The Circulation of Petrarch’s ‘Africa’: Poet Laureate, Unread Poems, and Epic Fame

Reflecting on Petrarch’s oeuvre and legacy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries compels us to examine the role of “circulation” as ‘the decisive driving force of a transformation that “World Literature” is constantly undergoing’ (‘Circulation’; Full reference in Zotero Library). Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) is generally regarded as the founding father of Humanism, a new cultural movement based on the imitation of the idealised ancient Greek and Latin world. This movement emerged in response to what was perceived as the “obscure” Middle Ages, which supposedly neglected the literary traditions of antiquity, as discussed in the case study by Bernhard Huss and myself.¹For further insights and bibliography on Petrarch’s role as the self-proclaimed initiator of the new cultural movement as a community-building act, see Huss/Longinotti forthcoming. For a recent account on Petrarch’s humanism and a discussion of his self-presentation, see Full reference in Zotero Library and connected bibliography. In order to give concrete expression to this successful imitation in the years around his poetic coronation, Petrarch composed the Latin epic poem ‘Africa’, which, although unfinished, played a fundamental role in establishing his reputation as the first poet laureate to follow the model of the ancient authors. At least, this is how Petrarch presents himself in the final book of the poem, where he has Homer describe his authorship and work in relation to the supposedly lost and idealised ancient world, as well as the new epoch that was to come:²See Full reference in Zotero Library for Petrarch’s Renaissance-project and the role of ‘Africa’. Burrow 2019 presents some critical insights into Petrarch’s self-fashioning as the initiator of a new cultural movement through his self-proclaimed ground-breaking imitation of the ancient Greek and Latin world.

Ille diu profugas revocabit carmine Musas

Tempus in extremum, veteresque Elicone Sorores

Restituet, vario quamvis agitante tumultu;

Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grandia facta,

Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum

Colliget: Hispanas acies Libieque labores

Scipiadamque tuum: titulusque poematis illi

Africa […]³ [That youth in distant ages will recall / with his sweet notes the Muses, long exiled, / and though by tribulations sorely tried / he’ll lure the venerable sisters back / to Helicon. He will be called Franciscus; / and all the glorious exploits you have seen / he will assemble in one volume—all / the deeds in Spain, the ardouous Libyan trials; / and he will call his poem Africa] (Full reference in Zotero Library). (Africa IX, 229–236, Full reference in Zotero Library)

But did Petrarch really write the epic poem that captured all the facts of the Second Punic War and aroused the ancient Muses with its stylistic elegance? During Petrarch’s lifetime, the epic had only few readers who were merely allowed to read selected passages.⁴Brownlee lists the only three authorised readers of the poem: Pierre Bersuire, King Robert of Naples, and Barbato da Sulmona, who copied the poem with the—afterwards broken—promise not to divulgate it; see Full reference in Zotero Library. But what happened then? How was Petrarch’s poem interpreted following his death in the late fourteenth and fifthteen century and beyond, and how did this impact the circulation of Petrarch’s oeuvre? Historical readers of Petrarch’s oeuvre, such as the Florentine Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), have provocatively remarked that there is no part of it in which he does not boast of the epic poem; and yet, the results fell short of the expectations that were created.⁵Leonardo Bruni in his Dialogi has his fellow humanist Niccoló Niccoli utter a provocative statement, only partially revised in the conclusion of the dialogue: ‘[Niccolò Niccoli:] “Atqui nihil unquam tanta professione praedicatum est quanta Franciscus Petrarcha Africam suam praedicavit; nullus eius libellus, nulla fere maior epistola reperitur in qua non istud suum opus decantatum invenias. Quid autem postea? Ex hac tanta professione nonne natus est ridiculus mus? […]”’ Full reference in Zotero Library; [Yet nothing has ever been praised with such fervour as Francis Petrarch extolled his ‘Africa’ no small book of his, almost no major letter is found in which you do not discover this work of his extolled. But what then? Was not born from this great proclamation a ridiculous mouse?] (all translations are my own unless stated otherwise).

