, Aeneas,
and the Epic of Praise," 19-57. A more general treatment of the relationship between epideictic
rhetoric and the literature of this period may be found in 0. B. Hardison, Jr., TheEnduringMonument:
A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance LiteraryTheoryand Practice (1962; rpt. edn., Westport,
Conn., 1973).
13 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric,Prudence,and Skepticismin the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 19-88.
Kahn has recently extended her approach in MachiavellianRhetoric:From the Counter-Reformationto
Milton (Princeton, N.J., 1994), which offers some interesting implications for Baron's work on
Machiavelli.

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134 CraigKallendorf

THE PETRARCHAN WORK to which Baron devoted the most attention was the
Secretum, to which he returned after completing the Crisis. Here as well, Baron
sought to identify phases in Petrarch's intellectual development, and his approach
remained essentially the same as it had been in the Crisis, his magnum opus: he
began with a careful redating of key documents, then moved to a gentle teasing out
of the implications of this redating, and ended with a bold statement of the
conclusion that overturns what we thought we knew about the subject at hand. And,
once again, Baron found that the medieval strain in Petrarch'swork turns out to be
more pronounced than was generally recognized.
Baron's work on Petrarch at this time unfolded in explicit reaction to scholars
such as Umberto Bosco, whose influential study states that it is impossible to
unravel a line of development in Petrarch's work. To be sure, he argues, there are
several drafts of many of Petrarch'swritings, but there is no way to write the history
of Petrarch'sintellectual development from them-it is impossible, as Bosco puts it,
to say, "in this period Petrarchwas a man like this, and then he changed in this way,
and for these reasons." In short, according to Bosco, Petrarch is a man "without a
history."914Nonsense, says Baron. Everyone knows that Petrarch continued to revise
his works until he died-indeed, he tells us this himself in his Posteritatiand in his
letters-so it ought to be possible for the careful reader to find signs of revision
("disturbedareas," as Baron called them) in Petrarch'sfinal drafts. These disturbed
areas contain interpolations, passages whose style of expression and direction of
thought stand out from the text around them, and Baron is especially interested in
interpolations that point in some way or other to a particular, datable event. The
interpolations, confirmed as such by sources outside the text being studied, can be
grouped together in turn by date of composition, allowing the scholar to identify
phases in the intellectual development of the author.15
It is important to state immediately that Baron was by no means so original in
applying this method to Petrarch as he was in applying it to Leonardo Bruni. Ernest
Hatch Wilkins, for example, had laid the groundwork for a reconstruction of
Petrarch's life as reflected in his works; and, as Baron himself acknowledges, the
Note criticheai testi in the two Petrarch anthologies in the Ricciardi series provided
him with "safe guides to all chronological questions."16 Others had studied the
various compositional strands in the various works of Petrarch: first Vittorio Rossi,
then Giuseppe Billanovich for the Familiares, Guido Martellotti for De viris
illustribus and the Trionfo della Fama, B. L. Ullman for De vita solitaria, Klaus
Heitmann for De remediisutriusquefortunae, and (most important) Martellotti and
Enrico Fenzi for Africa.17Others had also applied a form of the genetic method to

14 Umberto Bosco, Francesco Petrarca, rev. edn. (Bari, 1961), 9, 7. Baron positions his work in
relation to Bosco in "Evolution of Petrarch'sThought," 11-12.
15 Baron discusses his procedure explicitly in Hans Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum:Its Making and Its
Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 1-3, 21-23, 123-32; and in Baron, "Petrarch'sSecretum:Was It
Revised-and Why?" in From Petrarchto Leonardo Bruni, 58, 86.
16 See Baron, "Evolution of Petrarch's Thought," 14 n. 11.
17 Vittorio Rossi, "Sulla formazione delle raccolte epistolari petrarchesche,"Annali della Cattedra
Petrarchescha,3 (1932): 68-73; and Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, Vol. 1: Lo scrittoio del
Petrarca (Rome, 1947); discussed by Baron, "Evolution of Petrarch's Thought," 17-23.
Guido Martellotti, "Linee di sviluppo dell'umanesimo petrarchescho,"Studipetrarcheschi,2 (1949):
51-82; and La vita di Scipione lAfricano, G. Martellotti, ed. (Naples, 1954), 7-22; discussed by Baron,

