Petrarch and the Development of Historical Consciousness
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 20 July 2025 is the 721st anniversary of the birth of Francesco Petrarch (20 July 1304 to 19 July 1374), who was born in Arezzo, at that time an independent city-state, on this date in AD 1304. There are many spellings in use for Petrarch’s name — Petrarch, Petrarca, Petracco — so I’m to use the form that’s most familiar to me. Petrarch himself tells us that the 20th of July in 1304 was a Monday, and that he was born at dawn.
Petrarch’s life was entirely contained within the 14th century, as he lived from 1304 to 1374. He died one day short of his 70th birthday. A decade after his death, Arezzo was absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, after have been, for a time, a Ghibelline rival of Guelph Florence. In Western historiography it’s conventional to identify the period from 1500 to 1800 as “early modern,” so that Petrarch’s life just before this in the 1300s is neatly contained within the penultimate century of late medieval history. By this measure, Petrarch was a man of the Middle Ages, but one of reasons last year I discussed Petrarch’s account of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux was because this episode has been identified symbolically by some as an essentially modern episode, making Petrarch, by extension, already a modern man. In particular I quoted Hans Blumenberg, who wrote that Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux was, “…one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs.”
While, on the one, hand Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux was a modern example of climbing a mountain for the sake the view, on the other hand, we can interpret Petrarch’s journey as being as pervasively symbolic as Dante’s journey from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven in the Divine Comedy, and Petrarch gives us plenty of symbolic hints in his letter about the climb that his ascent was as much spiritual and physical. In other words, Petrarch’s Ventoux expedition was an admixture of the medieval and the modern.
The difficulty of classifying Petrarch’s proper epoch is reflected in the historiographical tradition around him and his work, and it was even shared by Petrarch himself, as we’ll see. If you read histories of medieval philosophy you’ll find that Petrarch isn’t usually mentioned in them even though he was a close contemporary of Jean Buridan, who was the source of the amusing paradox of Buridan’s ass, who starved to death between two equally enticing piles of hay. The exact dates of Buridan’s birth and death aren’t known, but, like Petrarch, he seems to have lived out his three-score and ten, approximately, in the first three quarters of the 14th century. Jean Buridan does appear in histories of medieval philosophy, since he was very much a part of the spirit of his time. He exemplified the later developments of Scholastic philosophy, but Petrarch didn’t.
There’s no mention of Petrarch is Gordon Leff’s widely available history Medieval Thought from Saint Augustine to Ockham, and there’s no mention of Petrarch in David Knowles equally widely available The Evolution of Medieval Thought. Of course, Petrarch doesn’t figure in Copleston’s Medieval Philosophy or Richard McKeon’s Selections from Medieval Philosophers, and Petrarch is mentioned only twice in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, and that to tell that was Petrarch wasn’t a philosopher but an independent man of letters. What Petrarch does feature in are histories of renaissance philosophy. He figures prominently in Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains, and the anthology edited by Kristeller, Cassirer, and Randall, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. That Petrarch isn’t classed among the medieval philosophers who were his exact historical contemporaries tells us something important. Petrarch was, in Nietzsche’s terms, untimely.
The Gospels tell us that a prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and L. P. Harley tells us that the past is a foreign country. From these two sources we can assemble the perspective that a prophet is not only not without honor except in his own country, but also with the exception of his own time. Except that Petrarch was honored in his own time, and quite conspicuously so. He tells us that princes and prominent men sought out his friendship, and that, while residing in Vaucluse, near Avignon, on the same day — the 1st of September 1340 — he received invitations from both the Senate of Rome and the Chancellor of the University of Paris to be crowned poet laureate. He chose the Roman invitation, stopping at Naples before heading to Rome to be further flattered by the king there. Many of the portraits of Petrarch show him crowned in laurel as a result.
One of the themes of Petrarch’s work was his desire for fame, and in this he seems to have been rewarded proportionately to his desires. In this he was like the great artists of his time, who are sought out and honored as conspicuously as Petrarch was honored by various city-states and kingdoms, and these are the artists we associated with the early renaissance. Art historians have pushed the origins of the renaissance always deeper into medieval history, so that, for example, the frescoes of Giotto, an older contemporary of Petrarch who was born in the 13th century, and Masaccio, a closer contemporary of Petrarch as well as Buridan, are counted as part of the renaissance, and not as medieval art. There’s a specific term for this in art history, namely, the Quattrocento, so we could call Petrarch a Quattrocento philosopher, but this would be a highly unusual usage.
