#23 – The Father Of The Renaissance (part two)

* Now that his parents are dead, Petrarch decides to dump law and become a scholar and a poet. * But you couldn’t make a living as a poet in the early 14th century. * So he took minor orders with the church. * In the Catholic Church, you have the major holy orders of priest (including both bishop and simple priest), deacon and subdeacon, and the four minor orders, that of acolyte, exorcist, lector and porter in descending sequence. * And although he apparently hated Avignon, his father had made lots of influential contacts there in the Papal court, and Petrarch moved back there to take advantage of them. * And it was there, in Avignon, at the age of 23, that he first saw Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon – the woman he was to fall madly in love with and dedicate his lifetime of work to. * Even though they possibly never even spoke to each other. * On the 6th April, 1327, Good Friday, he first saw Laura in the Church of St. Claire, and was overwhelmed at once with the love of which he tells us: “In my youth I bore the stress of a passion most violent, though honourable and the single one of my life; and I should have borne it even longer than I did, had not Death, opportune in spite of its bitterness, quenched the flame just as it was beginning to grow less intense.” * Who was Laura? * We don’t know. * If she really existed, he probably deliberately hid her identity. * His friends often teased him that she didn’t exist at all. * That “Laura” was just laurel crown of poetry – he really was just in love with the idea of becoming the poet laureate of Rome. * But scholars today are mostly sure that she was real. * Laura may have been Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade (an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade). * There is little definite information in Petrarch’s work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. * Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. * Scholars believe she was real for a couple of reasons. * Petrarch wrote a secret kind of diary, his “Secretum”, in the form of him having a discussion with St Augustine, which he never published, and which wasn’t even known about until well after his death, and in this he mentions her as a real woman. * He says she refused him because she was already married. * He also made some references to her, the date he first saw her and the date of her death, on the fly-leaf of his copy of Virgil. * He channeled his feelings into love poems. * Byron uses Petrarch and Laura as an example of the thought that love could only exist outside marriage: * * There’s doubtless something in domestic doings * Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis; * Romances paint at full length people’s wooings, * But only give a bust of marriages; * For no one cares for matrimonial cooings, * There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss: * Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, * He would have written sonnets all his life? * * Suffering through years of unrequited love, Petrarch poured out his soul into his most famous poems, the Canzoniere. * Il Canzoniere (English: Song Book), also known as the Rime Sparse (English: Scattered Rhymes),