The Construction of the European Intellectual: Petrarch, Humanism, and Middle English Literature

Abstract:

Petrarch’s reflections on fame and the legacy of classical tradition prompted the inscription of poetry within the wider structure of human history. He strove to comprehend a development of culture that clamoured to be understood in its own terms, beyond the overarching reference to the divine plan. This sometimes painful search brought him to be hailed, in centuries to come, as a proto-humanist writer. As late-medieval English literature struggled to find its identity, in linguistic and cultural terms, the legacy of Petrarch proved essential, durable, and complex. The Petrarchan texts drawn upon and the reactions they generated changed, sometimes radically, providing a singular instance of translatio studii: translations, rewritings, and parodies from Petrarch chart the passage of English writing from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance.