The Unpolitical Petrarch: Justifying the Life of Literary Retirement

Abstract

Francesco Petrarch’s involvements in the politics of Trecento Italy have often been the subject of criticism by later readers of his works—in effect, by that same posterity whose good opinion he so eagerly sought, and not just in the famous letter To Posterity. Indeed almost all of Petrarch’s literary interventions in the political life of his times come interlaced with pre-emptive apologias for his own stances. Petrarch knew that what he did and what he wrote would draw criticism, or was already drawing criticism. And his works certainly offer to hostile eyes what military tacticians would call a ‘target-rich environment’.