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 TheHistoricalPetrarch 135

the Secretumitself: Remigio Sabbadinihad tried it almost fifty years before Baron,18
and as we shall see, Baron's studies emerged not in isolation but in creative tension
with two other scholars.
It is also important to state immediately that many influential readers of Petrarch
today are much closer to Bosco than to Baron. John Freccero, for example,
examines the persona of the author in the Canzoniereand claims that "the portrait
has no temporality; only the most naive reader would take it for authentic
autobiography."19It is true that at one point Baron makes a move toward exempting
the Canzonierefrom his genetic approach, but he relies explicitly on Familiares 4.1,
the famous letter describing Petrarch's putative ascent of Mt. Ventoux, as a
historical document.20Yet in his discussion of this letter, Thomas Greene acknowl-
edges that we have no way of knowing whether the ascent was ever made and, if so,
when the account of it was written.21 Even with the Secretum itself, there are
scholars who have little interest in anchoring the dialogue into the circumstances of
its author's life.22
It seems to me, however, that life and art are intertwined more closely for
Petrarch than they are for most writers;we should not forget, after all, that Petrarch
recorded the death of Laura, who inspired his love poetry, in his copy of the poetry
of Virgil. Now that a decade has passed since the publication of Baron's major study
on the Secretum, I welcome the opportunity to stand back and ask what impact
Baron's genetic method has had on our understanding of this work. I offer first a
fairly narrow assessment of Baron's conclusions, focused on the dialogue of
Petrarch's on which Baron himself worked for over twenty years, and then move to

"Evolution of Petrarch'sThought," 23-46. Martellotti's work in this area has been collected in Scritti
petrarcheschi,M. Feo and S. Rizzo, eds. (Padua, 1983); appreciative overviews may be found in two
articles in Annali della Scuola Normale Superioredi Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia, ser. 3, 19, no. 1
(1989): E. Garin, "Martellotti e Petrarca," 163-72; and V. Fera, "Gli studi petrarcheschi di G.
Martellotti," 209-16.
B. L. Ullman, "The Composition of Petrarch's De vita solitaria," Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati
(Vatican City, 1946), 4: 123; discussed by Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum,84, 156-57. Klaus Heitmann, "La
genesi del De remediisutriusquefortune del Petrarca,"Convivium,25 (1957): 25; discussed by Baron,
Petrarch'sSecretum,85, 167.
Guido Martellotti, "Sulla composizione del De viris e dell'Africa del Petrarca,"Annali della Scuola
Normale Superioredi Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia, ser. 2, 10 (1941): 257-58; Martellotti, ed., Africa,
in Francesco Petrarca,Rime, trionfie poesie latini, Ferdinando Neri, et al., eds. (Milan, 1951), 626-703
(notes) and 863-65 ("nota critica ai testi"); and Enrico Fenzi, "Dall'Africaal Secretum,"Giuseppe
Billanovich and Giuseppe Frasso, eds., 11 Petrarca ad Arqua, Atti del Convegno di Studi nel VI
Centenario (1370-1374) (Padua, 1975), 61-115; discussed by Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 82, 124-26,
141-44. See also E. Paratore, "L'elaborazionepadovana dell'Africa,"G. Padoan, ed., Petrarca,Venezia
e il Veneto (Florence, 1976), 53-91.
In La revisionepetrarchescadellAfrica (Messina, 1984), Vincenzo Fera has identified a series of
annotations to Africa that can be traced back to Petrarch himself, but they provide few datable
references that aid in tracing the various redactions of the poem (see 7-43).
18 Remigio Sabbadini,"Note filologiche sul 'Secretum' del Petrarca,"Rivistadifilologia e di istruzione
classica, 45 (1917): 24-37; discussed by Baron, "Evolutionof Petrarch'sThought,"53-58; and Petrarch's
Secretum, 1-2, 72.
19John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Harold Bloom, ed., Petrarch
(New York, 1989), 44.
20 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 196-202.
21 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy:Imitationand Discoveryin RenaissancePoetry (New Haven,

Conn., 1982), 104.

22 An example of this perspective is offered by Victoria Kahn, "The Figure of the Reader in

Petrarch's Secretum,"Publications of the Modem LanguageAssociation, 100, no. 2 (1985): 154-66.

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136 CraigKallendorf

a broader assessment by scrutinizing the methodological assumptions in Baron's

work with which many scholars today feel most uncomfortable. My hope is that both
the strengths and the weaknesses of Baron's approach will emerge from this
analysis.

