Wilson - Petrarch's Queer History

Petrarch’s Queer History
By A n n a W i l s o n
Introduction
In the fourth letter of his first letter collection, the Rerum familiarum libri (Letters
on Familiar Matters), known as the Familiares, Petrarch writes to Cardinal
Giovanni Colonna, his friend and patron from the powerful Roman Colonna family,
a rather racy tale he claims to have heard from a cleric at the tomb of Charlemagne
in Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) during his northern walking tour in the spring and
summer of 1333. In this story, the emperor Charlemagne falls in love with a
“muliercula,” a “little woman” (we might translate the dismissive diminutive to
“some girl”).1 He completely neglects the ruling of his kingdom during the affair,
so that his councillors begin to be anxious and hope for the king’s interest to flag—
or for the woman’s death. But when she does indeed suddenly die, Charlemagne be-
comes sexually obsessed with her embalmed corpse. A holy man—identified as Saint
Giles/Aegidius in the versions traced by Susanne Hafner,2 but here unnamed—prays
for the release of the king, and receives a revelation that “the cause of the king’s
madness lies under the tongue of the dead woman” (“sub extincte mulieris lingua
furoris regii causam latere”).3 Entering the king’s bedroom by a subterfuge, he re-
moves a magic ring that he finds in the mouth of the dead woman. Charlemagne
immediately becomes revolted by the corpse and has it removed—but transfers
his unnatural affections to the priest.4 Charlemagne begins to “love him, honor
him, to embrace him daily more and more, and finally to do nothing unless it
I am very grateful to the two anonymous readers for Speculum for their generous and rigorous com-
ments, as well as to the editorial staff at Speculum. My thanks also to the other readers whose feedback
greatly improved this article in its earlier stages: James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, Daniel Donoghue,
David Townsend, Sarah Star, Suzanne Akbari, and the Harvard Medieval Colloquium.
1
Familiares 1.4, line 53. All translations in this article are my own. The Latin editions of the letters
to which I refer are as follows: Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco,
4 vols., Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca 10–13 (Florence, 1933–42); Francesco
Petrarca, Le senili, ed. Ugo Dotti and Felicita Audisio, 3 vols. (Turin, 2004–10); Francesco Petrarca,
My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann, I Tatti Renaissance Library 72 (Cambridge, MA,
2016), henceforth Fam., Sen., and Secretum, respectively, with the subsequent numberings referring
to book (in Roman numerals), letter number, and line number(s). Translations to which I am indebted
are Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age / Rerum senilium libri, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin,
and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (New York, 2005); Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters/
Rerum familiarum libri, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (New York, 2005); and Francis Petrarch,
Petrarch’s Secret: or, The Soul’s Conflict with Passion; Three Dialogues between Himself and
S. Augustine, trans. William H. Draper (London, 1911; repr. Norwood, PA, 1975).
2
Susanne Hafner, “Charlemagne’s Unspeakable Sin,” Modern Language Studies 32/2 (2002):
1–14.
3
Fam. 1.4, lines 91–92.
4
For the possible influences on the homosexual elements of Petrarch’s version, see Hafner,
“Charlemagne’s Unspeakable Sin,” 8–11.
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doi: 10.1086/709220, 0038-7134/2020/9503-0003$10.00.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
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Petrarch’s Queer History 717
was approved by him. He also refused to be separated from him either night or
day.”5 To avoid the emperor’s increasing and unwanted attentions, the priest
throws the ring into a bog. Charlemagne then becomes strangely enamored of the
bog, taking walks in it, so that the waters and the smell of the place become delight-
ful to him.6 At last he makes it the site of his capital.
This strange story is the only explicit mention of what we might call homosexu-
ality in Petrarch’s two major letter collections, which are nonetheless profoundly
concerned with love between men. Although Petrarch edited, revised, and some-
times invented new letters while compiling them for publication over many years,
the Familiares and its companion collection, the Rerum senilium libri (or Seniles),
present themselves as broadly chronological, an autobiographical project spanning
Petrarch’s youth to his old age, inspired by his encounter with Cicero’s letter collec-
tion in 1345.7 From its position early in the collection, Familiares 1.4 invites us to
read it in the context of a lifelong concern with the problem of carnal desire and
worldly ties, while, as Alison Cornish points out, also being a “grotesque literaliza-
tion of the love for dead ladies”—said ladies being Laura (who is also referred to as a
muliercula in Secretum 3.4.1) and, symbolically, the city of Rome.8 In fact, this letter
raises and rejects perverted versions of the three types of bond that Petrarch’s letter
collections explore: love for the dead, love for other men, and love for one’s country
here become, in Hafner’s formulation, “necrophilia, sodomy, and paludiphilia.”9
This story distances these perverted desires from the more refined versions in the
Familiares geographically (by locating them in northern Europe, the displaced heart
of the Roman empire), epistemologically (Petrarch repeatedly expresses disbelief
about the story, which he calls a “fabella”), and temporally (this is one of the very
few letters that make reference to any historical figure post‒Saint Augustine;
Charlemagne is not of the classical past but of Petrarch’s own, that is, postclassical
era, as he understood it, the era encountered in “modernos scriptores”).10
5
“Inde totus in antistitem conversus, illum amare, illum colere, illum in dies arctius amplecti,
denique nichil nisi ex sententia illius agere, ab illo nec diebus nec noctibus avelli” (Fam. 1.4, lines
100–103).
6
“illius odore veluti suavissimo delectari” (Fam. 1.4, lines 110–11).
7
On the significance of Petrarch’s letters in the context of his other writings: Albert Russell Ascoli,
“Epistolary Petrarch,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn
Falkeid (Cambridge, UK, 2015), 120–37. On Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s letters and its influence:
Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, 1961), 51–52; and Giuseppe Billanovich, “Quattro
libri del Petrarca e Verona,” Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1990): 223–62, esp. 259–60. On the dating of
Petrarch’s letters and his revision process, Roberta Antognini, Il progetto autobiografico delle “Familiares”
di Petrarca (Milan, 2008), 115–406; Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, vol. 1, Lo scrittoio del
Petrarca, Storia e letteratura 16 (Rome, 1947), 1–55; and Vittorio Rossi, Scritti di critica letteraria, vol. 2,
Studi sul Petrarca e sul Rinascimento (Florence, 1930), 3–227.
8
Alison Cornish, “Embracing the Corpse: Necrophiliac Tendencies in Petrarch,” in Dead Lovers:
Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann
Arbor, 2006), 66.
9
Hafner, “Charlemagne’s Unspeakable Sin,” 10. One of the Speculum reviewers for this piece pointed
out that the perverted reverence for the marsh may also be idolatry.
10
Fam. 1.4, 48. See Andrew J. Romig, “Charlemagne the Sinner: Charles the Great as Avatar of the
Modern in Petrarch’s Familiares 1.4,” in The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts, ed.
William J. Purkis and Matthew Gabriele (Cambridge, UK, 2016), 181‒201.
Speculum 95/3 (July 2020)
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
718 Petrarch’s Queer History
In evoking and then rejecting an excessive, carnal, impious version of love
between men, this letter distances Charlemagne’s homosexual desire from the friend-
ships between men that form the structuring conceit of the Familiares; and yet the
episode performs an apophatic function within the letter collection, an unsettling
invitation to consider the possibility of queerness. Petrarch’s circular narratives of
failed conversion, of broken resolution and continued longing, have been observed
and much discussed as regards his verse and his letters.11 In my readings of Petrarch’s
autobiographical Latin prose writings, I consider this tension between linear and cir-
cular narrative within the context of the homosocial epistolary community Petrarch
constructs. I draw here on Eve Sedgwick’s influential formulation of the “potential
unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual,” where “homo-
social” spaces and behaviors paradoxically are often structured by homophobia and
mandatory heterosexuality.12 I use “queer” rather than “homosexual” to capture not
only same-sex sexual or romantic desire but also the more capacious set of bodily
modes and styles that have an association with same-sex desire or are in alliance with
it against heteropatriarchal structures. Within these structures, queerness is constantly
present as a potential incursion that must be guarded against, as it threatens social
order. In the case of Charlemagne, his desire for the muliercula ceases to recognize
its own appropriate end point in her death, causes his neglect of his kingdom, and
degrades his masculinity (he becomes enervatus, floppy), as I discuss in more detail
below. Enervo means literally “to cut the sinews of,” and so to weaken, to undermine,
but also to effeminize, as nervus also signifies vigor, strength, virility.13 This desire is
transferred easily to a man, the priest, because the desire itself is queer in ways other
than its object choice.
Petrarch develops the idea of temporal mismatch or arrested development through
figures of men whose desire endures long beyond what is appropriate. Torn between
an aging exterior and the inward burning of youthful passions, their bodies undergo
a similar degradation to Charlemagne’s, becoming twisted backward, or mollis, soft,
effeminate. These figures often appear in—or create—moments of historical ambi-
valence, in which Petrarch explores his desiring relationships with men from the
classical past, most notably Cicero. By focusing on these moments in Petrarch’s Latin
writings where queer potential becomes visible in his virtual community of homo-
social intimacy, I will suggest that the shunned possibility of homoeroticism in
Petrarch’s letters is a vital but so far undiscussed aspect of his “hermeneutics of
intimacy,” as Kathy Eden has termed his historiographical method, which transposes
the relationship between present and past onto imagined friendships between indi-
viduals across time.14 In other words, I argue for the existence of a temporal mode
in Petrarch’s letters that we might productively call “queer.”
11
Gur Zak, “Modes of Self-Writing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. David Townsend and Ralph Hexter (Oxford, 2012),
500–501.
12
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New
York, 1985), 1.
13
Parker points out that the word nervus is frequently used to mean “penis” in classical writers, giv-
ing numerous examples (“Virile Style,” 213). Petrarch clearly does not intend this usage here, but he
would certainly have known it.