What differentiates Petrarch’s late medieval thought from the late medieval thought of Buridan? We might ask, by the same token, what distinguishes Quattrocento art from contemporaneous medieval art? One of the most charming things about medieval art is what I could call a near total absence of historical consciousness, or a different form of historical consciousness than that which we have today. Two works of art in particular stand out in my mind. The first time I traveled to Europe alone I went to Munster and visited the Westphalian State Museum of Art & Cultural History. There was a sculpture group that depicted the trial of Christ before Pilate, but Pilate was no Roman governor that any Roman would recognize. Pilate was a medieval Burgher, and the townsfolk who were part of the sculpture group were medieval townsfolk. Anyone who knows medieval art will be familiar to this, but it was new to be at the time. The collection was reorganized in a new building in 2014, and it may have been reorganized several times since I was there 35 years ago, and I don’t know if the sculptures to which I’m referring are still on display, but this stays with me because it was a key moment in my aesthetic education, and probably the moment when I began to be interested in medieval art.
Another work of art I found similarly striking is a small painting in the Thyssen-Bornemizca Museum in Madreid depicting an episode from the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, specifically, the departure from Colchis. The legend of Jason and the Argonauts is an ancient Greek story — in fact, it’s among the earliest known of Greek legends — but the ship and the people on the ship in the painting were all obviously from the late 15th century. It would be easy to produce any number of examples to similar effect, but I saw these when I was still relatively young and impressionable, and they brought home to me the distinctive relationship of medieval civilization to its past, both historical and mythological. In one sense this is an absence of historical consciousness, but in another sense this is another form of historical consciousness.
Kenneth Clark, who was an art historian before he made his television series Civilisation, said that the first paintings to show an awareness of the historical past as we now understand it were Andrea Mantegna’s (1431–1506) Triumphs of Caesar in the Gonzaga Ducal Palace at Mantua. These date from 1484 to 1492, so from about the same time as the painting of the Departure from Colchis. Clark wrote:
“…the humanists, who took so much trouble about the text of an author like Livy, accepted, as a correct representation of the event, a picture of the death of Julius Caesar in which figures are obviously dressed like fifteenth-century dandies. As long as there was this rather comical discrepancy between the written word and the image, antiquity could not exert its humanising power on the imagination. I suppose that the first occasion in which the dream of antiquity is given more or less accurate visible form is the series of decorations representing the Triumph of Caesar done for the court of Mantua by Mantegna in about 1480. It is the first piece of romantic archaeology.”
As Clark implies, humanist philosophers took great pains to reconstruct the literary milieu of classical antiquity, but it was another step to reconstruct the visual representation of the past, and this didn’t happen until after Petrarch’s death. But Petrarch was a part of the effort to reconstruct the literary milieu of classical antiquity, with which he identified himself. A theme running through Petrarch’s writings is how out of place he is in his world, and how he yearned to be part of the ancient world. He wrote a number of letters to ancient authors including Cicero, Seneca, Varro, Quintilian, Livy, and others. And so Petrarch wrote to Cicero:
“Your letters I sought for long and diligently; and finally, where I least expected it, I found them. At once I read them, over and over, with the utmost eagerness. And as I read I seemed to hear your bodily voice, O Marcus Tullius, saying many things, uttering many lamentations, ranging through many phases of thought and feeling.”
Given Petrarch’s own habit of writing letters and publishing them, it’s easy to imagine his interest in Cicero’s letters. Petrarch immersed himself in the ancient world, to the extent that he could, through its literature, which he read and copied and emulated in his own works. Petrarch worked on a collection of lives loosely based on Plutarch Parallel Lives, which remained unfinished at his death, and which, more than 700 years later, hasn’t been translated into English. This is usually referred to as On Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus). This is an example of what Nietzsche called monumental history, what Huizinga called historical ideals of life, and what I call exemplarism. Ostensibly these are biographies, but the point of the book was moral instruction, and in this sense Petrarch still conforms to the medieval conception of history, but even as he expands this medieval tradition, Petrarch modifies it. He finds exemplars in Republican Rome, among the church fathers, and from all ages, as he says in one letter, “…bringing together illustrious men from all lands and centuries.”
In my episode on Schopenhauer I mentioned the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, mostly concerned with the exemplary history of Alexander the Great, and which embodies an ahistorical conception of history in which nothing essential changes, in which the world has always been what it is, and will always be as it is. The Faits des Romains continues this with of the life of Julius Caesar, which is taken as the paradigmatic historical ideal of life. I attributed to Schopenhauer a categorical conception of history in which any one history is as good as any other, because all history is the same. While Petrarch is on board with the medieval tradition of exemplary history, he recognizes that something has changed between the time of classical antiquity, which he admires, and his own time. In this way, histories, then still primarily considered to be a form of moral instruction, become more pluralistic.