THE FULLEST STATEMENT OF BARON'S POSITION can be found in Petrarchs Secretum:Its

Making and Its Meaning. This is a richly textured study whose strength lies in its
close analysis of the text and in its marshaling of relevant details, but Baron's key
conclusions may be summarized as follows. The composition of the Secretum has
traditionally been assigned to the period around 1342-1343, the fictional setting of
the dialogue; based in part on this assignment, Petrarch has been said to have
experienced a religious crisis about this time. Baron, however, argues that the
dialogue "is undoubtedly a creation of the year 1347" but that corrections and
additions from 1349 and 1353 can be identified.23The basic problem with which the
dialogue was originally concerned was Petrarch's apparent unfitness for spiritual
progress even though his residence in the Vaucluse provided ideal conditions for
study and prayer. However, a relapse in his sexual behavior led him to rewrite a
section on wantonness in 1349, and his trips away from the Vaucluse led him to add
material on ambition and on travel at the same time. What is more, a growing
interest in Stoic philosophy led in 1353 to the dispersal of recognizable Stoic
"pockets"throughout the text, and changing circumstances also led to the addition
of sections on avarice and spiritual sloth as well. Interpreted in this way, the
dialogue no longer provides evidence for a sudden religious conversion around
1342. According to Baron, Petrarch used the Secretum to develop a struggle
between "the remnants of his medieval heritage" and "the classicism of the Africa,
the De viris, and some of his early letters."24This struggle is characteristic of
Petrarch's middle period (1347-1353), and the dialogue's redating places its
evolution between these years; only later did Petrarch succeed in allowing his
humanist and religious interests to develop side by side.
It is important to note here that, like the dialogue being studied, Baron's
scholarship on Petrarch also evolved over time. In the essays in From Petrarchto
Leonardo Bruni, which were originally published during the early 1960s, Baron
accepted the traditional 1342-1343 dating of the Secretum; by 1985, the new
1347-1353 dating had become the cornerstone of his approach. The stimulus for
this change (at least in part) was the publication in 1974 of an important book by
the Spanish scholar Francisco Rico: Vida u obra de Petrarca, Volume 1, titled
Lectura del "Secretum."Baron makes much of the differences between his method
and Rico's, and there is certainly some merit to his claims; nevertheless, both
authors struggled with many of the same problems in similar ways, and much of
Baron's book reads like a running commentary on Rico's. Rico in turn had engaged
in an exchange of articles with an Italian scholar named Bortolo Martinelli, who was
also trying to date the Secretum and anchor the dialogue in the development of

23 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 181.

24 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum,247.

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 The HistoricalPetrarch 137

Petrarch's life and thought. Martinelli published a long review of Baron's book in
Speculum-reminding us yet again that scholarship seldom develops in a vacuum.25
Unfortunately, a problem emerges when we place Baron's work into this
interconnected web of assertion and counterassertion. Baron regularly claims a
high degree of certainty about his conclusions: "The survivingversion of the luxuria
section, because it exactly parallels the record in his diary,must have been writtenin
1349." "[T]here can be little doubt that virtually everything we recognize as
Augustinian in Book I must have been part of the original Secretum.""[I]n Book IL
... there is no doubt how the Secretum conversation was structured in the 1340s."
"Consequently, the section on gloria in Book III must have been writtenbefore the
time when ... ," and so forth.26 The problem is that, using a closely related
methodology, Rico concluded that the entire Secretum had been recast in 1353-
that 1353, in other words, was the essential date of composition, not a time when
Petrarch added a few passages to a draft that was basically finished in 1347, as
Baron would argue. And to make the whole matter even more distressing,
Martinelli (recently supported by Enrico Fenzi and Giovanni Ponte) has continued
to insist on the traditional 1342-1343 date of composition-again using the same
basic methodology.27
The problem here is not in the application of the method: Martinelli, Rico, and
Baron are all fine scholars who have spent years poring over the documents related
to Petrarch's life and works. The problem is rather with the method itself. As
Charles Trinkaus put it in his review of Baron's book, "Having examined Rico's
presentation as well as Baron's objections, I conclude that both positions are
arguable because an uncertain date is being established by the similarityof thought
or language of passages in the Secretum and in other undatable writings of
Petrarch."28Baron's treatment of the making and meaning of the Secretum,in short,
has proved highly influential. But it is at present one of several competing