14
Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago, 2012), 49–72.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
Petrarch’s Hermeneutics of Intimacy
The concept of familiaritas (“intimacy,” or “familiarity,” containing the impli-

cation also of familial or domestic relation, of membership in the same micro-
community) is central to Petrarch’s letters. Eden and Hinds attribute the concept’s
importance to the influence of Cicero’s letters on Petrarch; the Epistolae ad Atticum
and the other letters Petrarch read in Verona are a subtle treatise on personal and
political friendships, teasing out the semantic ranges of amicus and the Ciceronian
“buzzword” familiaris.15 Petrarch adopts this concept in both practical and theoret-
ical terms, first in order to build an informal intellectual community in response to
the loose academic institutions of universities like Bologna, which Petrarch left be-
fore completing his law studies,16 and second, as a way of imagining an intellectual
community explicitly united around love and intimacy—that is, love between its
members, and love for a specific set of texts. The conceit of a (very limited) diversity
of recipients also enables Petrarch to experiment with what he calls a “plain, domestic,
and familiar style” of Latinity in multiple epistolary genres and provides a structur-
ing principle for reflections on a range of subjects, personal, literary, and political.17
The intellectual exchanges in Petrarch’s letters are intertwined with language em-
phasizing mutual love and intimacy, which, like much medieval friendship writing,
skates at the edge of the erotic, as David Wallace points out in his reading of
Petrarch’s letters to Boccaccio.18 The book of letters to classical authors that con-
cludes the Familiares ties together the reflections on the classical past that run
through the collection by incorporating these authors into the collection’s imagined
epistolary community. Petrarch’s historical hermeneutics are thus based on intimate
friendships between men, not merely in their setting (an all-male intellectual com-
munity) but also in their fundamental structure.
The world of Petrarch’s letters is almost entirely male. There is only one letter to a
woman out of approximately five hundred, a ceremonial letter of congratulations to
Empress Anne, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, on the birth of her
daughter that begins, somewhat inauspiciously, “Nor is your joy, indeed mine
and others’, diminished because your first child is a girl: for as wise men are wont
to say, better fortune often follows upon a weak beginning.”19 Laura’s name is barely
mentioned in the letters, while the letter that discusses her most explicitly is in
15
Stephen Hinds, “Defamiliarizing Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction,” Transactions of
the American Philological Association 135/1 (2005): 53.
16
Nancy S. Struever, Theory As Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1992), 6;
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy
(Stanford, CA, 1997), 264–65.
17
“hoc mediocre domesticum et familiare dicendi genus amice leges,” Fam. 1.1, lines 114–16. On
Petrarch’s stylistic experimentation geared to different recipients, see Daniela Goldin Folena,
“Pluristilismo del ‘Familiarum rerum liber,’” in Motivi e forme delle “Familiari” di Francesco Petrarca:
Gargnano del Garda, 2–5 ottobre 2002, ed. Claudia Berra, Quaderni di Acme 57 (Milan, 2003), 263;
and Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski, “Francis Petrarch: First Modern Friend,” Texas Studies in Literature
and Language 47/4 (2005), 269–98, at 280–81.
18
David Wallace, “Letters of Old Age: Love between Men, Griselda, and Farewell to Letters (Rerum
senilium libri),” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and
Armando Maggi (Chicago, 2009), 325–26.
19
Fam. 21.8, lines 1–3.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
response to a suggestion that she is a fictional construct (Fam. 2.9), and he barely
alludes to the mistress with whom he had two children. In general, women are rarely
discussed; the Charlemagne letter is an exception, as is the translation of Boccaccio’s
Griselda (Sen. 17.2), and a characteristically misogynistic letter of advice on mar-
riage (Fam. 22.1). In this way, Petrarch’s letters depart from their Ciceronian exam-
ple. Although Roman amicitia was conceived of as a bond between men, Cicero’s
letters to Atticus reflect the makeup of his political and personal spheres: patriar-
chal, dominated by men, but with women insistently and consistently present.20
The relationships between men and women are a constant subject of discussion
and negotiation between the two friends, as are relationships between patricians,
freedmen, and slaves, and between Romans and their colonized subjects of other
nations. For Cicero, amicitia between elite men constitutes only one facet of his
exploration of the relationships that form the fabric of Roman society; Petrarch’s
almost total exclusion of women from the “Petrarchan Academy” is, in fact, a
remarkable divergence from the imagined community of Cicero’s letters. Friendship,
for Petrarch, like history, is between men.21
“Queering” Petrarch’s historical project creates the potential to revisit the rela-
tionship between historicism, masculinity, and desire in Petrarch’s letters on the
classical past. The flaws in the historiographical argument that a major change oc-
curred between medieval and early modern consciousness of history, and that
Petrarch himself is an instigator or indicator of that change, have been substantially
addressed elsewhere.22 I do not address that argument directly here, but rather its
manifestations and effects, and most notably the fact that two of Petrarch’s letters,
particularly Fam. 4.1, on his ascent of Mount Ventoux, and Fam. 6.2, on the ruins
of Rome, have gained canonical status in a narrative of emerging modernity, where
“modern” means a sense of oneself as an individual in time: an attentiveness to his-
torical context and an awareness of historical difference, in contrast to a perceived
20
Craig A. Williams, Reading Roman Friendship (Cambridge, UK and New York, 2012), 66–67.
21
Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 274–75; Wallace, “‘Whan She Translated Was’: A Chaucerian
Critique of the Petrarchan Academy,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530,
ed. Lee Patterson, New Historicism 8 (Berkeley, 1990), 161–63; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual
Poetics (Madison, WI, 1989), 149–52; and Wojciehowski, “Francis Petrarch: First Modern Friend,”
287–88.
22
For a bibliography of the key works of scholarship on Petrarch as “first modern man,” see Gur
Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 9 n. 27. For the Renaissance
“sense of history,” see, for example, Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, 1969), 1;
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and renascences in Western Art, 2 vols., Gottesman Lectures Uppsala
University 7 (Stockholm, 1960), 1:84. The idea that medieval historiography does not demonstrate
scholarly rigor or interest in empirical evidence has been extensively addressed by medievalists working
on medieval historiography: for example, Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of
History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past As Text: The
Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997) and Romancing the Past: The Rise
of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France, The New Historicism 23 (Berkeley,
1993); Caroline Walker Bynum, “Miracles and Marvels: The Limits of Alterity,” in Franz J. Felten,
Nikolas Jaspert, and Stephanie Haarländer, eds., Vita religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar
Elm 70. Geburtstag, Berliner historische Studien. Ordensstudien 13 (Berlin, 1999), 799–817; and Chris
Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2004; repr. 2007).
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
anachronistic attitude to history in the Middle Ages.23 In these two letters and else-
where Petrarch himself invites his readers to see these two journeys—Petrarch’s
spiritual growth and an Italian rediscovery of antiquity and classical revival—as
one and the same, offering himself, in Ascoli’s words, as “a mediating figure for a
more crucial spiritual dislocation—a hoped-for transit from youth through an am-
biguous ‘middle age’ to achieved conversion and Christian selfhood.”24 Petrarch’s
“modernity” has often been seen in his (apparently novel) sense of himself as situ-
ated at a particular point in history, while the recurring themes of conversion in his
autobiographical project align him with a larger periodizing narrative of historical
change. Thus Petrarch’s “modern” temporal specificity is located in his sense of dif-
ference or distance from the past, which is itself predicated on a heteronormative
masculine subjectivity; the traditional view of Petrarch’s desire for the past does
not acknowledge the queerness of Petrarch’s erotics of historicism, or indeed that
he has an erotics of historicism. In this part of my argument I build on other schol-
arly work of “queering” the Renaissance that has shown how heteronormative
ideologies have structured, through the persistent use of metaphors of desire if noth-
ing else, the periodizing narrative of the Renaissance in modern historiography and
literary studies.25
The Latin letters of the Familiares and of the Rerum senilium libri (Letters on Old
Age, henceforth Seniles) are a counterpoint to Petrarch’s much more studied verse,
an alternative literary space in which he explored the same themes of selfhood and
desire that dominate his Italian writing, but from a different perspective lent by
the formal, contextual, and linguistic differences of the Latin epistle. Indeed, Ascoli
points out that Petrarch exploits and enhances this difference so that “the Familiares
represents the masculine, Latin, homosocial flip-side of the feminine, vernacular,
heterosexual RVF’s poems.”26 Several important studies on the letters in the context
23
Kenneth R. Bartlett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook, 2nd ed. (Toronto,
2011) includes Petrarch’s first letter to Cicero, his “Letter to Posterity,” and the “Ascent of Mount
Ventoux.” On the history of the uses of these letters in this historiographical narrative: Kenneth
Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the ‘Cognitive Turn,’” The American
Historical Review 103/1 (1988): 68; and Carol E. Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch,
Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), 20–21.
24
Albert Russell Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of
Mount Ventoux,’” Stanford Italian Review 10/1 (1991): 13. On this letter as spiritual autobiography,
see also Giuseppe Billanovich, “Petrarca e il Ventoso,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 9 (1966): 389–
401; and Giles Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” in Francesco Petrarca, Citizen of the World:
Proceedings of the World Petrarch Congress, Washington, D.C., April 6–13, 1974, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo,
Studi sul Petrarca 8 (Padua and Albany, NY, 1980), 53–99, at 96–98 and n. 199.
25
See, for example, Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC, 1994);
Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA, 1992; repr.
New York, 2010); Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen
Guy-Bray and Will Stockton (Farnham, UK, 2009); and Madhavi Menon, Unhistorical Shakespeare:
Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (New York, 2008). However, I acknowledge also
Valerie Traub’s more recent response to the increasingly polemical (and, she argues, paradoxical) re-
jection of historicism in queer studies, and particularly the danger of flattening historical, cultural, and
social difference in the history of sexuality: Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,”
PMLA 128/1 (2013): 21–39.
