Humanly Possible (Part Two)

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Chapter One: The Land of Living

A New Generation of Writers

Throughout the 1300s, new generations of writers emerged, infused with a spirit of recovery and revival. They aimed to reach back beyond the present troubles and even Christianity to connect with the writers of the Roman world, whose works had been forgotten to varying degrees.

These new writers adopted an old model of good living rooted in friendship, wisdom, virtue and the cultivation of power and eloquence in language. They produced their own literature from these elements across various genres. Their tool in this endeavour was human studies (studia humanitatis). Signs of a revived interest in human studies had already emerged in earlier decades, particularly from visionaries like Dante Alighieri (Italian poet, writer, and philosopher, 1265-1321), a promoter of the Tuscan language and a literary master. The true new beginning, however, surfaced in the generation after his, with two writers who, like him, hailed from Tuscany: Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch in English, and Giovanni Boccaccio.

They invented a way of life that would become, for the subsequent centuries, the humanist one. They themselves did not use this label. Only later did people regularly use the term humanist (umanisti). However, Petrarch and Boccaccio shaped this profile by rebelling against the prevailing norms and the lifestyle their fathers wanted, so it seems reasonable to call them humanists. Separately, they both chose literary life, a new counterculture that could take many forms and in the 1300s, it could mean reading extensively (particularly Cicero) and starting a book collection.

Petrarch

Petrarch was born in 1304 in Arezzo (eastern Tuscany, Italy). In his early years, he went through alternating phases of fleeing and finding temporary refuge, with some breaks lasting months or years before the family moved on. They faced dangerous adventures, but they survived and reached Avignon, where his father found employment in the papal court. They settled nearby, and Petrarch grew up in and around that city, which he did not enjoy.

Petrarch’s father was a notary by profession, making it natural for his son to prepare for a similar career. However, he hated his legal education and devoted much of his energy to collecting books. This was long before the advent of printing technology. The only way to obtain reading material was to find manuscripts to buy, borrow, or transcribe, which he eagerly took up.

Cicero’s book on rhetoric and a volume of Virgil’s poetry were among Petrarch’s favourites. Virgil, with his poetic beauty and reinvention of classical legend, and Cicero, with his insights on morality and politics and exceptionally elegant Latin prose, would continue to be revered by later humanists, too. When he was twenty-two years old, his father died. He gave up law and returned to Avignon to pursue a different way of life: the literary one.

Petrarch worked with powerful patrons in exchange for financial security and often comfortable homes. His jobs included various diplomatic and secretarial services, as well as producing a stream of pleasing, flattering, stimulating, or comforting compositions that involved reading and writing, which Petrarch loved.

He wrote treatises, dialogues, personal narratives, mini-biographies, formal celebrations, Latin poems, consolatory reflections and blistering criticisms. He also wrote beautiful love poetry, developing and perfecting his own version of the sonnet, which is still known as the Petrarchan sonnet today.

Petrarch was no stranger to vanity and occasionally drifted into pomposity. A later account by Giannozzo Manetti, based on reports from those who knew him, described Petrarch as tall and possessing a certain majesty. Despite this elevated demeanour, he bore a lifelong psychological burden from his insecure beginnings. In addition to moments of self-satisfaction, he experienced episodes of depression, or accidia, characterised by an inability to feel anything at all, even unhappiness. At other times, he appeared more confident, mainly because he derived a sense of purpose from his dedication to literature.

Petrarch was constantly aware of the highest examples of the classical past behind him. In his mind, they set moral tasks for him. When not thinking of the past, he wove his life and writings deeply into the lives of his contemporaries. He developed a vast circle of interesting friends: educated men, often literary, sometimes decadent, and powerful. He circulated his works among them, ensuring that his writings were read by others besides the patrons to whom they were dedicated.

This circle also became Petrarch’s valuable network of fellow book-finders. Each time his friends travelled anywhere, he provided them with shopping lists. Manuscripts, carefully copied or precariously lent, made their way around the Italian peninsula along dangerous roads teeming with robbers. Petrarch himself was often on the move for work and social calls, and wherever he went, he would stop if he spotted a monastery in the distance: “Who knows if there’s something I want here?” He sometimes stayed for days or weeks to make his own copy if he found a valuable text. At other times, Petrarch took comfort in writing; it was almost an addiction.

Petrarch often did more than simply copy. In addition to trying to remember what he read, he applied his growing scholarship to each discovery. He pioneered the art of sensitive editing, using newly found manuscripts to create more complete versions of ancient texts that had previously existed only in fragments, striving to assemble them coherently.

His most significant production of this kind was an edition of Livy, a Roman historian whose extensive works survive only in fragments. After discovering several new sections in various manuscript forms, he compiled them into a volume alongside his copies of other existing parts. This was precisely what generations of humanists would continue to do, expanding knowledge and using the evidence to enrich and enhance the accuracy of texts. Petrarch led the way.

Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and used his correspondence to discuss nearly any subject that interested him. He responded to friends’ thoughts and questions, drew from his wealth of knowledge for insights or examples, shared research plans, and offered personal advice.

It took him four years, but eventually, he began working and produced a substantial collection titled “Familiar Letters." This was followed by another collection, “Letters of Old Age.” Together, they represent his most comprehensive and enjoyable work. They indirectly illuminate his entire world and are filled with expressions of warmth, sorrow, concern, and anger, occasionally veering into offence and posturing.

Some of the letters tell long stories, including one that recounts a significant hike with his brother up Mont Ventoux near Avignon. They are meticulously edited and polished. To this day, no one is certain whether he indeed climbed Mont Ventoux or merely created a beautiful fantasy around the idea. The letters are literary constructions, and literature is often their theme. Some letters are addressed to the classical authors he admired, as if they, too, were part of his circle of friends. Instead of his usual sign-off phrase, he would conclude these with “From the land of the living. " Now, as we read his letters, we find ourselves (temporarily) in the land of the living while Petrarch speaks to us from the other side.

These are not fan letters but rather thoughtful engagements with fallible human beings who wrestled with life’s problems. They made ordinary mistakes, like any other human, yet they also came from a time that seemed wiser and more cultured to Petrarch than the world around him. Beneath Petrarch’s witticisms and intimacies, a strain of melancholy runs through these letters to the past. The recipients are gone, and their epoch has passed as well. Will such notable times or such people ever exist again? That was the question Petrarch and his circle longed to know and what they hoped to make possible. He even directs one of his letters to us, with the last one in the final collection written, To Posterity.

For Petrarch, books were sociable. They converse with us, guide us, and connect us with a certain penetrating intimacy. The ancients make just as good companions as those who consider themselves alive because, as he writes, they can still see their breath in the frosty air.

Being technically a churchman, Petrarch could not marry, yet he fathered two children, a boy and a girl. His daughter, Francesca, and her family went on to care for him in his old age, but his son, Giovanni, did not seem to win his father’s favour, apparently suffering from a similar accidia as his father, though lacking Petrarch’s other tendency to seek comfort in books.

Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio stands out among the friends with whom Petrarch engaged in book discussions through his letters. Like Petrarch, he entered literary life through an early rebellion. Born in 1313, nine years after Petrarch, Boccaccio was never an exile like Petrarch. He spent most of his life relatively settled in Florence and his family home in nearby Certaldo.

However, Boccaccio’s path had not been easy either. We know very little about his mother; he grew up with a stepmother. His father was a merchant who hoped Boccaccio would follow in his footsteps. He sent Boccaccio to learn arithmetic from a businessman for six years, but this effort proved unsuccessful. When his father considered training him for the church instead, Boccaccio had no interest in that either. However, he excelled at writing, particularly poetry, which he had been experimenting with since he was six years old.

Like Petrarch, Boccaccio experienced a ritual transition. He rejected his father's wishes and instead dedicated himself to literary and human studies. Like Petrarch, he later wrote an account of his journey toward the humanities. However, in other respects, they were entirely dissimilar.

On one hand, Boccaccio was often defensive and prickly, feeling at a constant disadvantage to others. On the other hand, he was more generous with his praise than Petrarch. He never hesitated to express his admiration for authors, both old and new. He had wonderful things to say about Petrarch as well. He referred to him as his revered teacher, father, and master and said that Petrarch was so illustrious that he deserved to be regarded more as an ancient than a modern. Petrarch would have loved that.

Boccaccio received commendations for his work across a broad range of genres, including fiction, poetry, literary dialogues, collections of myths and tales, and scholarly works. He is best remembered today for The Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales written in the Tuscan dialect. Over ten days, ten narrators share ten stories each, allowing Boccaccio to demonstrate his versatile command of style and creativity.

Some stories mock the clergy for their laziness or corruption. In one, an abbess (the female head of an abbey) is woken up in the middle of the night with news that one of her nuns is in bed with a lover. This prompts her to rise and investigate. In the heat of the moment, she accidentally covers her head, not with her veil but with the breeches (shorts or underpants) of the priest she was with at the time.

Among such anticlerical humour, other stories risk a more profound critique of the authority of Christianity. For instance, a great lord summons his three sons and gives each a ring to indicate his choice of an heir. In fact, he has made two identical copies of the original ring, so no one can determine which of the three is real. This creates a compelling parable about the competing truth claims of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all believing they possess the true religion, while in reality, the matter remains undecidable.

Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods is a similarly expansive and adventurous compilation of classical myths. It was assembled by talking to knowledgeable individuals and examining books at a time when the study of mythology and history had not yet acquired methodological rigour. The book radiates Boccaccio’s love for all things ancient. The closing sections also include his thoughts on modern literature, accompanied by an account of his own journey toward a literary life.

While writing this and other works in various genres, Boccaccio also maintained a career in Florentine public life. He held positions as city treasurer, tax collector, and ambassador, and served on civic boards and in the department overseeing public works at different times. He was more deeply embedded in his community than Petrarch. One of these civic engagements eventually led Boccaccio to meet Petrarch in person after years of admiring him from a distance.

In 1350, when Petrarch was passing through Florence, Boccaccio took the opportunity to invite him to the city and host him in his own home. He arranged for the town to offer Petrarch a university chair. It was a considerable honour but did not come to fruition; Petrarch never moved to Florence, which disappointed Boccaccio. However, they overcame this rocky beginning and became lasting friends.

Occasionally, Boccaccio visited Petrarch in his various homes. Nonetheless, they maintained their relationship mainly through letters filled with book talk. Although their age difference was not great, Boccaccio viewed Petrarch as a father figure.

Boccaccio showed boundless interest in all the right things: his passion for language, his joy of writing, and his dedication to finding and reviving ancient literature. These elements defined the humanities scholars of the early modern world. Like Petrarch, Boccaccio loved manuscripts and explored monasteries. He, too, made significant discoveries, including additional works by Cicero in the great Benedictine monastery of Montecassino.

At one point, Boccaccio nearly abandoned all his copying and collecting of manuscripts when a monk warned him that he would soon die if he did not rid his library of all non-Christian books and cease writing such books. Alarmed, Boccaccio sought advice from Petrarch, who calmed his panic. He argued that if a person loves literature and excels in it, it would be morally wrong to abandon it. He stood for knowledge, learning, and a healthy abundance of words and ideas. Fortunately, Boccaccio soon changed his mind and retained his books. In his Genealogy, he asserted that nothing should be considered “improper” for a Christian to study, not even the gods or stories from the ancient world.

Petrarch and Boccaccio had such a strong passion for literature that they even cherished texts they could not read. Their Latin was impeccable, but like most Western Europeans of their time, they had little or no knowledge of ancient Greek. While some medieval scholars had studied it, the majority had not; when monastic copyists encountered Greek words in a Latin text, they often wrote, Graecum est, non legitur, meaning “It is Greek, and cannot be read.” This phrase evolved into the saying, “It’s all Greek to me,” popularised by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar.

Homer (Ancient Greek poet, the author of the Iliad and Odyssey) was one of the unreachable authors for Petrarch and Boccaccio since no Latin translations of his work existed at that time. However, Petrarch was the proud owner of a copy of the Iliad, which had been given to him by a Greek friend in Constantinople.

Boccaccio also owned Greek books and devised a solution to the problem. In 1360, he persuaded the authorities in Florence to create Western Europe’s first professorship of Greek and recruited Leontius Pilatus, a Calabrian Greek speaker, to take the position. He allowed Leontius to live with him in his Florence house and commissioned him to produce a word-for-word Latin version of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In 1363, after spending nearly three years in Boccaccio’s house and with the translations still unfinished, Leontius announced that he was tired of Florence and wished to move to Constantinople. Petrarch presented him with a copy of Terence’s comedies as a parting gift.

Once in Constantinople, Leontius changed his mind, longed for Italy again, and managed to organise the journey himself (1366). However, it ended very badly for him. The ship, after sailing up the Adriatic and nearly reaching its destination, encountered a storm, and he was the only one to die in it.

What emerges from all these stories of their book collecting, translating, editing, and letter-writing is their unwavering dedication to their work and an elusive goal: reviving the long-ago human studies, which they hoped would be reborn and infuse with new life for the future. However, the path to that future was not always easy.

Black Death

In 1347, a disease began to spread in northern Italy and southern France. It had also appeared in parts of Asia and Africa, later reaching other areas of Europe. The cause was a bacterium (Yersinia Pestis), which primarily spreads by fleas and rodents; however, no one knew that yet. Some individuals fell unconscious; a few recovered, but the majority died. Because of the presence of buboes (swollen, inflamed lymph nodes in the armpit or groin), the disease became known as the bubonic plague or the Black Death.