25Francisco Rico, Vida u obra de Petrarca,vol. 1 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1974); noteworthy reviews are
by G. Martellotti, Annali della Scuola Normale Superioredi Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia, ser. 3, 6,
no. 4 (1976): 1394-1401; F. Bruni, Medioevo romanzo, 3 (1976): 144-52; G. Ponte, Rassegna della
letteraturaitaliana, 81 (1977): 442-45; D. Phillips, Italica, 54 (1977): 300-06; A. D. Scaglione, Romance
Philology,30 (1977-78): 116-18; and K. Foster, ModernLanguageReview,73 (1978): 442-44. The major
books and articles on this topic, in addition to those already mentioned, are F. Rico, "Precisazionidi
cronologia petrarchesca: Le 'Familiares' VIII.ii-v e i rifacimenti del Secretum,"Giornalestorico della
letteraturaitaliana, 155 (1978): 481-525; Bortolo Martinelli, In "Secretum"conteso (Naples, 1982); F.
Rico, "Sobre la cronologia del Secretum:Las viejas leyendas y el fantasma nuevo de un lapsus biblico,"
Studi petrarcheschi,n.s., 1 (1984): 51-102; and B. Martinelli, "Sulla data del Secretum del Petrarca:
Nova et vetera," Criticaletteraria,13 (1985): 431-82, 645-93. Martinelli's review of Petrarch'sSecretum
appeared in Speculum, 62 (1987): 644-46; other noteworthy reviews of this book are by Charles
Trinkaus,AHR, 91 (June 1986): 695-96; Franz-Rutger Hausmann,Archivfur das Studiumder neueren
Sprachenund Literaturen,223 (1986): 225-26; M. Palumbo, Medioevo romanzo, 11 (1986): 456-61; F.
E. Cranz, Renaissance Quarterly,39 (1986): 731-32; U. Dotti, Giomale storico della letteraturaitaliana,
164 (1987): 120-25; G. Holmes, English HistoricalReview, 103 (1988): 480-81; and N. Mann, Modern
Language Review, 83 (1988): 751-52.
26 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum,26, 36, 47, 137, all emphases mine.
27 Fenzi, "Dall'Africaal Secretum,"61-64, esp. 63 n. 4; Giovanni Ponte, "Nella selva del Petrarca:La

discussa data del Secretum,"Giornale storico della letteraturaitaliana, 167 (1990): 1-63.
28 Trinkaus,AHR, 696; Trinkaus had expressed similar reservations about trying to identify phases
in Petrarch's life on the basis of problematic datings of various versions of his writings in The Poet as
Philosopher:Petrarchand the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 53.

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138 CraigKallendorf

treatments, and it appears that the impasse will remain until someone devises a
different method with which to approach the problem.

THERE IS, UNFORTUNATELY, MORE AT STAKE with Baron's genetic method than its
failure to produce definitive conclusions. Scholarship in the humanities has changed
a good deal in the last several decades, and a number of Baron's basic assumptions
are likely to make many intellectual and literary historians uncomfortable in 1996.
For instance, Baron falls victim to what Giuseppe Mazzotta has labeled "the
biographical fallacy"-the assumption that Petrarch's works "mechanically reflect
and correspond to" the events of his life.29 Baron is quite clear about this: "the
Secretumreflectssuccessive stages in Petrarch'slife," it is a text in which "he depicted
reality."30This approach relies on what John Barth once called "the Windex theory
of language"-the belief that literary works provide a clear window through which
the reader views a "real"world beyond.31From this belief follows logically Baron's
reliance on "homologies"-passages in different works that have the same basic
structure and derive from the same life event. Since literature can only reflect
reality, parallel passages must present the same biographical data, so that if we can
date the life event or any one of its literaryrenditions, we can date the other parallel
passages as well.32
To be sure, there are times when Petrarch's literary works do not appear to
record the events of his life accurately, which leads Baron to devote an entire
chapter to "The Question of Petrarch's Truthfulness and His Sincerity .. ." The
issue is an important one for Baron, for "it is disquieting to discover any insincerity
in Petrarch"; several key issues are thus examined with the goal of removing as
much disquiet as possible. The ascent of Mt. Ventoux is comparatively easy to
evaluate: Baron concludes that it simply happened as described in Familiares 4.1
(although most scholars now believe otherwise). More difficult is the matter of
Petrarch's acquaintance with Augustine's De vera religione, but here Baron applies
some pressure to the word nuper ("lately") in the Latin text and manages to
reconcile what Petrarch says in the Secretum with what he says elsewhere. More
difficult still is Petrarch's claim that he conquered his sexual urge by the time he
turned forty. Baron's solution here is to note that Petrarch did not make this claim
until he wrote his Posteritati late in life. The claim is not true, and that is a
"disquieting" admission for Baron, though men in general seem to find this a
difficult area to be honest about. Fortunately, however, things are not as bad as they
could be, since "Petrarchwas by that time so advanced in age that his memory could
easily have failed him."33
Now, there are other ways to explain what is going on in these passages short of
the verbal and logical gymnastics in which Baron is engaging. One explanation is
29 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worldsof Petrarch(Durham, N.C., 1993), 6.
30 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 182, 176, my emphases.
31 This phrase was mentioned by John Kronik, "The Web, the Hive, and the Looking Glass: The Art

of Self-Consciousness,"a lecture delivered at Texas A & M University, November 14, 1994; apparently,
Barth had used it in a lecture he delivered at Hamilton College, which Kronik heard.
32 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 147.
33 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum,212.