26
Ascoli, “Epistolary Petrarch,” 124. The Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is the original Latin title of
the Italian poems for which Petrarch is best known, often titled Il Canzoniere or Rime Sparse.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
of Petrarch’s Latin autobiographical works, and on individual letters in relation to
other medieval genres, such as travel writing, have begun to correct the comparative
neglect of Petrarch’s Latin writings as literature, rather than as sources for autobio-
graphical details.27 Much of this recent scholarship reads the letters together with
several other of Petrarch’s Latin works that have a similarly introspective bent and
show traces of composition and editing in relation to Petrarch’s interest in shaping
the narrative of his own life for himself and for posterity. These texts include the
prose dialogue between Petrarch and Saint Augustine known as the Secretum; the
ethical and lifestyle treatises De vita solitaria, De otio religioso, Rerum memorandum
libri, De remediis utriusque fortunae; and miscellaneous autobiographical fragments
from his manuscripts, including his obituary notes in the flyleaf of the Ambrosian
Virgil28 and even his gardening diary.29 This article, although interested primarily
in Petrarch’s letters, also discusses the Secretum because, as an imagined trans-
temporal dialogue with Augustine, it clearly forms part of the same literary experi-
ment as the letters to classical authors that are a major point of discussion here, and
consequently has heavily informed the scholarly understanding of the letters as an
autobiographical project. The Secretum’s dating (as with most of Petrarch’s works)
is debated, but currently the timeline of compositions and revisions includes a prob-
able initial composition period around 1342–43 and revision in the early 1350s.
Thus its writing coincides with the periods of initial composition of many of the let-
ters to classical authors, and with the early stages of collation and editing of the
Familiares, the idea for which was born from that 1345 encounter with a volume
of Cicero’s letters in the Cathedral Library of Verona.30 The Secretum is a natural
companion to the letters in their exploration of Petrarch’s relationship to his personal
and national pasts, his love for the dead, and the tension between stasis and change.
There is great scope for a fuller discussion of queer desire, of masculinity and the self
in Petrarch’s autobiographical Latin writings, and this article inevitably represents
only a partial foray into queer readings of Petrarch.
Petrarch and Queer Temporality
Petrarch’s historicism appears to be rooted in difference, and this has been the
dominant scholarly narrative. He is influential in his emphasis on reading classical
texts in toto rather than in the form of aphorisms divorced from context via florilegia
27
See, for example, Antognini, Il progetto autobiografico; Gur Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism; Shayne
Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago, 2017); Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery
of Intimacy; and Motivi e forme delle “Familiari,” ed. Berra.
28
Mann, “From Laurel to Fig,” 26–27; Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2 vols.,
Bibliothèque Littéraire de la Renaissance, n.s. 1–2 (Paris, 1907), 2:286.
29
Mann, “From Laurel to Fig,” 40; William Ellis-Rees, “Gardening in the Age of Humanism:
Petrarch’s Journal,” Garden History 23/1 (1995): 10–28.
30
For the dating of the Secretum to 1342–43 and its later revisions, see Hans Baron, Petrarch’s
“Secretum”: Its Making and Its Meaning, Medieval Academy Books 94 (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
For the dating of the letters to classical authors, see Antognini, Il progetto autobiografico, 31–35,
42–49, 405–6; Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 1:28–41; Wilkins, Life of Petrarch; and Ernest Hatch
Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years, The Medieval Academy of America Publication 70 (Cambridge,
MA, 1959).
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
or artes poetriae.31 His encounter with Cicero’s personal letters detailing his life in
contemporary politics led to his reevaluation of the author’s highly popular philo-
sophical works in their historical context.32 Petrarch’s letters to classical authors
poignantly undermine their assertion of a shared linguistic and cultural community
with farewells that draw attention to the religious and temporal gulf between
Petrarch and his “recipient.” This example from the letter to Livy is typical: “From
the land of the living, in that region of Italy and in that city where you were born
and are buried, in the vestibule of the temple of Justina Virgo, and standing before
your gravestone, on 22 February, in the year 1351 from the birth of Him whom you
might have seen or heard, had you lived a little longer.”33 This passage is also typical
of the ways in which Petrarch often enfolds his relationship with the past into his
“poetics of exile.” Spatial proximity here only emphasizes temporal distance; earlier
in the letter, he contrasts his wandering over the countryside Livy once saw with a
fantasy of impossible time travel, “You often make me forget the woes of the present
day and send me into happier centuries.”34 The motif of the man out of time returns
in even more force in the Letter to Posterity, Petrarch’s unfinished autobiography-
cum-apologia that concludes the Seniles:
Incubui unice inter multa ad notitiam vetustatis, quoniam michi semper etas ista displicuit . . .
alia qualibet etate natus esse semper optaverim et hanc oblivisci, nisus animo me aliis semper
inserere. Historicis itaque delectatus sum.35
[I took especial pleasure in the study of the ancients, since this age always displeased me . . .
I would always have wished to be born in any other age and to forget this one, striving
always to imagine myself in others. And so I delighted in histories.]
The past of Roman antiquity in Petrarch’s letters is a site of nostalgia but also of
desired futurity; decidedly different from what his homeland has become but also
an example of what it could become. In his letter on the ruins of Rome, Petrarch
laments its current state and the ignorance of its denizens about their history:
“For who could doubt that it would not rise up at once, if Rome should ever come
to know itself?”36
The sense of loss that permeates Petrarch’s descriptions of his desire for the past
blurs together with his more well-known lost love, Laura. Book 3 of the Secretum
explicitly associates the two, as Augustinus (henceforth I will use “Augustinus” to
distinguish the figure of Saint Augustine in the Secretum from the historical Saint
Augustine) castigates Petrarch’s inability to relinquish his love for both Laura and
classical antiquity. The latter passion is evidenced by his continued laboring at the
two projects of epic and historical biography that have divided his attention,
31
Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to
Bruni, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 74 (Leiden and Boston, 2000), 239; see, for ex-
ample, Secretum 3.14, line 8.
32
Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 280.
33
“Apud superos, in ea parte Italie et in ea urbe in qua natus et sepultus es, in vestibulo Iustine
virginis et ante ipsum sepulcri tui lapidem, VIII Kalendas Martias, anno ab illius ortu quem paulo
amplius tibi vivendum erat ut cerneres vel audires natum, MCCCLI,” Fam. 24.8, lines 45–49.
34
“immemorem sepe presentium malorum seculis me felicioribus inseris,” Fam. 24.8, line 25.
35
Sen. 18.1, 11.
36
Fam. 4.2, lines 120–21.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
the Africa and the De viris illustribus.37 Elsewhere, the figure of the dead woman
repeatedly stands in for the recovery of Latin antiquity, as in Fam. 2.9, where
Petrarch replies to Giacomo Colonna’s playful accusation that “Laura” is as illusory
as Petrarch’s expressed intention to visit Rome.38 Petrarch’s own association of the
desire for the classical past with his desire for a dead woman (or a woman whose
death is anticipated and imagined, as in the Secretum) sets up his desire for the past
as a hetero desire, a desire for difference.
And yet, running counter to the assertions of division and difference in Petrarch’s
letters is a mode of historiography that seeks out familiarity and operates through
anachrony and disruptive chronologies, and which Petrarch associates with queer
bodies. Madhavi Menon describes the association of historicism with a heterosex-
ual schema in Shakespeare scholarship as “hetero-temporality”; its opposite is the
“homohistory” that queer theory embraces as an alternative historiographical prac-
tice, a practice seeking familiarity and community across time, which embraces the
potential of anachronism and “insists that neither past nor present is capable of a
full and mutually exclusive definition.”39 Before returning to Petrarch, I will briefly
outline the workings, logics, and contexts of queer theory’s alternative historiography.
The Charlemagne episode that I discussed above suggests a level of semiotic over-
lap for Petrarch and his readers between necrophilia and homosexuality. No Future,
Lee Edelman’s analysis of representations of homosexuality in twentieth-century
Western media and political discourse, identifies a similar semiotic overlap where
homosexuality is made to stand in for the “death drive”40 and against the future,
in a symbolic order in which the Child is co-opted as a symbol of futurity and imag-
ined as being under threat by homosexuals (here figuring both as potential predators
or corrupters and as nonreproducers). Queer theorists of the past thirty years have
unfolded the ramifications of this persistent association of queerness and modes of
temporality that interrupt the forward flow of time associated with heteronormative
life schemes (what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism”41). Such associations in-
clude the nineteenth-century medical discourse that pathologized homosexuality as
a form of arrested development;42 the fact that, in numerous historical cultures, ad-
olescence has been the only permissible period for homosexuality or gender and
sexual deviance (in an eromenos-erastes relationship, for example, or in a period
of “experimentation,” particularly within same-sex institutional settings43); and
melancholia, nostalgia, and other negative affects common to queer literature that
are “tied to the experience of social exclusion and to the historical ‘impossibility’
of same-sex desire.”44 In late medieval Italy, too, if there was a window of relative
37
Secretum 3.14.9–10.
38
Fam. 2.9, 135–62. Cornish, “Embracing the Corpse,” 58. On this letter see also Martin Eisner, “In
the Labyrinth of the Library: Petrarch’s Cicero, Dante’s Virgil, and the Historiography of the Renaissance,”
Renaissance Quarterly 67/3 (2014): 755–90, at 776–77.
39
Menon, Unhistorical Shakespeare, 3.
40
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC, 2004), 7.
41
Edelman, No Future, 3.
42
Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany, NY, 2009), 10.
43
David M. Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 6/1 (2000): 92.
