Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca (commonly anglicized as Petrarch) was born on July 20th, 1304, in Arezzo, Tuscany. He studied law with his brother in 1316 in Montpelier, France, although Petrarch had a passion for Latin literature and writing. In 1326, Petrarch's father dies. Petrarch then left law to pursue his love for literature, since his father had wanted him to study law instead. He worked as a cleric to allow himself time to work on his own writings. In his travels as a diplomatic envoy for the church he worked for, he collected many interesting lost texts. he then traded it in for place to stay in Venice, Italy, as a refuge from the Black Plague.

Petrarch had a belief that our humanity can become greater, which that belief had later formed into humanism, the study of humanity. Petrarch was even considered the "father of Humanism", because he brought back interest in classical literature. On April 6th, 1327, he fell in love with Laura De Noves, a woman he met at a church in Avignon. Since then, he wrote 366 poems about his love for Laura. These poems included 317 sonnets. Petrarch was an early major practitioner of sonnets, and developed an Italian style of the sonnet, the Petrarchan sonnet.

In 1337, he wrote an epic poem, Africa, though it wasn't published until 300 years after his death. Petrarch was crowned as poem laureate on April 8th, 1341. He delivered the "Coronation Oration" during the ceremony, which was the very first manifesto written since the start of the Renaissance.

Petrarch was famous all throughout Europe, and was called the "first tourist" since he liked to travel around Europe for pleasure. Petrarch was especially an influence in England. He inspired many English writers. One English poet, J.D. McClatchy, made a statement about Petrarch's poems: "True love - or rather, the truest, - is always obsessive and unrequited. No one has better dramatized how it scorches the heart and fires the imagination than Petrarch did, centuries ago. He dipped his pen in tears and wrote the poems that have shaped our sense of love - its extremes of longing and loss - ever since."

He died on July 19, 1374, just before his 70th birthday.

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