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 The HistoricalPetrarch 139

that Petrarch reacted differently to the same event on different occasions, that his
writings were shaped at least in part by audience or occasion. Factors such as these,
however, are rhetorical, and "rhetoric" has consistently negative overtones in
Baron's writings on Petrarch.34 When Baron writes that Petrarch's appeal to
witnesses who know he is speaking the truth about his ascent of Mt. Ventoux "does
not look like a mere rhetorical formula," we suspect that he is equating rhetoric
with insincerity-a suspicion that is confirmed a few pages later when Baron
dismisses those modern scholars who presume that in Familiares 4.1, Petrarch "lied
frequently in the interest of mere rhetoric."35Once rhetorical factors are intro-
duced, language becomes something more than referential, and no amount of
Windex will restore it to its pristine clarity.
Another way to deal with the matters troubling Baron is to face directly the
question he refuses to confront: the status of the Secretum as a literary construct.
As Aldo Scaglione reminds us, the Secretum is an autobiography, a work of
literature that imposes on the past a highly structured pattern of the author's
making. At the time Petrarch was finishing his final draft of the Secretum, he was
also working on his Familiares, a work that is also autobiographical and that,
according to most modern scholars, also presents a literary rewriting of reality-a
work of self-fashioning in which Petrarch presents the image of himself that he
wants the world to see.36 I do not wish to efface the differences between these
34Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 147. I am well aware that there is a certain irony in noting that a
historian who authored a classic study on Cicero ("The Memory of Cicero's Roman Civic Spirit in the
Medieval Centuries and in the Florentine Renaissance,"In Searchof FlorentineCivicHumanism:Essays
on the Transitionfrom Medievalto Modern Thought,2 vols. [Princeton, N.J., 1988], 1: 94-133, a revised
version of "Ciceroand the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance,"Bulletin
of the John RylandsLibrary,22 [1938]: 72-97) is mistrustfulof rhetoric, yet Baron states clearly that his
interest in Cicero is not in "the mere teacher of rhetoric familiar to the Middle Ages" but in the writer
who presented "a philosophy of dedication to society and the state" (95-96). This issue arises again in
Baron's now-famous exchange with Jerrold Seigel, who claimed that Leonardo Bruni is best understood
as a practicing rhetorician rather than a committed devotee of civic humanism ("'Civic Humanism' or
Ciceronian Rhetoric?" Past and Present, 34 [1966]: 1-48). Baron disagreed ("Leonardo Bruni:
'Professional Rhetorician' or 'Civic Humanist,"' Past and Present, 36 [1967]: 21-37). Seigel claimed
explicitly in his article that Petrarch had recovered Cicero's way of approachingphilosophy through the
concerns of the orator, and this is the position Baron opposed. Likewise, Enrico Fenzi provided a
rhetorical interpretation of Petrarch-in Baron's words, Fenzi argued that "Petrarchreacted differ-
ently on different occasions, as seen in his letters, speeches, and canzones, and later made use of these
diverse reactions in major works like the Africa and the Secretumwithout definitively reorienting his
view" (Petrarch's Secretum, 133; compare Fenzi, "Dall'Africa al Secretum," 81-82)-which Baron
pronounced a "rathertortuous notion" (Petrarch'sSecretum, 133).
Other scholars such as Trinkaus have long felt comfortable with the rhetorical strain in Petrarch's
thought (see, for example, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist
Thought[Chicago, 1970], 1: 41-50; and ThePoet as Philosopher,chap. 4, 90-113). An increasingnumber
of scholars are exploring the implications of Petrarch's interest in rhetoric. See, for example, Conrad
H. Rawski, "Notes on the Rhetoric in Petrarch's Invective contra medicum," Scaglione, ed., Francis
Petrarch,Six CenturiesLater, 249-77; Kallendorf,In Praiseof Aeneas, 19-57; Massimo Verdicchio, "The
Rhetoric of Enumeration in Petrarch's Trionfi,"Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare A. lannucci, eds.,
Petrarch'sTriumphs:Allegoryand Spectacle (Ottawa, 1990), 135-46; and Ronald Witt, "Petrarchand
Pre-Petrarchan Humanism: Stylistic Imitation and the Origins of Italian Humanism," John W.
O'Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson,eds., Humanityand Divinityin Renaissanceand
Reformation:Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus(Leiden, 1993), 73-101.
35 Baron, Petrarch'sSecretum, 198, 201, my emphasis.
36 Nicholas Mann has brought out this point both in his Petrarch(Oxford, 1984), chap. 6, 87-104; and
in his review of Petrarch'sSecretum,752 (see n. 25 above). The point is also developed with sensitivity
by Aldo Scaglione, "ClassicalHeritage and Petrarchan Self-Consciousness in the Literary Emergence
of the Interior 'I,'" Bloom, ed., Petrarch, 125-37. Marguerite Waller, Petrarch'sPoetics and Literary

