The historical evidence is that Gherardo was not a monk at Montrieux but only a rendered cleric.
This literature requires for its interpretation a sophistication in its moral topicality, regressing to the fraternal paradigm of Cain and Abel, who offered different religious sacrifices, vegetable and animal. Yet Petrarch's writings to and about him are not historical record but epideictic rhetoric.
Another figure adduced as historical proof of Petrarch's impiety is his brother Gherardo as the Carthusian monk. The status of Petrarch as poeta-theologus need not be denied because his aspiration and achievement of it may differ from that of Dante as poeta-theologus, as if that medieval model were the only sacral model. This tension persists with varying emphasis throughout the history of theology and the practice of religion. The historiographical probability may be that what the periodization has discerned is not a difference between the sacred and the secular, but rather two different ways of apprehending the sacred: the one by distinction, the other by diffusion the one by antithesis, the other by analogy. As Petrarch is precariously positioned between those cultures as Janus-faced, his piety must be suspicious: ambivalent, or at least ambiguous. In consequence the piety of the medieval poet may be sincere, but the piety of the Renaissance poet must be ironic. Obsolete historiography that demarcated the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as sacred and secular cultures. Petrarch the poet as irreligious, even idolatrous, is the legacy of an The poetry becomes "semiological idolatry." In a development of this argument, the thematics of idolatry is stated as necessary to create a poetic presence that is autonomous. This idolatry that perverts the beatific vision of God is central to the Rime sparse, whose very theme is the unresolved conflict in Petrarch between love and religion. In the original interpretation, the meditation of Petrarch the lover (who is the poet) converts the phantasm of the beloved Laura into a beautiful idol, in archetypal violation of the first commandment. This has been identified as "the sin of idolatry," whether thematically or semiologically. It is one opinion that Petrarch's poetry is about sin, quite another that it is sin. In fourteenth-century spirituality penitence was the vogue, a penitence so exorbitant as to be erroneous. If the reformers and the satirists are correct, they did so from much personal experience. Theologians wrote prolifically about sin. These are not mutually exclusive states in the human condition they coexist. The issue is not whether Petrarch was a sinner, however, but whether he was a theologian. This book is about Petrarch the poet as theologian.Īs Petrarch has commonly been interpreted as oscillating, sometimes in torment, between sacred and secular values, some critics would consider his piety problematical. In hearing the polysemy of his verse we may recognize that a prophet has indeed been among us (epigraph). The lyricist of love struck a political chord. If Petrarch personally courted a woman in verse, he also publicly criticized the Avignon papacy. His love, as he wrote in the initial poem of his Rime sparse, made him "the talk of the town." Yet this phrase echoes an ancient prophetic complaint about the contempt of the populace for oracles (Lam. Petrarch the plaintive lover is so familiar a figure that he has solidified into Petrarchism.