Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters

The purpose of this volume is essentially historical. It is not a piece of literary criticism; it is only incidentally a biography. It has been prepared with the single but lively hope of making a little clearer the development of modern culture. It views Petrarch not as a poet, nor even, primarily, as a many-sided man of genius, but as the mirror of his age - a mirror in which are reflected all the momentous contrasts between waning Medievalism and the dawning Renaissance. Petrarch knew al...