Rudolph Agricola's Life of Petrarch

Abstract

Among the many personal faults with which Petrarch, in his dialogue entitled The Secret or The Soul's Conflict with Passion, let himself be charged by St. Augustine, there was one which he found harder to renounce than any other. In reply to Augustine's reproach: ‘You are seeking fame among men and the immortality of your name more than is right,' Petrarch could only say: ‘This I admit freely and cannot find any remedy to restrain that desire.' In fact, throughout his life Petrarch was well aware that ‘to the whole people I have been a favola,' as he declared in the introductory sonnet of his Rime Sparse, and he showed himself constantly determined to perpetuate his fame beyond death, as his Epistle to Posterity and numerous other autobiographical documents demonstrate. His effort bore fruit, for the life of no other literary figure of the fourteenth century, not even that of Dante, was told more frequently and fully by the writers of the Renaissance than that of Petrarch. Among his biographers we find some of the greatest Italian humanists, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Filippo Villani, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Pietro Paolo Vergerio and Gianozzo Manetti. But, interestingly enough, for the period of the first century after Petrarch's death in 1374, there exists not a single biography which was composed by a non-Italian writer. This fact is the more notable when we remember the tremendous reputation which Petrarch enjoyed, during his own era and afterwards, in France and Germany, and even in remote England, where Chaucer, in The Clerk's Prologue, sang the praise of ‘this clerk whose rethoryke so sweete enlumed al Itaille of poetrye.' The anonymous Bohemian scholar who, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, brought together an anthology of Petrarch's works, did not himself write a biography but simply used the one written by Vergerio. Interest in the personalities and achievements of the great poets and artists arose first in Italy, and it was there that the traditional literary form of ‘the lives of the illustrious men' was filled with a new spirit and content. From this point of view it appears characteristic that the first biography of Petrarch by a non-Italian was composed only after the passage of a hundred years following his death and that it was written by a man like Rudolph Agricola who was more than any of his northern fellow humanists influenced by Italian traditions and who, at the same time, was to become ‘the founder of the new intellectual life in Germany.’