As it spread, it initially took communities by surprise. However, more frighteningly, people soon heard news of it advancing towards them from town to town. People tried to remain calm and optimistic, believing fear would make them more vulnerable. Meanwhile, thoughts often turned to God, who seemed to be in one of his punitive moods. Processions were organised, with participants beating themselves. Sometimes, these events escalated into violence, as Jewish people were suspected of causing the disease.

Guy de Chauliac (French physician, 1300-1368) tried to stop anti-Semitic violence and to bring order to the troubling processions. When cemeteries and mass graves in fields filled up, he consecrated the Rhône River, which runs through France and Switzerland, so that those whose bodies were thrown in the river could reach heaven.

In Florence, the situation was even more extreme. It is estimated that by the end of the outbreak, two-thirds of the population were dead. The most vivid sense of what must have happened comes from Boccaccio. Although he was not there at the time, he knew people who were and included a brief but horrifying account of their descriptions in his prelude to The Decameron. Boccaccio wrote, “All the wisdom and ingenuity of man were unavailing.” The disease challenged both the Christian vision of God’s order and the classical vision of a society composed of gifted, capable people benefiting from their sciences and arts.

Long before Boccaccio, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (circa 460-400 BCE) recounted a similar moral collapse caused by an epidemic that struck Athens during its long war with Sparta. Thucydides, who contracted the disease but survived, described how Athenians disintegrated when no one believed in the future. People squandered their money on immediate pleasures; they broke laws as they did not expect to live long enough to face prosecution. The gods appeared indifferent, as both the good and the bad died indiscriminately, and many lost their faith, feeling that worship made no difference. Boccaccio’s story mirrored this sentiment. Faced with disaster, people abandoned their civilised habits, believing the age of civilisation had ended.

Like total war, total collapse creates a compelling narrative, but when it approaches, people will also strive to avert it or lessen the damage. Thus, during the crisis, individuals sometimes remained at their posts, making heroic efforts to keep things together. Boccaccio acknowledges this, as he properly should because one of those who continued to work to minimise suffering in Florence was reportedly his own father.

As a minister of trade in the city, Boccaccio’s father stayed on at significant personal risk and worked to distribute food supplies. It’s uncertain whether he caught the disease, but he died shortly afterwards. Elsewhere, others attempted to devise new medical treatments to reduce contagion or to continue the necessary task of disposing of corpses as effectively as possible.

When the plague was over, they worked to restart life. Thus, like everything involving human morality, culture and behaviour, the process was complicated. As the nineteenth-century novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1786-1873) observed regarding a 1630 plague outbreak in Milan: “In any public misfortune, in any long disturbance of whatever may be the normal order of things, we always find a growth, a heightening of human virtue; but unfortunately, it is always accompanied by an increase in human wickedness.” In other words, along with panic or selfishness, one also finds acts of courage and many shades of extremes.

Petrarch and Boccaccio also experienced other outbreaks. The first and worst, in the late 1340s, came to an end, but more followed throughout the rest of that century and beyond. The entire era that we refer to as the “Renaissance” in Europe, characterised by a revival of classical wisdom and knowledge, bursts of artistic brilliance, advancements in medicine, and more effective modes of enquiry, unfolded while people were dying at regular intervals from a disease that no one understood.

The last European outbreak occurred in Marseille, southern France, in 1720. The plague also caused misery and death in other parts of the world, particularly in China and India during the mid-nineteenth century. When this first wave declined, having killed at least a third of the population of Western Europe, it left behind a transformed landscape and resulted in post-traumatic effects of depression, grief, and anxiety, all vividly expressed by Boccaccio and particularly by Petrarch.

Petrarch was in Parma, northern Italy when the plague began and stayed there throughout. He escaped the illness, but some of his friends were not as fortunate. He lost his patron and dear friend, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, and he also heard about the death of his beloved Laura in Avignon. Upon receiving this news, he took out the volume of Virgil in which he had recorded their first meeting and added more lines to note her death. He dated this entry as “6 April 1348,” twenty-one years after their initial encounter.

Petrarch continued to write love poems, but they became darker and more melancholy. He also composed a despairing Latin verse addressed to himself, lamenting the dying everywhere, the losses, and the many graves. A letter to his old friend Ludwig van Kempen, whom he always called “my Socrates, " poses the question, “What shall I say? Where shall I begin? Where shall I turn? Everywhere we see sorrow; on all sides, we witness terror.” Humanity itself was almost wiped out; why? To teach us humility? Perhaps we are meant to learn that humans are frail and proud beings, building too securely on fragile foundations, or perhaps we are destined to long for the next world.

