I’m currently reading Humanely Possible by Sarah Blakewell – I liked her previous two books so it wasn’t too difficult to pick this one up as well. She devoted quite a few pages about Petrarch. He liked collecting books, except that back then the printing press didn’t exist, so he has to manually copy every book:
While supposedly studying hard, in Montpellier and then in Bologna, he put much of his energy into collecting books instead. This was long before printing technology; the only way to get reading matter was to find manuscripts to buy, beg, borrow, or transcribe—all of which he did eagerly.
We’ve been so technologically abundant now that it is easy to forget that once upon a time there was no way to reproduce books easily. I can’t imagine having to copy every word of a book I want to read.
The following passage also jumped out at me:
Often, Petrarch did more than mechanical copying. Besides trying to remember what he read, he also applied his own growing scholarship to each new discovery. He pioneered the art of sensitive editing, using fresh manuscript finds to build up fuller versions of ancient texts that had previously existed only in fragments, doing his best to fit them together correctly. His most important production of this kind was an edition of Livy, a historian of Rome whose huge work survived only in parts. (It is still incomplete, but we have more of it now than in Petrarch’s time.) Having found several new sections in different manuscript forms, he assembled them in a volume together with his copies of other existing parts. The resulting book would belong to a great scholar of the next century, Lorenzo Valla (whom we will meet properly later on); Valla added more notes of his own, improving it further. This was exactly what generations of humanists would continue to love doing—enlarging knowledge, using the evidence to make texts richer and more accurate.
This is what human beings did: enlarging knowledge, by taking the effort to assemble the truth or learnings from different fragments, so that someone else can benefit from it. I relate to this as I am also personally attempting to piece together what I’ve learnt on my own journey and share them here.
Is this like the ancient substack/newsletter?
Finding the Cicero letters at a point when he had just turned forty and was ready for a midlife summation, he realized that he could do the same. He could retrieve and revisit his own letters, copy them, polish them, put them in a satisfying order, and then circulate them to anyone who cared to read them—which in turn would bring more correspondents and new friends to whom he could write even more letters.
…and like me and some others, Petrarch seems to like socialising with books too:
For Petrarch, books are sociable: “They speak with us, advise us and join us together with a certain living and penetrating intimacy.” The ancients make just as good companions as people who consider themselves alive because, as he writes, they can still see their breath in the frosty air
I’m still far from finishing the book, but thought I’ll note and share these highlights before I forget the impressions they had on me. History really puts a perspective on things, and I would like to be a person who will always remember the awe when I encounter books.
In a time when books did not really exist, Petrarch is just doing his own thing copying manuscripts for long periods, collating volumes of text from various sources, sending letters. Nobody asked him to, but he just did it because he wanted to. He did not do it for money or fame, as far as I know. I feel this way about this website. I do it because I want to, yet it is strange how it feels weird in this current society to do something simply because we want to. We can love acquiring and sharing knowledge just for the sake of it, like Petrarch. The act of enlarging knowledge, is truly an uniquely human endeavour and I would say, pleasure.