Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarium libri), Volume 3

by Francesco Petrarca, Aldo S. Bernardo

This translation makes available for the first time to English-speaking readers Petrarch's earliest and perhaps most important collection of prose letters. They were written for the most part between 1325 and 1366, and were organized into the present collection of twenty-four books between 1345 and 1366. The collection represents a portrait of the artist as a young man seen through the eyes of the mature artist. Whether in the writing of poetry, or being crowned poet laureate, or in confessing his faults, describing the dissolution of the kingdom of Naples, summoning up the grandeur of ancient Rome, or in writing to pope or emperor, Petrarch was always the consummate artist, deeply concerned with creating a desired effect by means of a dignified gracefulness, and always conscious that his private life and thoughts could be the object of high art and public interest. As early as 1436 Leonardo Bruni wrote in his Life of "Petrarch was the first man to have had a sufficiently fine mind to recognize the gracefulness of the lost ancient style and to bring it back to life." It was indeed the very style or manner in which Petrarch consciously sought to create the impression of continuity with the past that was responsible for the enormous impact he made on subsequent generations. This complete translation by Aldo S. Bernardo has long been out of print and is reproduced here in its entirety in three volumes. Introduction, notes, bibliography.Vol. 3 includes Books XVII-XXIV.

374 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1865

About the author

Famous Italian poet, scholar, and humanist Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, collected love lyrics in Canzoniere .

People often call Petrarch the earliest Renaissance "father of humanism". Based on Petrarch's works, and to a lesser extent those of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, Pietro Bembo in the 16th century created the model for the modern Italian language, which the Accademia della Crusca later endorsed. People credit Petrarch with developing the sonnet. They admired and imitated his sonnets, a model for lyrical poems throughout Europe during the Renaissance. Petrarch called the Middle Ages the Dark Ages.

Reviews

[Jo Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Petrarch's letters to the ancients are the best thing, and the last book of this volume is full of them.

Of course, that's why I started reading Petrarch's letters. Greenblatt mentioned in _The Swerve_ that Petrarch had written a letter to Cicero, and while Greenblatt thought this was a weird thing to do it made me love Petrarch and identify with him, because a large part of my teenage years were spent writing letters to Cicero. Mine weren't as good as Petrarch's though. But I entirely sympathise with the impulse.

I am so glad I found these letters, all of them, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. There's nothing better than letters for getting to know somebody, understand how they think, and get a strong feeling for how they live and what they care about.

There are two more volumes of Letters of Old Age, thank goodness, because as long as I am still reading them there's a way in which he's still alive.