Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/644

 588 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE tual center of Italy and home of many of the geniuses of the Renaissance. Petrarch entered the clergy, whereas Dante had been a layman, but Dante was perhaps the more truly religious of the two. Petrarch sinned against the rule of sacerdotal celibacy and was also guilty of holding a plurality; that is, more than one ecclesiastical position at the same time. In his younger days he had writ- ten love poetry in Italian, inspired by a mysterious Laura as Dante had been by Beatrice. But while the masterpiece of Dante's maturity, although dealing with a solemn reli- gious theme, had still employed the Italian tongue, Petrarch in later life became so enamoured of classical antiquity that he disdained to write in any other language than Latin. Vergil had guided Dante through the Inferno: Petrarch wrote letters to Cicero and other dead ancient authors whom he passionately admired and with whom he longed for per- sonal communion. When he wrote letters to his living friends he still tried to express himself as if he were writing to Cicero or as if Cicero were writing to him. It was an event in his life when a rare or previously unknown work by Cicero or some other classical author came to his notice. With eager haste and yet with painstaking accuracy he would make a copy of the precious manuscript for his own library. Besides many letters, Petrarch composed a number of other works in Latin prose and verse. But as they dealt chiefly with classical subjects, — as, for instance, his epic Africa on Scipio Africanus, concerning whom he knew noth- ing except what he could read in classical literature itself, — they have not interested posterity nearly so much as the early love poems in which he expressed his own feelings in his own language in a comparatively new verse-form, the sonnet. Among his contemporaries, however, he aroused •great enthusiasm for classical studies. His letters were passed around and read before admiring circles. He had made a wide acquaintance by his travels about Italy and in other European lands. King Robert of Naples crowned him poet laureate at Rome in 1341. Petrarch was one of the first humanists and his activities