Travelogue 1242 – 12 March
Laura

The story starts in the church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon in France. Our young man, not more than 23 years old, catches sight of a beautiful woman during a service.

It was April 6, 1327, and our hero had just experienced two life-changing events within the past year, the passing of his father and the completion of his training in law at the prestigious faculty at Bologna. He was back in Avignon, working as a clerk somewhere among the ranks of church hierarchy gathered in the city. The papacy had moved to Avignon in 1309, and Petrarca’s father had followed a few years later, because he was a notary and needed the work. His father had been friendly with Dante, but Dante had been exiled from Florence some years earlier, and Petrarca had never met him.

So Francesco catches sight of Laura, and it’s one of history’s great stories of love at first sight, and also of unrequited love. Laura is married. Petrarca tries to court her, but she refuses him. It is both important and not important to us who the real Laura is. It’s the ideal Laura that we encounter. What follows the fateful encounter at church is nearly half a century of Petrarca’s writing life and then centuries of admiration via his poetry.

It is likely that Petrarca’s Laura was a woman named Laura de Noves. We know of her because she was aristocracy, married to a count. There is at least one portrait still existing of the real Laura de Noves, beautiful, modest, blonde. She died in the first wave of the Plague.

But Laura the ideal has never passed away. This unique creation, somewhat chivalric in origin, but developing into something very human and individual, does indeed endure the way Petrarca predicted. Literature has sent forth a raiding party to retrieve the soul. Poets will now tend for the welfare of the animating spark.

Perhaps it begins when Dante writes that Virgil, an ancient poet, has led him through Christian hell, and that Beatrice, his chivalric ideal, has led him through heaven. And we are led to question whether Beatrice lives on because she is in heaven or because we are reading about her. Dante has posed us this question.

Petrarca poses us a slightly different question, something humbler, less heroic: might beauty be enough? Might a pure heart be enough? Might a lover’s devotion be enough? Would these small things save the soul of the beloved?

Shakespeare writes of his own ideated love in Sonnet 18,

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

By “this” he means the poem. The prestige of the artist and the artwork has grown through the Renaissance. Shakespeare is familiar with Petrarca, even if only indirectly. Renaissance proteges have played their part, poets like Vittoria Colonna.

Travelogue 1241 – 5 March
The Rhetorician

A century after its inception, the sonnet found its master. This is someone unavoidable, a figure dead centre in the road of cultural history, the indispensable man. Though one wouldn’t want to lose Dante, one could, and history would flow past him with barely a ripple. But one couldn’t tell our story without Francesco Petrarca, the father of the Renaissance, the first humanist, and the consummate poet.

I wrote a forgettable thesis about Petrarca at university, in my baccalaureate days, and he has haunted me since. Even after reading about him for months, I sense that I didn’t really understand him. His legacy is complex. His persona is complex. He is the fox to Dante’s lion. Where Dante stood tall, stood alone, stood proudly; Petrarca sought out company, linked arms with others, chatted, lectured, and sang.

It is meaningful for history that Petrarca was simply a more congenial man, someone who cared about and cultivated the opinion of others. He became the first modern poet laureate by courting important people across Italy and charming them, by exciting them with ideas. He was persuasive. He was a rhetorician. He revived the study of Cicero, one of the great rhetoricians in European history. To study Renaissance intellectual history is to study ancient Greek and Roman history. To the ancients, rhetoric was the linchpin of education. It was fundamental to politics; it was a tool in social advancement.

We in our time say we don’t like rhetoric. We are suspicious of it. Even as we make up the most manipulated societies of all time, swimming in floods of persuasion, drowning in advertising and targeted messaging, though we are subject to psy-ops nearly every day of our lives, we turn our noses up at the word “rhetoric”. It seems “inauthentic” to engage in formal rhetoric. I guess we would know from inauthentic, living in the Trump era.

The truth is, rhetoric can be a tedious study, boring. So is math, but we would never eliminate math from our curriculum. Instead, we dropped rhetoric and civics. We think we have grown beyond these topics. Never mind that in two generations, we have lost all feel for how we are governed, how our own government works; never mind that we are inarticulate in the face of oppression. Never mind that Donald Trump, a man forcing a national dialogue about dementia; a man who cannot finish a sentence; a man whose vocabulary is that of a middle-schooler; a man who cannot make an intellectual case for any one of his devastating policies, and has recourse only to primitive emotional ones; that this man is called, with great seriousness, a “great communicator”.