There’s not just the history of Alexander or the history of Caesar, and these being understood as equivalent to the histories of recent events, but there are histories that are radically different from the history of our own time. With Petrarch, history becomes different from our own time, rather than being one big repetition of the same, over and over again. The past was different. For Petrarch, the past was also better. In another letter to Cicero he wrote:
“You have heard what I think of your life and your genius. Are you hoping to hear of your books also; what fate has befallen them, how they are esteemed by the masses and among scholars? They still are in existence, glorious volumes, but we of today are too feeble a folk to read them, or even to be acquainted with their mere titles. Your fame extends far and wide; your name is mighty, and fills the ears of men; and yet those who really know you are very few, be it because the times are unfavourable, or because men’s minds are slow and dull, or, as I am the more inclined to believe, because the love of money forces our thoughts in other directions.”
In the same way that art historians find traces of the renaissance earlier and earlier in medieval history, I could says that Petrarch constitutes the earliest form of historical consciousness that would eventually become historicism — not in Popper’s sense, but in Ranke’s sense. Petrarch’s expansion of historical consciousness extended both to the past and the future. He demonstrated historical consciousness with respect to the past with his “Letter to Cicero” and with respect to the future with his “Letter to Posterity.”
The letter to posterity is an unfinished autobiography that breaks off abruptly, as in fact all lives break off abruptly without explanation. But the fact that Petrarch presents the story of his life in the form of a letter to posterity, saying that, in the off chance that his name survives, those who have heard of him might like to know what his life was like and what kind of man he was — and he was right about this — shows us that he was thinking in terms of a future that would see his own times as the past. This owes as much to St. Augustine as to modernity, as Augustine wrote his Confessions for much the same reason, to recount the story of his life and what kind of man he was. Petrarch was an admirer of Augustine and especially of his Confessions. It was a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions that Petrarch brought with him on his ascent of Mount Ventoux, opening and reading a passage that is one of the key symbolic moments in Petrarch’s letter about his expedition to Mount Ventoux.
The expansion of historical consciousness that Petrarch represents a step away from the categoricity of medieval historians and Schopenhauer, and an approximation of the formal complementarity that I discussed in the second episode on Copernicus. That we have a posterity that will look back on us as their past is complementary to the fact that we have a past for which we are the posterity. This is the same temporal relationship, displaced from the present into the future. This is ultimately based on a metaphysical uniformitarianism of time: time past is structurally like time present, and time future will be structurally like time present. We may find ourselves living in different ages of the world’s history, but our experience of time is invariant. This kind of invariance of temporal experience could also be claimed by Schopenhauer’s categorical historicity, so there’s a relation among invariant structures of history and how they relate to the individual’s experience of their own time.
The differentia between these two conceptions of temporal structure, which I could call the categorical and the complementary, is historical consciousness. In the categorical account of history, historical consciousness is invariant. The costumes change over time, but the mind of man is the same. In the complementarity account of history, temporal structures are invariant, but historical consciousness is relative to some period of time. Not only do the costumes change, but men’s minds change along with the fashion of their dress. Aron, Raymond wrote in his Dimensions of Historical Consciousness (1964), which hasn’t yet been translated into English:
“Consciousness of the past is constitutive of historical existence. Man truly has a past only if he is aware that he has one, because only this consciousness introduces the possibility of dialogue and choice. Otherwise, individuals and societies carry within them a past that they ignore, that they passively endure… As long as they are not aware of what they are and what they were, they do not access the proper dimension of history.”
Recall the Petrarch, in his letter to posterity, wanted us, his posterity, to know what kind of man he was. Petrarch, then, wanted us to access the proper dimension of history, and he did this quite explicitly by entering into dialogue with us. He wrote us a letter that we can still read today. But I don’t think that Aron went far enough in his account of historical consciousness. Man can be aware that he has a past and still not access the proper dimension of history, as Aron sees it. This is because there are, as I implied earlier, different forms of historical consciousness that correspond to different forms of historicity. The categorical historicity of medieval thought truly had a past, but it was not a past as we conceive it today. In some ways the past was much more immediate, as it seems to be immediate when Petrarch writes letters to ancient writers dead for more than a thousand years, as though they are intimate friends of his.
This is Petrarch’s categorical heritage. And when he writes a letter to posterity, that is to say, when he writes a letter to us today, who are his posterity, his larger and more comprehensive historical framework. This is Petrarch’s legacy of complementarity. And while most ancient and medieval history was as much about moral instruction as it was about the past, the complementarity of modern historical consciousness is, in its own way, no less about moral instruction. The most familiar and perhaps the most fundamental moral exercise is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of someone else. This is an exercise in complementarity. Taken individually, it’s how we compare our own personal consciousness to that of others. Taken socially, it’s how we understand and compare the historical consciousness of different ages.