44
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 4.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
acceptability for queerness (that is, the sexual passivity and associated gender-deviance
associated with the eromenos, as opposed to penetrative activity) between men, it was
adolescence; the historical record (continuous from antiquity) suggests that sexual
relationships between men were imagined to take place between a younger and an
older partner, with the younger partner taking on the characteristics of passivity and
effeminacy and facing the greater stigma if such same-sex liaisons continued past the
age of acceptability (often the age at which boys exhibit the physical signs of mascu-
line adulthood, i.e., facial hair).45
Queer theory observes, in Carolyn Dinshaw’s words, “sex’s irreducible inter-
relatedness with other cultural phenomena.”46 This observation of the ways in
which anachrony or asynchrony and same-sex desire have been linked is not a claim
that backwardness, anachrony, and same-sex desire are inherently associated, but
rather that in the Western tradition, through long association between same-sex
liaisons, abstinence from reproductive sexuality, and nonparticipation in the linear
continuity of society, these cultural ideas have often come to stand in for or to struc-
ture each other, and thus, sometimes, can make each other legible beyond straight-
forward depictions of homosexuality.47 The articles in the 2007 special issue of
GLQ on sexuality and temporality thus “connect the marginalized time schemes
they explore to subjugated or disavowed erotic experiences, including male homo-
eroticism, same-sex marriage, interracial coupling, heterosexual feminine desire,
mourning, incest, and pedophilia.”48
Immaturity is one of these queer temporal modes, a kind of backwardness. The
immature person’s mind does not match up to the age of their body, creating a tem-
poral misalignment. To be immature is to be behind schedule, temporally deviant;
it is to fail to learn, develop, adapt in tandem with the progression of time as ob-
served in the physical world. Immaturity in this sense is queer, in that it is a threat
to reproductive futurism. Jack Halberstam imagines queerness to be aligned with an
“epistemology of youth” that disrupts conventional expectations of progress from
childhood to adulthood; In a Queer Time and Place explores queerness as a set of
practices enacted in places and on schedules that have the potential to disrupt heg-
emonic (patriarchal, neocapitalist) social structures, such as club culture, punk
rock, and sex work.49
Queer affect can also take the form of “a queer desire for history,”50 a backward
look toward the past rooted in an impulse toward recovery, recuperation, and rep-
aration of queer experiences across time, a historical hermeneutics that has been set
in opposition to a historicist understanding of the past as irrevocably alien from the
45
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence
(Oxford, UK, 1996), 12–13.
46
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern
(Durham, NC, 1999), 13.
47
For the articulation of this distinction I am indebted to Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others, xi–xv.
48
Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13/2–3 (2007):
159.
49
J. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York,
2005), 3.
50
Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A
Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13/2–3 (2007): 178.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
present. Dinshaw brings to her readings of medieval texts “an impulse toward mak-
ing connections across time between . . . lives, texts and other cultural phenomena”51
that she identifies as queer, which she uses to recognize moments of desire-driven
temporal slippage in medieval texts themselves. Dinshaw identifies this impulse as
queer because the community and sameness that she seeks in the past is one of
shared queer desires. But this impulse itself is also queer, because it rejects the
linearity of time, the linearity that is particularly complicit with Western, hetero-
normative teleological narratives of reproduction, succession, and progress. Carla
Freccero goes even further, imagining a “queer” historical project that uses this kind
of nonlinear slippage between past and present but is not necessarily focused on
queer desire or community; indeed, she acknowledges that “If, in a given analysis,
queer does not intersect with, touch, or list in the direction of sex—the catchall word
that here refers to gender, desire, sexuality, and perhaps anatomy—it may be that
queer is not the conceptual analytic most useful to what is being described.”52 There
is a possibility for Freccero’s “queer kind of history” to be queer only in its herme-
neutics, which focus on “dismantling the barriers between the world considered as
an object of social scientific study and the world considered as infused with passional
attachment, fantasy, and wish.”53 Likewise the editor’s preface to Queering the
Middle Ages embraces the “logic of the queer,” effecting “a disturbance of temporal-
ity” and hence the potential for a disruption, or revising, of periodizing narratives.54
Nevertheless, this attentiveness to a queer historical hermeneutics has gathered around
histories that seek out specifically the history of queer desires, identities, or practices—
that is, the continuation of a recognizable transhistorical queer community—such
as in Will Fisher’s suggestion that the Victorian formation of the Renaissance as
a historical period celebrated the role of gay men in the intellectual and cultural
flowering in fourteenth-century Italy, in service to an emerging contemporary polit-
ical identity.55
This queer historical hermeneutics (or “homohistory”) bears a striking resemblance
to the medieval anachronism against which Renaissance historiographical practices
have been typically defined in Petrarch scholarship, for example in Thomas M.
Greene’s The Light in Troy:
[For Petrarch] history betrayed a rupture, whereas medieval historiography tended to
stress continuities—the five monarchies, the six ages, the nine worthies, the repetitions
of the liturgical year, the millennial autorità evoked by Dante in reply to Saint John—even
if it could not fail to take note of the disjuncture of Christian revelation. The Book contain-
ing that revelation existed in a continuous present . . . it is this sense of continuity that ac-
counts for the appeal of medieval anachronism.56
51
Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 1.
52
Carla Freccero, “Queer Times,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106/3 (2007): 490.
53
Freccero, “Queer Times,” 491.
54
“Introduction,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Medieval
Cultures 27 (Minneapolis, 2001), xii.
55
Will Fisher, “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Historiographical Writing about the ‘Renaissance,’”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14/1 (2008): 41–67.
56
Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, Elizabethan
Club Series 7 (New Haven, CT, 1982), 30.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
Medieval anachronism sometimes comes into focus as examined practice, as, for ex-
ample, in Nicholas Watson’s analysis of the empathetic “time travel” of Julian of
Norwich,57 and in Dinshaw’s study of Margery Kempe as cross-dresser, both stud-
ies that experiment with practicing affective empathy as historical hermeneutics—
the “queer touch across time”—as well as interrogating it in medieval texts.58 It is
not surprising, of course, that we might find a hermeneutics in Petrarch’s work that
resembles contemporary religious thought or devotional praxis, although a full ac-
count of the overlap between this medieval praxis and queer historical hermeneutics
is outside the bounds of this study. It is worth noting, however, that I draw on other
recent scholarship exploring the “medievalness” of Petrarch’s hermeneutics, for ex-
ample, Martin Eisner’s argument that Dante’s historical hermeneutics structure
Petrarch’s far more than Petrarch admits or than previous studies have acknowl-
edged, and Demetrio Yocum’s work on the Carthusian influence on Petrarch.59
In seeking out moments of queerness in Petrarch’s work, therefore, we may find a
Petrarchan historical hermeneutics that disrupts not only the paradigms thought to
apply in Petrarch’s work but also the periodizing narratives that enfold him. Historio-
graphical narratives of progress from medieval to modern, which often make
Petrarch’s letters stand in for precisely the moment of conversion that Petrarch him-
self finds so elusive, do so through complicity with the homophobia that hems in
Petrarch’s explorations of history via desire between men, and in doing so overlook
the queer possibility with which Petrarch imbues familiaritas.
We might glimpse an example of this queer historical impulse in Greene’s mem-
orable description of the letters to classical authors as an “incomplete embrace.”60
The letters, Greene writes, are the best example of the limitations of Petrarch’s “heur-
istic imitation.” Heuristic imitation is Greene’s formulation of Petrarch’s mode of
historical inquiry through mimicking the ancients (and hence exhibiting familiarity
with them), a concept overlapping with Eden’s aforementioned “hermeneutics of in-
timacy.” Greene describes this one-sided epistolary exchange in romantic terms:
“the ancients whom [Petrarch] loved as friends maintained a marble or a bronze
repose that could break hearts.”61 The ancients as heartbreakers, coupled with
the curious qualifier “as friends,” invites the possibility that the reader might mis-
takenly believe Petrarch loves the ancients as more than friends; Cicero becomes
the statue to Petrarch’s would-be Pygmalion, cold stone unresponsive to his over-
tures. Although this image also resonates with Charlemagne’s attentions to his dead
muliercula, this influential and much-quoted analysis frames Petrarch’s historicism
not in hetero terms—that is, as an awareness of and attraction to difference—but as
a rejected or disavowed romantic overture between men whose queer possibilities
run just beneath the surface. What, then, if we returned to the queer possibilities
in Petrarch’s own formulations of desire between men? We find it most often, I will
57
Nicholas Watson, “Desire for the Past,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 89.
58
Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 156–201.
59
Eisner, “In the Labyrinth of the Library,” esp. 769; Demetrio S. Yocum, Petrarch’s Humanist
Writing and Carthusian Monasticism: The Secret Language of the Self, Medieval Church Studies 26
(Turnhout, 2013).
60
Greene, The Light in Troy, 43.
61
Ibid.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
suggest, in the figure of the man looking over his shoulder, looking back at what he
desires.
The letter in which Petrarch recounts his ascent of Mount Ventoux is an impor-
tant exploration of the interlinking of temporality and desire in the figure of the male
body. Billanovich has shown it was extensively revised, if not written in 1352 or
1353, around the same time as Petrarch was revising the Secretum.62 Like that dia-
logue, the letter is a heartfelt meditation on the tug-of-war between worldly desires
and a Christian renunciation of the world, such as Petrarch’s brother Gherardo, a
Carthusian monk, had embarked on in 1342 (the letter is ostensibly composed be-
fore then). In the letter (henceforth “The Ascent”), Petrarch recounts his day’s climb
with Gherardo, and reads into their contrasting methods of ascent (his own indirect
and lazy, his brother’s direct and physically strenuous) their contrasting moral char-
acters, foreshadowing Gherardo’s entry into the harsh Carthusian life. “The Ascent”
is suffused with ambivalence and frustration at, as Ascoli writes, Petrarch’s “inability
to effect a final passage from the earthly desires of youth to the heavenly desires of
maturity.”63 Frustrated by his inability to progress, he reflects on how his life up
to this point—it has been ten years to the day since he left his childish studies
(“puerilibus studiis dimissis”) at Bologna—has also been characterized by promis-
ing starts and shameful retreats, responding to the gravitational pull of desire. The
circularity of his soliloquy mimics his walk up the mountain, with false starts and
backtracking:
Quod amare solebam, iam non amo; mentior: amo, sed parcius; iterum ecce mentitus sum:
amo, sed verecundius, sed tristius; iantandem verum dixi. Sic est enim; amo, sed quod non
amare amem, quod odisse cupiam.64
[What I used to love, I no longer love; I’m lying: I love it, but less; but look, again I’ve lied; I
love it, but with more shame, more sadness; now at least I’ve spoken the truth. It’s like this:
I love, but I love what I ought not, and desire what I should revile.]
