referenced in notes
highlights (4)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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