Francis Petrarch: first modern friend.

In the classic Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt developed a concept of an era, a concept that despite controversy would retain currency for over a century. Drawing on Goethe and the tradition of nineteenth-century German liberalism, Burckhardt emphasized the rise of individualism as the defining feature of the Renaissance. As Hans Baron observed, "No other leitmotif occurs as often in his texts as the contention that the Italians of the Renaissance were the 'first-born among the sons of modern Europe' ... and that 'the first truly modern man,' 'a wholly recognizable prototype of modern man,' appeared in the period of Petrarch and the Quattrocento" (1988, 165). Petrarch's own modernity, the historian claimed, was demonstrated in part by his remarkable sensitivity to nature, and by his individualistic desire to climb Mont Ventoux--a strange aspiration unheard of since antiquity, Burckhardt asserted (thereby offending generations of medievalists), and a yearning that precluded "the companionship of friends or acquaintances" (II, 296). From Burckhardt's time almost up to our own, Petrarch has come to stand metonymically for his era, for Renaissance individualism, and for modernity itself. (1) And while some more recent studies have focused on Petrarch as an inheritor, rather than the founder, of the humanist tradition, (2) the image of the solitary poet and philosopher ushering in modernity--an image promulgated by Burckhardt and cultivated by none other than Petrarch himself--has maintained its appeal.

In this essay, I, too, shall view Petrarch as one of the usual suspects in the lineup of modern men, but not for the usual reasons. Petrarch was, of course, an individualist, but he was also a relentlessly social creature, despite his self-fashioning as an anchorite of love, or, after 1348, after the death of Laura, as one of the last remaining men of good sense. I shall view him not against the scenic backdrop of the Ventoux and of heroic Quattrocento individualism, as Burckhardt did, but in a more disturbing and equivocal context, that of the disaster both natural and unnatural that rocked Europe to its very foundations, ultimately shattering the culture and economy of feudalism. Europe rebuilt and reinvented itself after the Black Death, as did Petrarch, who had never found himself lonelier or more in need of friends and patrons than in 1349. For this and other reasons I shall style him in this essay the "first modern friend," for Petrarch helped define for later generations the conventions and values of humanist friendship. He articulated these notions and also demonstrated them in his Epistolae rerum familiarium, or Letters on Familiar Matters, a collection of his own letters that he devoted himself to assembling in the years following the plague. As I hope to show, Petrarch's views on friendship had changed and would take on new dimensions, both for the author and for his community of readers, in the post-plague years.

Love in the Time of Pestilence: The Social Crisis of 1348

In October of 1347, twelve Genoese galleys returning from the Crimea introduced the plague to the Sicilian coastal town of Messina. Within three months, plague would arrive on the mainland; within a year it would reduce the population of Europe by as much as one-half. It would recur several times during the remainder of the fourteenth century, and sporadically until the eighteenth. While the general story of the Black Death is well known (though still much debated), (3) certain details bear repeating here--especially those that shed some light on fourteenth-century social relations. The effect of the plague on interpersonal relations, as on every other aspect of medieval life, was predictably catastrophic. Giovanni Boccaccio provides some of the most powerful testimony concerning the antisocial effects of the contagion, describing in the introduction to his Decameron the rapid breakdown of the social order of Florence. "The pestilence was so powerful that it was communicated to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry or oily things will set them aflame" (4). Despite the fact that no solid medical theory of contagion could explain the disease, Boccaccio reports what everyone had observed: that contact with the sick, or even with their clothing, was likely to be lethal. Hence the afflicted were typically avoided and shunned at all costs. As a consequence of the mass terror, human bonds, no matter how cherished, were broken.

 
    The fact was that one citizen avoided another, that almost no one 
    cared for his neighbor, and that relatives rarely or hardly ever 
    visited each other--they stayed far apart (rade volte o non mai si 
    visitassero e di lontano). This disaster had struck such fear into 
    the hearts of men and women that brother abandoned brother, uncle 
    abandoned nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned 
    husband, and--even worse; almost unbelievable--fathers and mothers 
    neglected to tend and care for their children, as if they were not 
    their own. (6; Quaglio, 14) 

As citizens, neighbors, and relatives abandoned each other to their fates, Florentine social structure collapsed into virtual anarchy. Boccaccio paints a disturbing picture of alienation, isolation, and physical and social distance induced by the plague. In particular, the betrayal of sick children by their parents epitomized for the author the brutal logic of triage in the time of plague.

Guy de Chauliac, the Pope's physician in Avignon, likewise commented on the cruel betrayal of the dying and of collapsing family bonds: "The father did not visit his son, nor the son his father. Charity was dead and hope crushed" (Campbell, 3). Like Boccaccio, he presents the disaster in terms of the dissolution of the parent-child bond, rendered meaningless by the epidemic that would wipe out, perhaps most importantly, trust in others. Admirably, de Chauliac did not abandon his patients, (4) but many physicians, realizing the limits of their abilities to help and their own desire to survive, avoided the sick and dying like the plague.