Petrarch's Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy. Berkeley: University of California Press, c Petrarch the plaintive lover is so familiar a figure that he has solidified into Petrarchism. His love, as he wrote in the initial poem of his Rime sparse , made him "the talk of the town. Job , Ps. If Petrarch personally courted a woman in verse, he also publicly criticized the Avignon papacy. The lyricist of love struck a political chord. In hearing the polysemy of his verse we may recognize that a prophet has indeed been among us epigraph.
This book is about Petrarch the poet as theologian. As Petrarch has commonly been interpreted as oscillating, sometimes in torment, between sacred and secular values, some critics would consider his piety problematical.
The issue is not whether Petrarch was a sinner, however, but whether he was a theologian. These are not mutually exclusive states; in the human condition they coexist. Theologians wrote prolifically about sin. If the reformers and the satirists are correct, they did so from much personal experience.
In fourteenth-century spirituality penitence was the vogue, a penitence so exorbitant as to be erroneous. It is one opinion that Petrarch's poetry is about sin, quite another that it is sin. This has been identified as "the sin of idolatry," whether thematically or semiologically. 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.
The poetry becomes "semiological idolatry. As Petrarch is precariously positioned between those cultures as Janus-faced, his piety must be suspicious: ambivalent, or at least ambiguous. 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.
