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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
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.
Stories of abandonment are corroborated again and again by eyewitnesses. The Siennese chronicler Agnolo di Tura likewise described the betrayal within families: "Father abandoned child; wife, husband; one brother, another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and the sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or for friendship" (Ziegler, 41). Similarly Gabriele de' Mussis, a lawyer and chronicler from Piacenza, wrote: "When one person lay sick in a house no one would come near. Even dear friends would hide them-selves away, weeping. The physician would not visit." In his chilling report, de' Mussis ventriloquized the "tearful voices of the sick":
"Oh father, why have you abandoned me? Do you forget that I am your child?" "Mother, where have you gone? Why are you now so cruel to me when only yesterday you were so kind? You fed me at your breast and carried me within your womb for nine months." "My children, whom I brought up with toil and sweat, why have you run away?" Man and wife reached out to each other, "Alas, once we slept happily together but now are separated and wretched." And when the sick were in the throes of death, they still called out piteously to their family and neighbors, "Come here. I'm thirsty, bring me a drink of water. I'm still alive. Don't be frightened. Perhaps I won't die. Please hold me tight, hug my wasted body. You ought to be holding me in your arms." (Horrox, 22)
Fear of or indifference to the dead, as well as the dying, was a deeply terrifying by-product of the plague, and no familial or social tie could be counted on to shelter the bodies of the dead from ignominious mass burial or some worse fate. Numerous observers comment on the lack of proper burial rites, marking a loss of distinction between the living and the dead, the high and the low, the human and the animal. (5)
As the loves and loyalties of private citizens evaporated, so too did certain more fragile relationships between social groups, especially between the mainstream and the margin. "Relations with strangers, beggars, lepers, Jews, and others were always tense in medieval society, but not usually violent," David Herlihy writes (64); however, they quickly turned so. Jews were immediately blamed for the plague, supposedly caused by their having poisoned the wells, and were subjected to harassment, brutalization, and mass murder. The first massacre took place in Provence in May, 1348, followed by others in Narbonne and Carcassone (Deaux, 168). Though the Pope issued two bulls in July and September forbidding such slaughter, the killings spread through Germany, Italy, France, and Spain (172). Many of the clergy and ruling classes, though aware of the lack of basis for charges against the Jews, nevertheless sanctioned the murders, or participated in them, out of fear of the masses and, still more cynically, out of a desire for profit (Nohl, 181). (6)
What were the long-term effects of these private and public betrayals of humanity, and of the murderous projections of collective rage onto the Jews of Europe and various other social groups? It would take much more space than I have here to trace a psychoanalytic history of plague survivors. Europe did seem to recover quickly, as historians usually note. (7) "The resilience of mankind is perpetually astonishing," Philip Ziegler notes, "and within only a few years the horrors of the plague had been thrust from the forefront of their minds. But no one can live through a catastrophe so devastating and so inexplicable without retaining forever the scars of his experience" (220). One suspects, in other words, that while conscious repression of the knowledge of human depravity was required of survivors, the effects of that trauma lingered for a long time--possibly for generations. As the historian Robert Gottfried has argued, the crises attendant upon the 1348 plague and on successive outbreaks that recurred in five- to twelve-year cycles, produced in the people of the later Middle Ages "a violent, anxious, and skewed perspective on life" (162).
Some historians link the rise of individualism and modern subjectivity to the widespread doubt and questionings--of authority, of the dominant worldview--that ensued upon the plague. (8) One might imagine several modes of individualism arising from the plague trauma--including the every-man-for-himself variety. Indeed the chroniclers suggested that this was the typical response or behavior during the epidemic. But the Black Death surely generated a nostalgia, as well, for the days when love, friendship, and the possibility of trust actually meant something--or seemed to do so. After social bonds were undermined or destroyed, the network of human relations had to be restored or reinvented. Arguably a collective shift in perspective--a shift that some might name "modern" consciousness (though certainly throughout history there were precursor episodes of such rupture)--arose from a knowledge of the fragility of those relations.
The Ethical Bases of Friendship
In order to make further claims about the nature of Petrarchan friendship before and after the watershed year of 1348, it is necessary to provide some context regarding friendship in general, and medieval and Renaissance friendship in particular. As some recent historians of the institution have noted, friendship is undertheorized, as well as underhistoricized. (9) Friendship seems ubiquitous, its qualities obvious enough until one attempts to define them. Generally, however, it might be characterized as "a voluntary, close, and enduring social relationship," which, though it varies greatly from society to society, involves commitment, intimacy, and spontaneity. (10) People often choose friends with similar status and attractive attributes. Friends must, ideally, have adequate and frequent access to each other. Moreover, friendships are valued most heavily in cultures where social contacts have outgrown the bonds of kinships, neighborhood, age and work groups, ethnicity, and social classes. But in all societies, friendship allows individuals to have or conduct relationships beyond the affiliations required by their cultures. (11)
The sociologist Gerald Suttles provides an intriguing theory of the nature and development of friendships. He contends, first of all, that friend-ship must be, or appear to be, free from self-interest or utilitarianism (an idea popularized by Cicero and Petrarch in earlier times). (12) Also, friends must be valued not for their superficial characteristics--e.g., hair, weight, bank account--but for their "real" selves. Gift-giving must not be motivated by anything other than an appreciation of the real or genuine self. The friend must also be viewed as an individual, rather than as a member of a group, class, or type (98-100).
How, then, is the real self revealed or disclosed to another? How is its authenticity verified? Suttles conjectures that the violation of public propriety is key to understanding friendship. Such propriety...
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