The distinction between “closed” and “open” circulation can help illustrate certain peculiarities in how Petrarch’s oeuvre, particularly the poem ‘Africa’, circulated during the early modern period in Italy. As described in ‘Circulation’, the first category refers to ‘secure infrastructures’ and a ‘clearly defined group’ that lead literature ‘along controlled paths’ back to its origin; the second describes the movement of literature in ‘progressively structured circuits’, which evolve in time and space through ‘net-like structures’ (Circulation). Within this framework, I would like to consider what happens to the circulation of a work that was never completed and therefore never read during the author’s lifetime, but which the author himself presented as the highest achievement in literature after the supposedly dark Middle Ages—as the work that set the standard for the Renaissance of the idealised ancient world. In this case, it is necessary to search for new metaphorical meanings of the terms “circulation” that might combine the ‘notion of an unbounded movement as in the example of blood circulation’ and the ‘idea of wholeness and unity, similarly to planetary cycle […] independent from concrete actors’ (Circulation).

In order to understand what happened in the years between Petrarch’s death and the moment when the poem became generally known, our methodology could be defined in Douglas Pompeu’s words as as histoire croisée, which develops at the intersection between philology and comparative studies and considers how actors, such as the “author”, “critic”, “translator”, and “reader”, are ‘displaced and set in constant motion’ (Pompeu; Full reference in Zotero Library). To outline this ‘topography of reception’ (Pompeu, ‘Suhrkamp Verlag’) and the ‘unhampered distribution’ (Soethaert, ‘Circulation’) that defined the circulation of Petrarch’s oeuvre on the threshold of the ‘discovery’ of his supposedly ground-breaking Latin epic poem, we must focus on two main centres connected to Petrarch’s biography: Florence, where his father came from and Petrarch’s fellow humanists negotiated their fellow’s return for many years, and Padua, where he died and left his library, including the drafts of the unfinished poem. Through a praxiological approach to circulation, we can, therefore, focus on ‘the particular roles and interactions of different actors, dispatchers, connectors and other agents of circulation’ (Soethaert, ‘Circulation’).

After Petrarch’s death, Florentine and Paduan humanists began intense interregional negotiations about the publication of the poem based on the idea of Latin as the lingua franca of the European culture (see Full reference in Zotero Library). While in Padua, Lombardo della Seta (died in 1390) and Francescuolo da Brossano (died in 1405), Petrarch’s executors, were the main dispatchers of Petrarch’s oeuvre, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) worked as the central cultural mediator from Florence. However, the negotiations were not only about the poem itself, but also about the value of Petrarch’s legacy and oeuvre:⁶For Salutati’s stance on Petrarch, see the letter IV, 20 (1379) to Giovanni Bartolomei d’Arezzo and its defence against the criticism of the successive generation in the letter XIV, 19 (1405) to Poggio Bracciolini. who could prove himself worthy of being the first editor and publisher of Petrarch’s epic poem? And, moreover, which community could claim Petrarch as its patron: the humanist circle of Padua or Florence?⁷The tension between Padua and Florence becomes evident in Salutati’s epistolary exchange with the Paduan circle, first presented as ignorant imbeciles who supposedly wanted to correct the poem in a letter to Bevenuto da Imola (III, 18, Full reference in Zotero Library) and then praised in a later letter to Lombardo della Seta (IV, 2, 1376). In this, Salutati explains that publishing the poem would grant him eternal glory: ‘nec inficier hoc michi accessurum ad gloriam, si me dignum duxeris qui tanto munere doner’ Full reference in Zotero Library; [Nor do I deny that this will contribute to my glory, if you consider me worthy to come into possession of such a gift (the unpublished drafts of the poem)]. In my project, I pursued these questions by examining what Alexander Beecroft calls ‘scenes of authorship’ Full reference in Zotero Library.⁸Beecroft describes them as ‘biographical anecdotes concerning the composition and performance of poetry by named individuals’ Full reference in Zotero Library. These scenes deal with the composition of Petrarch’s poems in different sources, such as the epistolary exchanges between Florence and Padua, or Petrarch’s biographies, written all across Italy. By examining passages that describe the moment when a literary work is brought to the public to illustrate ‘different modes of mapping the circulation of literature onto the circulation of political power’ Full reference in Zotero Library, I have outlined the social, cultural, and temporal tensions within Petrarch’s reception.