Although reading “The Ascent” in the context of his Italian poetry invites us to
assume that the youthful passion Petrarch seeks to shake off is his attachment to
Laura (or to heterosexual desire more generally), reading “The Ascent” in the con-
text of the Secretum suggests the extent to which Petrarch associates his youthful
love for Laura with his literary endeavors and passions, and with his Latin writings
on antiquity. The two desires appear united here again as worldly ties he cannot re-
linquish; in his meditation on his spiritual progress, what pulls him back is “terrenas
et infimas voluptates” (“worldly and low pleasures,” Fam. 4.1, 105) but also labor
wickedly deferred (“male dilati laboris,” Fam. 4.1, 107), suggesting the unfinished
works that Augustinus scolds Petrarch about in the Secretum. The affiliation of
“The Ascent” to the Secretum is made clearer with the appearance of Saint Augustine
on the top of the mountain, as Petrarch takes out his pocket Confessions, a fur-
ther rebuke for his inability to model himself after the saint and finally and truly
62
Mann, “From Laurel to Fig,” 36–37. On the dating of “The Ascent”: Antognini, Il progetto
autobiografico, 140–42; Billanovich, “Petrarca e il Ventoso,” 399. On the dating of the Secretum,
see n. 28 above.
63
Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age,” 13.
64
Fam. 4.1, 154–58.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
leave behind his devotion to ancient writers and embrace spiritual pursuits. The
path Petrarch takes through time as well as place in this letter is characterized by
backward turns and retraced steps, pulled by desire both of and for the past.
The motifs that appear in “The Ascent” of backtracking and a refusal to progress
appear throughout Petrarch’s Latin writings associated with a retreat to sameness,
the homosocial community, and familiaritas (familiarity, intimacy) as a hermen-
eutics, in a way that suggests a Petrarchan “homohistory,” to use Menon’s formu-
lation. Figures of deviant, queer temporality, particularly immature old men, recur
in moments of confrontation with his own historical project. There is a moment in
this letter when Petrarch and his brother, while reveling in their youthful energy
(“animorum vigor, corporum robur ac dexteritas,” Fam. 4.1, 50–51), meet an
elderly shepherd who urges them to retreat (“retrahere,” 4.1, 53), telling them that
he himself, fifty years before, climbed the mountain, “eodem iuvenilis ardoris impetu”
(4.1, 55)—from the same impulse of youthful ardor—but got nothing but regret,
hard work (“penitentiam et laboram,” 4.1, 56), and torn clothes from the endeavor.
Unable to persuade them, he shows them where to start and gives them some sug-
gestions, and in the last we see of him, he is “multa monens multaque iam digressis
a tergo ingeminans” (4.1, 64–65)—still uttering warnings at them over his shoulder
as they walk away from him. The old man appears like a specter of their possible
future selves, a figure of cross-temporal identification linked by desire (“eodem
impetu”), and twisted around, “a tergo,” looking backward at them as he continues
with his fruitless attempts to change their minds, just as Petrarch shall shortly look
backward at his route and his life with regret. The queerness of the old man looking
back at his own youth, unable to let it go, is the subject of the next part of this article.
Although not always literally twisted around, the childish old man’s queerness mani-
fests in his body in another way, in his mollitia and enervatio—slack body and soft
will.
Petrarch’s Senes Pueriles
Petrarch’s epistolary friendship networks replicate the all-male world of the

schoolrooms and universities in which he would have first encountered classical
texts. As a privileged, gifted child being educated in an Italian enclave at the papal
seat in Avignon, with a passion for reading and surrounded by indulgent adults and
richly stocked libraries, Petrarch seems to have had some measure of control over
his own syllabus. In a letter to the papal secretary Luca da Penna, Petrarch claims
he read Cicero with a precocious pleasure, even before his Latin was up to the task:
ab ipsa pueritia, quando ceteri omnes, aut Prospero inhiant, aut Esopo, ego libris Ciceronis
incubui . . . Et illa quidem etate nichil intellegere poteram, sola me verborum dulcedo
quedam et sonoritas detinebat . . . Erat hac, fateor, in re, pueri non puerile iudicium.65
[From early childhood, when all the others were eating up Prosperus or Aesop, I brooded
over Cicero’s books . . . at that age of course I could understand nothing; only a certain
65
Sen. 16.1.2.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
sweetness or tunefulness of the words captivated me . . . In this, I confess, a child’s judgment
was not childish.]
Petrarch alludes here to the topos of the puer senex, the preternaturally wise child.
Curtius traces this cliché from Virgil (Iulus is “ante annos animumque gerens
curamque virilem”—“in possession of a man’s mind and forethought beyond his
years”), through its popularity with late antique rhetoricians and Greek fathers,
to its most influential iteration for the Middle Ages appearing in Gregory the Great’s
vita of Saint Benedict, in which the saint “ab ipso suae pueritiae cor gerens senile”
(“even from his childhood had the heart of an old man”).66 Petrarch’s use of this
topos, and even an echo of Gregory’s phrasing, “corrected” to a more classical usage,
following Augustine,67 to “ab ipsa pueritia,” would have inevitably evoked the
comparison (perhaps here purposefully ironic; certainly elsewhere) between himself
and a line of saintly pueri seniles; the arrogance of this invited comparison is deflected
by the modest “hac, fateor, in re” (“in this matter, I confess”). Although Petrarch
suggests that his interest in Cicero was prodigious, even premature, Petrarch’s con-
temporaries may well have associated classical literature with childhood, since Latin
verse was part of grammatical instruction in the earlier stages of Latin education.
Much of this Latin poetry was classical; popular school texts included Virgil’s
Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics; Ovid’s Ars amatoria, or the Metamorphoses; com-
position guides like Horace’s Ars poetica; the epic poems of Statius and Lucan; some
of Juvenal’s satires; and finally, perhaps, Boethius.68 After this, if they entered higher
education, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds would go onto higher studies of prose
rhetoric and letter-writing (the ars dictaminis), or theology, or (as Petrarch did)
law at a university like Bologna.69 Indeed, Petrarch often describes his love for clas-
sical writers, particularly Cicero, as a lifelong one stemming from childhood: “[Cicero]
has always been an object of great love and devotion for me from an early age,” he
writes in a letter to “Socrates” (his friend Ludwig van Kempen).70
However, the figure of the puer senex appears inverted in the Secretum as a senex
puerilis; not one of those on whom Jesus calls in Matthew 18.3 to become “as child-
ren” (“sicut parvuli”) that they may enter the kingdom of heaven, but an old man
66
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask,
Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton, 1953), 98–101.
67
For an example of Augustine’s usage of this phrase, see, for example, De ordine 2.16.44.
68
Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” in The Cambridge
History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK, 1999), 380–85; Paul F.
Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, The Johns Hopkins
University Studies in Historical and Political Science 107th series 1 (Baltimore, 1989), 111–14; and
Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text, Cambridge Studies
in Medieval Literature 27 (New York, 1996), 7–11.
69
Marjorie Curry Woods, “Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the
Schoolroom,” New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009): 113–32; Woods and Copeland, “Classroom
and Confession,” 376–406; and Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance
Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge,
UK, 2001). For a sweeping history of Latin culture in Italy and the role of education up to the thir-
teenth century, see Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance
Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge, UK, 2012).
70
“michi ab ineunte etate tam carus semper et tam cultus,” Fam. 21.10, lines 103–4.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
who cannot give up his youthful passions. Here these passions are “puerilia studia”
rather than the “voluptates” that occupied Petrarch on Mount Ventoux:
Gratusque tibi est quisquis non senex occurrit, qui te infantulum vidisse testetur; presertim
si, more communis sermonis, id heri aut nudius tertius se se vidisse contendit . . .
Nonagenarios pueros videmus passim de rebus vilissimis altercantes, puerilia nunc etiam
sectantes studia. Dies nempe fugiunt, corpus defluit, animus non mutatur. Putrescant licet
omnia, ad maturitatem suam ille non pervenit . . . Pudeat ergo senem amatorem dici.71
[You are delighted when you come across someone who is not particularly old who
declares he knew you when you were a little baby, especially if, in that common figure
of speech, he insists that it was only yesterday or the day before. . . . Constantly we see boys
of ninety quarreling about trifles and even now pursuing childish studies. The days fly past,
the body ages, but the mind does not change. Although everything decays, he does not
come to maturity . . . you should be ashamed to be called an aged lover.]
The passage rings with the expectorative alliteration of pudeat, putrescant, and
pueriles, where childishness is suffused with shame, contempt, and degradation.
Elsewhere in this passage Augustinus distinguishes sharply between the young body
with age-appropriate desires and the childish or immature body: “Pueritia quidem
fugit; sed, ut ait Seneca, puerilitas remanet” (“Childhood passes, but, as Seneca says,
‘childishness lingers’”).72 On Mount Ventoux, Petrarch realizes it has been ten years
since he left his “puerilia studia”—there, the phrase refers to his law studies at the
University of Bologna, but with irony, since in a more general sense, he has not yet
left behind his youthful occupations. The phrase’s use here in the Secretum evokes
Petrarch’s youthful studies in his boyhood institutions, while condemning him as a
senex amator—a phrase he invites us to see as a disrupted norm, a deviant identity.
Thus the Secretum calls on the letter on the Ascent of Mount Ventoux in order to
collapse together Petrarch’s devotion to Cicero and other ancient authors with
his love for Laura, as the Charlemagne letter collapses together homosexuality
and the love for a dead woman.
The “nonagenarios pueros” (“ninety-year-old boys”) are perverse figures that we
might productively call “queer”; their bodies are a mismatch to their desires, which
they should have outgrown. Elsewhere, Petrarch elaborates on the softening, fem-
inizing effects of these desires on these bodies. In Fam. 1.1, he observes that his writ-
ing style has gone from strong to weak as he has grown older, instead of the other
way around:
Pudet vite in mollitiem dilapse; ecce enim, quod epystolarum ordo ipse testabitur, primo
michi tempore sermo fortis ac sobrius, bene valentis index animi, fuerat . . . sequentia in
dies fragiliora atque humiliora sunt, neque sat virilibus referta querimoniis . . . Ergo ego
in adolescentia vir fuero, ut in senectute puer essem? Infelix et execranda perversitas!73
71
Sec. 3.12.4–6.
72
Here, puerilitas is clearly the state of immaturity, inappropriately behaving or feeling like a child
when one is no longer a child, with a suggestion of arrested development and falling behind in an
expected trajectory of growth or progress. Here and elsewhere I have sometimes translated puerilis
and puerilitas as “immature” and “immaturity,” as distinct from “childish[ness],” “boyish[ness],”
etc., to make clear what I take to be the full semantic range of the Latin word.