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140 CraigKallendorf

works, for there is definitely a difference of some sort in their intended audiences.
Nor do I wish to claim that Petrarch never "told the truth" about himself. But to
insist that this is what he was supposed to be doing every time he set pen to paper
is to begin with an assumption about literature that is profoundly disquieting in the
theoretical climate of the 1990s.

As WE HAVE SEEN, in both his analysis of Petrarch's republican sentiments and in his
efforts to redate the Secretumand trace its evolution, Baron found more "medieval"
features in Petrarch's thought than many other scholars of his day. He also showed
persistent discomfort in the face of the literary and rhetorical aspects of the
documents he was studying. Sometimes, as with Petrarch's political attitudes, this
led to what I see as an oversimplification of the evidence. At other times, as with
his analysis of the Secretum,Baron ended up asking questions about areas (such as
authorial sincerity) that strike many scholars today as tangential to what the
documents can actually reveal.
Yet, even if some of Baron's work raises questions on methodological grounds,
I have no wish to underestimate his contributions to studies on Petrarch. To claim
with Bosco that Petrarch is a man "without a history" is to take the easy way
out-and Baron never did that. Here, as elsewhere, he returned to the documents,
and his writings show the fruits of long hours of study and intimate familiaritywith
hundreds of pages of primary sources. From this familiarity came the claim that
Petrarch's early enthusiasm for classical antiquity was followed by a period of
conflict between the classical and religious strains in his thought, followed in turn
by a mature phase in which both strains developed side by side. It is possible to
accept a version of this claim whether or not one accepts all the details of, say,
Baron's account of the composition and revision of the Secretum, and Petrarchan
studies have been significantlyenriched by this work. Finally, it is important to note
that at a time when many scholars were examining the writings of the past according
to isolated, single-disciplinary models, Baron insisted on reading the poetry and
prose of Petrarch as part of the broader political and cultural currents of its day.37
This insistence is in line with several currently fashionable approaches to Renais-
sance texts, and my guess is that much of the best work on Petrarch in the near
future will ask versions of Baron's questions from a variety of methodological
perspectives that a scholar of his age could not be expected to have anticipated.
That, I believe, is a record any scholar should be proud of.

History (Amherst, Mass., 1980), 13-20, discusses the Secretum from the position that "history is
redefined by Petrarch as a literary construct, open to the same possibilities and subject to the same
limitations as other literary constructs" (p. 10).
37 Denys Hay, "The Place of Hans Baron in Renaissance Historiography,"Anthony Molho and John
A. Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (De Kalb, Ill., 1971), xi-xxix.

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 The Historical Petrarch 141

Craig Kallendorfis a professorof English, Classics,and Speech Communica-

tions at Texas A&M University.He received his PhD in ComparativeLitera-
ture from the Universityof North Carolina(1982), and his researchcenters on
the historyof the book, humanismin the Italian Renaissance,and the history
of rhetoric. Selected publications include In Praise of Aeneas: Virgiland
EpideicticRhetoricin theEarlyItalianRenaissance(1989), two bibliographiesof
Italian Renaissanceeditions of Virgil (1991, 1994), and "FromVirgil to Vida:
The Poeta Theologusin Italian Renaissance Commentary,"Journal of the
Historyof Ideas, 56 (1995): 41-62. He is currentlyworkingon a catalog of the
editions of Aldus Manutiusheld at the Universityof Texas and a book about
Virgil in the Venetian Renaissance.

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