20. The Renaissance’s Greatest Unconsummated Romance
Petrarch’s father was a lawyer who compelled his son to study law at the universities of Montpellier and Bologna. However, Petrarch’s interests lay in writing and Latin literature, and he detested the legal profession. After his parents’ death, he worked in clerical offices, which gave him time to devote to his true passion, writing, and his first major work, an epic about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, won him acclaim. His poems to Laura, an idealized beloved who was beyond his reach, contributed to a flowering of lyrical poetry. Laura’s death during the Black Death led Petrarch to renounce sensual pleasure, but his love for her continued for the remainder of his life.
That chaste love and unconsummated romance formed the basis of his most celebrated work, the Italian poems Rime, which he divided into rimes during Laura’s life, and rimes after her death. Even before he penned Rime, Petrarch’s poetry had earned him considerable praise such that, in 1341, he became only the second poet laureate crowned since antiquity. He became known as the “first tourist” for his propensity to travel for pleasure. While on the road, he visited monastic libraries to collect manuscripts from antiquity and was prominent in the recovery and propagation of knowledge from Greco-Roman writers. That became his scholarly life mission, and it lasted until his death in 1374.