73
Fam. 1.1, lines 262–70.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
[I am ashamed of a life fallen into excessive softness. The very order of my letters will testify
to this. My style was strong and sober in the early years, the sign of a healthy mind . . . with
the passage of time it became weaker and more humble, no longer bursting with masculine
aggression . . . Was I therefore a man in my youth, only to become a child in my old age?
Unfortunate and cursed perversity!]
Petrarch anticipates that his style should follow the expected linear progression of
his mind, becoming steadily more serious and sober, but instead it doubles back on
itself, as with his route up Mount Ventoux, where Petrarch describes himself in com-
parison to his brother as “mollior,” softer and weaker of will (Fam. 4.1, 72).74 The
passage above sets the mollitia into which he has slipped in opposition with the
virilitas his style should possess. The backward-facing, immature body is here, again,
a queer body; in both classical and medieval usage, mollitia frequently refers to effem-
inacy in men, with a suggestion of inclinations toward sexual passivity with both men
and women. Petrarch draws here on a rhetorical tradition of using gendered and
sexual metaphors to describe Latin style, which Patricia Parker traces from Ben Jonson
back to Quintilian, who famously compares an overly ornate Latin style to a vigorous
masculine body made womanish (“muliebris”) by cosmetics and depilation (Institutes
8.18–22); this style is also racialized, drawing on contemporary stereotypes of Eastern
decadence and effeminacy (Inst. 12.10.12). Quintilian points to criticisms of Cicero as
overly bombastic and ornate in his style, “paene, quod procul absit, viro molliorem”
(“almost, heaven forbid, softer than a man”) (Inst. 12.10.12). This criticism of Cicero
was echoed by early modern critics, as Parker observes.75
This sexualized metaphor of softness and rigidity appears also in the Charlemagne
letter, where the homosexual nature of the king’s regard for the priest is foreshad-
owed by Petrarch’s choice of language to describe his love for the muliercula:
Charlemagne is completely unmanned by his passion for her: “eius blanditiis ener-
vatus” (“made floppy by her embraces,” Fam. 1.4, 54). As I discussed earlier, enervo
suggests the undermining of masculine strength, nervus suggests stiffness and virility.
A lack of nervus also appears in the categorization of insufficiently masculine Latin
styles: the Ad Herennium describes an overly wordy or rambling Latin style as “sine
nervis et articulis . . . nec potest confirmare neque viriliter sese expedire” (“without
sinews and joints . . . it cannot get under way with resolution and virility,” Ad
Herennium 4.11, 16). As a metaphor, enervatus draws on centuries-old cultural
paradigms and metaphoric associations common in classical Roman Latin litera-
ture and with continued purchase in medieval Italian culture that associated physical
softness, flexible posture, and emotional lability with male effeminacy and sexual
passivity.76 Charlemagne’s slavish devotion to a woman, and a muliercula at that
(this woman, unnamed and diminutized in Petrarch’s version, is in other versions
identified as Charlemagne’s powerful wife, Fastrada77), emasculates him, and both
anticipates and prefigures his devotion to the priest.
74
Fam. 1.1, lines 287, 324.
75
Patricia Parker, “Virile Style,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla
Freccero (New York, 1996), 203, 222.
76
Michael Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” in Queering the
Middle Ages, ed. Burger and Kruger, 66–71.
77
G. Paris, “Der Ring der Fastrada: Eine Mythologische Studie, von Dr. Jur. August Pauls, Aachen,
1896,” Journal des savants (1896), 637–43, 718–30.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
Petrarch’s meditation on style in the opening letter of the Familiares becomes a
question of chronological arrangement and the sequence of the letters. Here the
letter collection is another perverse body, a “senectute puer,” aging in reverse.
When the letters are gathered together “at one time and one place, after having been
written over many years and sent to various regions of the world,” Petrarch writes,
“facile deformitas uniti corporis apparuit, que per membra tegebatur” (“the defor-
mity of the whole body could be easily discerned though it was hidden in individual
letters”).78 Petrarch is tempted to “change the order” (“mutare ordinem”)79—to dis-
guise his deviant maturation—but he knows it will not deceive his dedicatee,
“Socrates,” who has all the original letters with their original dates. He asks his
friend to destroy these letters to aid him in his editorial efforts to hide this deformitas,
and particularly to conceal the immature weakness of his later letters.80 Petrarch has
now, he continues, edited the letters so as to begin and end with “virilibus sententiis”
(“strong, manly phrases”).81 The Familiares ends in fact with the book of letters to
classical authors, which suggests that the letters to the past are representative of this
stronger, more “virile” style and thought, which Petrarch has, anachronistically,
moved to the end of the collection (he acknowledges in Fam. 1.1 that he has gathered
book 24 together by theme rather than placing them in chronological order with the
rest of the collection).82 The letters to classical authors are also the only letters that
Petrarch dates. Their placement disrupts the collection’s fiction of linear chronology,
a turning back toward the past where there should be movement forward, even as
Petrarch suggests in the opening letter of the collection that the positioning of book
24 emerges from a desire to create a narrative of progress.
Saint Augustine’s influential schema for the ages of the world—which, like other
early medieval periodizing narratives, used the metaphor of a human life to stand in
for the stages of history—saw the classical period as the gravitas, adulthood; the
advent of Christ marks the transition into senectus, the respectable seniority of
the world.83 Petrarch draws attention to this periodizing schema in Fam. 24, in
his lament on the swift passage of time that forms the first of two letters introducing
the book of letters to classical authors, in a way that suggests the schema’s inadequacy
to capture the subjective experience of time as old age rushes upon him: ‘‘Let us
divide times as we wish, let us multiply the number of years, let us invent names for
the ages, yet the entire life of a man is a single day, and that not a summer day but a
winter one.”84 Petrarch’s placement of the letters to classical authors at the end of
78
Fam. 1.1, lines 214–15.
79
Fam. 1.1, line 270.
80
“Illa precipue ut occultare studeas, precor,” Fam. 1.1, lines 266–67.
81
Fam. 1.1, line 324.
82
See n. 7 above.
83
Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus 1.58.2 (PL 40:43); J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study
in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986), 80; and Mann, “From Laurel to Fig,” 19. For Petrarch’s
uses of the different “stages of man” schemas, see Francisco Rico, Vida u obra de Petrarca, vol. 1,
Lectura del “Secretum,” Studi sul Petrarca 4 (Padua, 1974), 160 and 361 n. 380; and Carlo Calcaterra,
Nella selva del Petrarca (Bologna, 1942), 84–86.
84
“Distinguamus utlibet, multiplicemus annorum numeros, fingamus etatum nomina: tota vita
hominis dies unus est, nec estivus quidem sed hibernus dies,” Fam. 24.1, line 29; Eisner, “In the
Labyrinth of the Library,” 761.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
his otherwise chronological collection perhaps suggests that the classical period
is paradoxically returning or could be revived—the periodizing schema of the
Renaissance—but this disorderly placement also suggests that the classical period,
too, is age deviant, the “in adolescentia vir” to the “senectute puer” of the Middle
Ages, the return of Petrarch’s youthful passion for Cicero.
Petrarch’s references to the process of editing and revising the Familiares are fre-
quently discussed in the context of Petrarchan self-fashioning and autobiography,
but it is often overlooked that these passages represent formal experimentation
with the letter as a temporally fraught genre. A letter’s energies center on two tem-
poral poles—the date of composition and the date of arrival to the intended recipient.
The sender’s uncertainty about the length of time between these two moments and
the difficulty and danger of sending a message over a long distance are constant sub-
jects of anxiety in premodern letters.85 Indeed, there may be more than two temporal
points of reference, as a single letter may point to its composition over the course of
many hours, days, or even weeks before it is even sent, or it may acknowledge that it
has been sent in multiple copies with multiple possible moments of arrival. How-
ever, the letter often gains its dramatic force from the particular moment of its com-
position, such as Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux, which implausibly claims to
have been composed on the very evening of the climb; and yet this implausibility re-
veals the artificiality of the letter’s temporal specificity.86 In their discussion of their
own revision for publication over the course of months or years in anticipation of a
different audience, a different time of reception, the letters draw attention to the fact
that they “tend to escape or erase the specific moment of their historical origin.”87
Indeed, Petrarch’s letters—and perhaps premodern letters in general—internalize
the practical difficulties of correspondence (including interception, delay, or loss)
by playing with themes of disrupted time, as well as with their own liminality be-
tween public and private.88
Aside from anticipation of the practical difficulties of the letter’s journey, chrono-
logical disruption is inherent to the epistolary form in that the reader encounters
their own futurity in the writer’s present. Cicero’s letter to his brother Quintus from
exile superimposes the letter-writer and letter-reader in a moment of simultaneous,
shared affect: “You can imagine how I weep as I write these lines, as I am sure you
do as you read them.”89 The fiction of immediate, direct address draws attention to
its own temporal impossibility. The letters to classical authors are thus of a piece
with the references to editing, revision, and placement that erase or confuse histor-
ical specificity, while also drawing attention to the impossibility of imposing a linear
timeline on Petrarch’s autobiography, precisely because of Petrarch’s failure to
grow up. This exploitation of the epistolary form explores the confused temporality
85
Ascoli, “Epistolary Petrarch,” 127–29.
86
Mann, “From Laurel to Fig,” 36–37.
87
Wallace, “‘Whan She Translated Was,’” 163.
88
For example, Sen. 17.4, wherein Petrarch worries that his letter to Boccaccio will be intercepted.
89
“Haec ipsa me quo fletu putas scripsisse? Eodem quo te legere certo scio,” Letters to Quintus
1.3.3, in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Quintus and Brutus; Letter Fragments; Letter to Octavian;
Invectives; Handbook of Electioneering, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library
462 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 66.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
of the desire for the classical past, where striving toward this past comes to stand in
for, at different moments, both growing up and its opposite.