Petrarch’s son, Giovanni, died in one of these pandemics in 1361 at the age of twenty-three. The same outbreak also took the life of Petrarch’s “Socrates. " He wrote to another cherished epistolary friend (or pen pal), Francesco Nelli, about this loss, but Nelli died soon afterwards. Additionally, another friend, with whom he had spent thirty-four years, also died.

Petrarch’s way of getting through each crisis was through literature and writing consolations. A consolation often took the form of a letter to a friend or patron who had experienced bereavement, illness, or other misfortunes. It would contain morally uplifting thoughts and be elegantly composed, as beautiful writing could elevate spirits. This is why Petrarch focused on literary techniques even while providing comfort or appearing engulfed in his own sorrow.

Following the first outbreak (1349), he began work on the longstanding project of collecting his letters. He also resumed a personal writing endeavour, the Secretum, or Secret Book. This work is a dialogue between himself (Francesco) and Augustine of Hippo, the wise old mentor. Francesco confesses to Augustine that he feels hatred and contempt for the human condition, which weighs so heavily upon him that he cannot help but be utterly miserable. Augustine advises him to seek solace in classical works by authors such as Seneca and Cicero.

Petrarch and his associates believed that Latin eloquence could inspire confidence and foster moral strength, among other benefits. No author exemplified this better than Cicero, who refined the art of expressing his thoughts in persuasive, emotionally compelling language, both in his oratory and writings. He employed specific types of syntactical structure that delayed the punchline by allowing the sentence to extend, placing the most significant words at the end. Here is an example: the “Letter from Birmingham Jail, " which has devastating emotional power, is written by Martin Luther King Jr. (1963), where he expresses the frustration of constantly being told to wait for equality and social change:

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to coloured children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat coloured people so mean?’ Then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

The structure here mirrors the meaning: this is a Ciceronian technique in the hands of a master writer and speaker, used to support one of the most critical human arguments ever presented. Rhetorical skill is useless or even harmful if it does not accompany virtue and moral purpose; all efforts must be made in the service of good. Cicero distinguished between virtuous eloquence and the mayhem created by demagogues.

Another influential writer, Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a Roman educator and rhetorician, 35-100 AD), emphasised that a speaker who uses such powerful forms must be a good person for logical reasons. After all, language is “the gift that distinguishes us from other living beings”, and Nature would hardly have granted humans such a gift if it served only to aid crime. Quintilian also suggests that people with bad intentions would be so tormented by anxiety that they could not concentrate on achieving literary excellence. Thus, effectively using language is more than adding decorative twists or sparkles; it involves moving others to emotion and recognition. It is a moral activity because the ability to communicate well lies at the heart of humanism and being human in the fullest sense.

The consolation letter, the most humane of genres, is especially apparent when both writer and recipient share similar experiences, which bind them together (ubuntu-style). The most moving characteristic example of Petrarch’s letters occurred in 1368 when he wrote to a friend who had recently lost his son. He provided many pages of examples of grief and loss drawn from classical literature but also spoke of the fact that his own grandson had just died, leaving him devastated.

Petrarch’s entire body of work both defies and defends against the vagaries of fortune, which he had known since his unsettled childhood. By discovering and collecting manuscripts, writing letters and consolations, and producing other works, he erected barriers against the breakdown of relationships, friendships, and literature.

Boccaccio also sensed the wasteland of loss. In the preface to his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, he reflected on the past centuries as a whirlwind of destruction and misfortune. Just consider, he urged his readers, how little of the past’s work has endured and the many adversities it has faced: fires, floods, and erosion over time. He specifically noted another factor: the deliberate actions of early Christians who saw it as their duty to erase all traces of the religions that preceded them.

Boccaccio and Petrarch set themselves to retrieve what they could of that past, rework it, reimagine it, use it to strengthen themselves and their friends against grief and pass it on to future generations in the hope that they, too, would use it for rebirth.

Back in 1341, when Petrarch was submitting his poem, Africa, he addressed his own work as if it were a child going into that future world: My fate is to live amid varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. Our descendants can return to the former pure radiance when the darkness has been dispersed.

Such talk of darkness and radiance would continue throughout the next century. It formed a new way of visualising European history. Behind him and still around him, Petrarch feels that darkness as a devouring void into which books and humanity alike have fallen. He believes the ancients lit up their world with eloquence and wisdom in the past. In some new period of time to come, future generations may illuminate their world afresh. The hope is to bridge this gap by preserving what can be found or copied, by creating new variations on the old forms, and by keeping it all in precarious existence long enough for the lamps to be relit.