Indeed, Petrarch undermines the supposed virilitas of the letters to classical au-
thors when in Fam. 1.1 he compares his own aged childishness with Cicero’s vacil-
lations and inconsistencies and, moreover, associates their shared immature mollitia
with the historiographical project of writing to classical figures. Cicero “molliter agit”
(“goes soft”) in the face of troubles,90 and it is this weakness of Cicero’s, he writes,
that first impelled Petrarch to write to him in a fit of irritation “sibi tanquam coetaneo
amico, familiaritate que michi cum illius ingenio est, quasi temporum oblitus” (“as if
he were a friend living in my time, with an intimacy that I consider proper because of
my deep and immediate acquaintance with his thought . . . forgetting, as it were, the
gap of time”).91 Petrarch later complains to Pulix Vicentinus of the unseemliness of
this “youthful zeal for fruitless quarreling in an aged philosopher” (“sine fructu
iuvenile altercandi studium in sene philosopho”92), while to Cicero himself he writes,
“What false luster of glory led you, an old man, into young men’s wars?” (“Quis te
falsus glorie splendor senem adolescentium bellis implicuit?”93). The stark contrast of
“senem” and “adolescentium” here highlights that Cicero’s behavior is not merely
unbefitting of a philosopher but inappropriate to a man of his age, and the activity
of immaturity is sine fructu: nonreproductive, potentially queer.
Petrarch’s hermeneutics of homosocial familiaritas shapes both his own back-
ward gaze and his anticipation of the backward gaze of his future readers. The
impulse to write to Cicero that Petrarch describes, compelled by a sense of their
shared mollitia—inappropriate softness—resembles the “queer historical impulse”
Dinshaw analyzes in Getting Medieval, the sense of familiarity that propels the
affective historical connections between herself and Margery Kempe, and between
John Boswell’s gay readers and the “gay people” he identifies in the ancient and
medieval worlds in the subtitle of his trailblazing but controversial 1981 book,
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe
from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. The fact that
Petrarch writes to Cicero with the desire to reject this mollitia is of a piece with
his ambivalence toward his own hermeneutics, which allow him to cross time but
also seem at odds with adult Christian masculinity. Like the Charlemagne letter, this
letter is apophatic, calling queerness into being in order to dismiss it.
Another instance of the childish old man appears in the letter that introduces the
book of letters to classical authors. In this letter, Petrarch describes an encounter at a
party with an elderly man, a huge fan (“mirator maximus”94) of Cicero. The con-
versation turns to Cicero (as conversations at parties so often do), and this elderly
man refuses to accept the unflattering aspects of Cicero’s personality that Petrarch
has recently discovered in Cicero’s personal letters, remaining instead obstinately
(“obstinatius”) deferential to the Cicero of the philosophical and rhetorical dia-
logues—the “auctor” of medieval Ciceronianism. The man’s enthusiasm for Cicero
90
Fam. 1.1, line 287.
91
Fam. 1.1, lines 292–93; Eisner, “In the Labyrinth of the Library,” 760.
92
Fam. 24.2, line 115.
93
Fam. 24.3, lines 14–15.
94
Fam. 24.2, line 73.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
is uncritical, so that “erranti quoque plaudere et amici vitia cum virtutibus amplecti
mallet quam discernere, nequid omnino damnare videretur hominis tam laudati”
(“he preferred to applaud him even when erring, and to embrace the vices of his
friend together with his virtues rather than to distinguish them, lest he should seem
to condemn anything in so celebrated a man”).95 Petrarch upsets the man so much
with his novel criticism of Cicero’s character that he flinches and turns away
(“cohorrebat et . . . aversabatur”), physically identifying with Cicero “as though
the words were directed not at another’s reputation but at his own.”96 The old man’s
stubborn love is ill suited to his seniority: “even at his age” (“quidem . . . ea aetate”),
Petrarch exclaims, “he was incapable of entertaining the thought that if Cicero were
a man, it followed that . . . he must have erred.”97 Here Petrarch links the old man’s
incomplete masculinity and immature reading with misguided piety, just as Augustine
views his own enthusiasm for Dido as symbolic of his preconversion spirituality in
the Confessions. The old man reacts to Petrarch’s criticism of Cicero “as though we
were dealing not with a man but with a god,” and with an “almost religious devo-
tion.”98 Petrarch continues:
Quesivi igitur an deum fuisse Tullium opinaretur an hominem; incuntanter “deum” ille
respondit, et quid dixisset intelligens, “deum” inquit, “eloquii.” “Recte,” inquam,
“nam si deus est, errasse non potuit; illum tamen deum dici nondum audieram; sed si
Platonem Cicero suum deum vocat, cur non tu deum tuum Ciceronem voces? nisi quia
deos pro arbitrio sibi fingere non est nostre religionis.”99
[I then asked whether in his opinion Tullius was a god or a man; immediately he responded,
“A god,” but then realizing what he had said, he added, “really a god of eloquence.” I
said, “Quite so, for if he is a god, he could not have erred; still, I had not heard him called
a god, but if Cicero called Plato his god, why should you not call Cicero yours except that
our faith does not allow us to fashion gods arbitrarily?”]
The placement of this anecdote provides the context for Petrarch’s letters to Cicero
that follow, suggesting that Petrarch wishes to place his own reasoned, “adult”
approach to Cicero in contrast to the old man’s fervor, and yet, Petrarch sees him-
self in this puerilis senex: “quique quam michi puero fuisse memineram, eam de illo
senex opinionem gereret altissime radicatam” (“The man held the same deep-seated
opinion of Cicero that I recall having as a boy” [Fam. 24.2, lines 79–81]). The child-
ish old man is again, here, an apophatic figure, serving to evoke and dismiss the
potential for queer immaturity in Petrarch’s love for Cicero. Here too is the possi-
bility that his love for Cicero is intertwined with his love for Laura, distracting
him from progressing into spiritual adulthood. This old man also calls up the ghost
95
Fam. 24.2, lines 47–51. Eisner has another reading of this scene; see “In the Labyrinth of the
Library,” 763–64.
96
“hec dum dicerem, cohorrebat et quasi non in famam alterius sed in suum caput dicerentur,
aversabatur,” Fam. 24.2, lines 71–72.
97
“nec cogitare quidem posset ea etate: si homo fuit Cicero, consequens esse ut . . . erraverit,”
Fam. 24.2, lines 81–83.
98
“quasi non de homine sed de deo quodem ageretur,” Fam. 24.2, line 9; “reverentiam . . . tantam
religionem,” Fam. 24.2, line 12.
99
Fam. 24.2, lines 60–66.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
of the old man at the base of Mount Ventoux, the future image of Petrarch after he
has climbed and learned nothing; that old man laments while turned backward,
“multaque iam digressis a tergo ingeminans” (Fam. 4.1, lines 64–65), and this old
man likewise “avertebat frontem ingeminans” (“turned his face away, lamenting”
[Fam. 24.2, lines 57–58]).
Petrarch’s perverse, childish old bodies draw on homophobic cultural anxieties to
level a critique of excessive, unthinking reverence for the past, but they also express
uncertainty about the value of the affective ties to the past—love, nostalgia, desire,
mourning—that are central to Petrarch’s historiography in both its style and its sub-
stance. The twisted body, the body turned backward, is one that cannot let go of the
past, but its flexibility is granted by its enervatio, its limpness, and this lack of rigid-
ity is betrayed by its mollis Latin style. In a letter to Francesco Nelli, Petrarch denies
the accusation that he is overly concerned with making his letters elegant, revising
them over and over, “quite like a lascivious youth [adolescens] who examines not
only his face but his behind [terga] in the mirror.”100 Terga, often translated as
“back,” also refers unambiguously to the buttocks in many instances, perhaps most
relevantly in the descriptions of classroom corporal punishment that Cestaro gath-
ers in his accounting of sexual metaphors and sexual anxieties in Renaissance gram-
matical education.101 Recent scholarship on the Familiares has shown more than
ever how that process of revision is also a process of stripping the temporal specificity
from the letters, dehistoricizing them; the possible gender or sexual deviance of the
young man looking at his own behind in the mirror suggests the queerness of this
atemporality. The image also recalls the backward-turned bodies of the diviners, as-
trologers, and soothsayers in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell: “ché da le reni era tor-
nado ’l volto / ed in dietro venir li convenia / perchè ’l veder dinanzi era lor tolto”
(“the face was turned towards the kidneys, and they were forced to walk back-
wards, since seeing forward was taken from them” [Inferno, 20.13–15]).102 Tiresias
is one of those named whose bodies have ironically twisted around to punish them
for their arrogance in presuming to see the future, so that their tears now wet their
buttocks, “’l pianto delli occhi / le natiche bagnava per lo fesso” (Inf. 20.23‒24).
After this image that evokes anal sexuality, the poem lingers on the gender deviance
of the prophet Tiresias, “quando di maschio femmina divenne” (“when he from
male became female,” Inf. 20.41).103 This description again links queer sexuality
with the body twisted to look backward, and with disruptive temporalities.
100
“quasi lascivior adolescens, non tantum vultus in speculo, sed terga contempler,” Fam. 18.8,
lines 4–5.
101
Gary Cestaro, “Pederastic Insemination, or Dante in the Grammar Classroom,” in The Poetics of
Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, ed. Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus, Essays and Studies 22
(Toronto, 2010), 48 n. 26.
102
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, Inferno, trans. John D. Sinclair (Oxford, 1939),
248, 250.
103
Dante refers here to the legend transmitted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Tiresias was trans-
formed from a man into a woman, and lived as such for seven years before seeking and achieving trans-
formation back into a man (Metamorphoses 3.324–31). Ovid says of Tiresias, “Venus huic erat utra
nota” [“s/he had known Venus both ways”] (3.323).
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
The Mirror and the Backward Gaze
Petrarch’s use of the figure of the queer male body twisted around, closely linked
to his sequence of senes pueriles, resonates with the use of this same figure in modern
queer historiography, particularly with the witty title of the 1999 essay collection
Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze. In its introduction, the editors
read their project of queer historiography through Barthes’s figure of the author’s
backward look toward the reader, with its hint of a gay male erotics of cruising:
“Our backward gaze can be compared to the look directed over the shoulder at
the attractive stranger who has just passed by. We want to see the texts we discuss
as both alluring and strange.”104 Here too, texts of the past are figured by their
authors, and the modern scholar’s relationship with these old texts is figured as a
desiring relation between men. Such a relationship is shot through, here, with queer
sexuality, and moreover with a search for community and recognition, with the risk
that entails rejection or even violence. The way Petrarch uses this topos, however, in
the image of the young man looking back at his own reflection, resonates with and
can be read through another anxious metaphor of modern queer historiography:
the mirror.
Valerie Traub’s introduction to her book on lesbianism in early modern England
uses the image of the mirror as an example of immoderate desire in historical work,
desire that ultimately distorts objectivity. Traub instead expects “neither that we
will find in the past a mirror image of ourselves nor that the past is so utterly alien
that we will find nothing usable in its fragmentary traces.”105 It is a frequently re-
peated truism that queer historians must exercise moderation over our pleasure
in identifying—or finding community—with people from the past.106 The method-
ological tension between a transhistorical familiaritas and a rigorously objective
historicism has come since to structure many debates about both queer theory
and queer history, as it has in other fields structured around modern identity forma-
tions. John Boswell’s important contribution to the history of homosexuality
famously drew criticisms for being so eager to find “gay people” (as the book’s sub-
title proclaims them) in the past that it erased differences between modern and
ancient contextual frameworks for erotic behaviors, using the anachronistic model
of the “homosexual” to group all kinds of behaviors that would not necessarily
have been associated with same-sex desire in their own historical situation.107 As
I mentioned previously, Dinshaw points to the power of Boswell’s work to inspire
a sense of queer kinship—familiarity, even—across time, as revealed in a letter that a
fan wrote to him: “Whereas I have often felt intellectual ‘friendships’ across the cen-
turies—historical thinkers with whom I have felt such strong affinities that I feel I
104
Guy-Bray, Nardizzi, and Stockton, “Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze,” 4.
105
Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in
Renaissance Literature and Culture 42 (New York, 2002), 1.
106
For a more nuanced approach to this caveat, see Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero,
“Preface,” in Premodern Sexualities, vii.
107
Matthew Kuefler, “The Boswell Thesis,” in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago, 2006), 1–35.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
know them and that we speak for one another, I had never felt—until I read your
book—that I had gay friends across the centuries.”108
In Karl Morrison’s theorization of the hermeneutics of empathy (which we might
add to Eden’s and Greene’s formulations of Petrarch’s hermeneutics of empathy,
familiarity, intimacy, and imitation), he visualizes the process of identification/
imitation as a “hermeneutic circle” in which person A must negate their own self
in order to identify with and emulate person B (as in imitatio Christi). However,
in doing so there is always the danger that instead they will impose their own char-
acteristics upon person B, such that they merely replace person B with themselves.109
Glenn Burgess describes this problem as it pertains to the historian, “If you do not
reconstruct [the past] non-anachronistically, you construct only a version of your
self, your prejudices, a version of the present. Your enriching encounter with the
alien past becomes a cosy self-confirming fireside chat with yourself.”110 Morrison’s
hermeneutic circle suggests a sort of queer intercourse, the possibility of role-
switching that creates a dangerous ambiguity wherein the reader sees not another
with whom they identify but one whom they distort into another self, just as Traub’s
mirror parable warns that the bad queer historian may distort the past, and as critics
accused Boswell of doing.
In the Secretum, Augustinus suggests that Petrarch has been using both the mirror
and classical history in this way, to enjoy his own reflection, rather than to see the
difference between present and past, in which the past doubles as aspirational fu-
ture. In both his reflection and in the classical role models, Petrarch should see
not affirmatory likeness but the difference between what he is and what he ought
to be. In the final passages of the Secretum, Augustinus challenges Petrarch to notice
his own old age in the mirror and how it contrasts with his inner immaturity:
Vidisti ne te nuper in speculo? . . . nonne vultum tuum variari in dies singulos et inter-
micantes temporibus canos animadvertisti? . . . mutavit ne animum ulla ex parte corporis
conspecta mutatio?111
[Have you looked in a mirror recently? . . . Surely you have noticed that your face changes
from day to day, and that white hairs are beginning to show on your temples? . . . Didn’t
the sight of the changes in your body change your heart in some way?]
He then mocks Petrarch’s attempt to list classical figures who grayed prematurely
(Domitian, Numa Pompilius, Virgil): “If I had mentioned baldness to you, I imagine
you’d have cited Julius Caesar!” (Secretum 3.11.8). Petrarch takes up this accusa-
tion enthusiastically, pointing out that “grande solatium tam claris septum esse
comitibus” (“it’s a great solace to be surrounded by such famous companions”)
(3.11.9). Augustinus concedes that he has no objection to the use of identifying with
108
Letter, 9 June 1983, quoted in Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 28.
109
Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology
and Art (Princeton, 1988), 236.
110
Glenn Burgess, “The ‘Historical Turn’ and the Political Culture of Early Modern England:
Towards a Postmodern History?,” in Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History
and Politics, ed. Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer, Studies in Renaissance
Literature 5 (Woodbridge, UK, 2000), 36.
111
Sec. 3.11.5.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
exemplary figures to keep the spirits up, but not when such consolation is merely
seeing what he wants to see in order to deny the transience of the material world:
legitimate autem senectuti morulas nectere, annos etati subducere, canos nimie celeritatis
arguer eosque velle occultare vel vellere dementia, quamvis comunis, tamen ingens est.
Non videtis, o ceci, quanta velocitate volvuntur sidera, quorum fuga brevissime vite
tempus devorat atque consumit?112
[Attempting to delay the normal process of aging, taking years off one’s age, accusing gray
hairs of coming too soon, and trying to hide them or pull them out; all this, however com-
mon, is completely crazy. Don’t you see, you blind mortals, how fast the stars revolve, and
how their onward rush devours and destroys the brief span of a lifetime?]
There follows castigation of Petrarch’s wish to pretend he is still a boy, and mock-
ing of the “nonagenarios pueros” (“ninety-year-old boys”) (Secretum 3.12.5). This
critique of Petrarch’s improper use of a mirror segues into Augustinus’s argument
that Petrarch should give up on the Africa as the vain pursuit of worldly glory
(3.17.6), just as, at the beginning of the Secretum, he argued he should give up
Laura. Augustinus’s prescription of a speculum suggests perhaps the redirection of
Petrarch’s intellectual energies and meditations to the eponymous genre of Christian
moral instruction. In such mirrors, the reader sees not who they wish they were but
who they ought to be, not the desired past of nostalgia but a path to progress. Thus
the end of the Secretum seems to suggest that any desire for the past at all is antithet-
ical to spiritual growth, and contemplation of one’s own death the best route to di-
recting one’s body and desires into adult Christian masculinity. And yet, the use of
historical figures as exempla, the only use of history Augustinus will countenance,
suggests a return to the uncritical Ciceronianism of the old man at the party, a love
that does not acknowledge that Cicero was a man with flaws. This too would mean
regression, since that old man’s love recalls Petrarch to his own feelings as a child;
the end of the Secretum points toward the puer senilis, rather than the senex puerilis,
as the desirable mode for spiritual reform. And yet, like all Petrarch’s narratives of
conversion, no final resolution is determined on or enacted, the allure of the past
never fully relinquished. Indeed, it is this sustained ambivalence—the look back
over the shoulder—which itself represents Petrarch’s historical hermeneutics, rather
than either desire or its relinquishment.
Conclusion
In this article I have suggested taking seriously the ways in which Petrarch and his
critics have described his historical hermeneutics using metaphors of desire, and
have placed his relationships with men from the past and his epistolary activity in
parallel with his love for Laura and his writing of love lyric. I have suggested that
Petrarch’s desiring hermeneutics might be read as an erotics of historicism, and that
this erotics is constituted not only by heterosexual but by homosexual formations.
Queerness is inherent to the way Petrarch thinks and talks about the past in his Latin
autobiographical project (the Familiares, Secretum, and Seniles) precisely because
he resituates historical relationships in desiring relationships between bodies, and
112
Sec. 3.11.11.
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.
often between men. I have argued for locating this queer historicism in moments in
the Latin writings where the male body comes into focus as in a mirror or turned
back to look over its own shoulder, literally twisted by the effects of queer desire:
the desire of a younger man for much older men long after they are dead, the desire
for an older man for his own younger self. Such desiring relations have a different set
of associational relationships to time than heterosexual formations of reproduction,
linear progression, and inheritance. Queerness often stands in for moments of ten-
sion or resistance between Petrarch and the classical past, moments of fraught
desire, of failure or rejection, of ambivalence toward the uses of history; and yet,
these moments are also among those that have been identified as most influential
and generative of a new historicism that recognizes and desires the past’s difference.
These queer moments in Petrarch appear within narrative frameworks that co-opt
them for heteronormative schemas of desire.
The uses of this queer reading of Petrarch’s erotics of historiography extend
beyond its application to his other works in Latin and Italian, although such work
certainly should be done; reading Petrarch’s queer historical hermeneutics also has
the potential to disrupt the periodizing narratives that so often structure scholarly
approaches to Petrarch and his influence. In the critical model that has dominated
approaches to imagining a queer historical project, historicism is queer history’s
guilty conscience: historicist reading demands the assertion of the past’s difference,
while the search for a queerness across time insists on the recognizable continuity of
a particular coagulation of identity, feeling, and experience. Petrarch is a protago-
nist in the stories we tell about the emergence of this “historical imagination”; read-
ing Petrarch’s queer desires for the past suggests the extent to which the template of
heterosexuality has been superimposed upon Petrarch’s historical imagination in
the writing of these stories, excluding possibilities and shutting down routes of in-
quiry. Recovering the queer currents in Petrarch’s love for Cicero and other classical
authors helps us to deconstruct not only the narratives of growth and progress that
lie beneath our understandings of historicism but also the extent to which placing
the recognition and desire for difference as the end of historical inquiry rests on
a heteronormative ideal—an ideal that obscures the way in which the practice of
history has so often been, and so frequently still is, the desiring exchanges of an
all-male intellectual elite.
Anna Wilson is Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University

(anna_wilson@fas.harvard.edu)
Speculum 2020.95:716-741.

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Petrarch’s Queer History

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