What happened after the exchanges between Salutati from the Florentine circle and Lombardo from the Paduan? Salutati received the first two books of the poem from Padua and could only acknowledge their poor condition. While he had previously considered preparing an edition to spread Petrarch’s and his own fame in the most important cultural centres of Europe,⁹Salutati describes in detail his project for the poem in the letter IV, 4 to Francescuolo da Brossano (1377), see especially Full reference in Zotero Library. Salutati was made to retreat. Pier Paolo Vergerio published the poem in Padua in 1396 and, in the biography of Petrarch included in the volume, Vergerio presented him as the unsurpassed modern Latin author.¹⁰Describing Petrarch’s overarching literary ability in different genres, Vergerio concludes: ‘Eloquio fuit claro, ac potenti, ut stilus librorum indicat, atque (ut vere dixerim) unicus fuit, qui per tot saecula exulantem, et iam pene incognitam dicendi facultatem in nostra tempora revocaret’ Full reference in Zotero Library [He had a clear and powerful eloquence, as the style of his books indicates, and (to speak truly) he was the only one who would bring back a nearly forgotten power of expression into our times from an exile lasted many centuries’]. However, only a few years later, voices of dissent were raised in Florence.¹¹In his exchange with Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini questions the older humanist’s praise of Petrarch, presenting him not as the ground-breaking poet laureate who reached and surpassed the ancients, but as the one who paved the way for Bracciolini’s generation to reach new heights in imitation of the ancients: ‘quippe qui primus suo labore, industria, vigilantia hec studia pene ad internicionem redacta nobis in lucem erexerit et aliis sequi volentibus viam patefecerit’ Full reference in Zotero Library [For indeed, he was the first who, through his own labor, diligence, and vigilance, brought forth these studies, which had nearly fallen into oblivion, into the light for us, and he opened the way for others willing to follow]. Despite these criticisms, the Florentine humanists did not negate Petrarch as the patron of their local and cultural community: by distancing themselves from his prestigious model, successive authors could claim their superiority. At this point in the circulation of Petrarch’s oeuvre, we do not find a ‘peripheral synchronization’ (Cf. Full reference in Zotero Library), but the opposite: two asynchronous centres. The first, Padua, claims its prestige by virtue of Petrarch’s unsurpassed imitation of the ancient past, according to his own self-description as poet laureate. The second, Florence, makes a similar claim by virtue of its own improvement in Petrarch’s literary skills, and in doing so relegates all rival communities—and Petrarch himself—to the dark Middle Ages.

Examining the reception of Petrarch’s ‘Africa’ prompts a rethinking of the concepts of literary text and reception beyond the dichotomy of closed and open circulation. By exploring Petrarch’s epic poem ‘Africa’ not merely as an unfinished work but as an ‘open-ended input network’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; Soethaert, ‘Circulation’), we can examine the relationships within the textual corpus and the interconnected ‘hubs and relay stations’ (Soethaert, ‘Circulation’) of Padua and Florence. These relationships reflect ‘the result of the unequal distribution of social status and symbolic capital among the actors’ (Pompeu, ‘Suhrkamp Verlag’), encompassing not only the actors of the first generation after Petrarch, such as Coluccio Salutati and Lombardo della Seta, but also those who moved in the competitive space of the Quattrocento, such as the aforementioned Leonardo Bruni and his fellow humanist in the rediscovery of ancient texts Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). All this, however, requires a primary shift in perception: that is, not to consider the network of ‘Africa’, the Florentine and Paduan humanists and their community as the product of circulation; rather, to paraphrase Latour, to acknowledge that circulation first shapes the landscape for the interactions and continuous negotiation between ‘templates and agents of all sorts and colours’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; Soethaert, ‘Circulation’). From this perspective, it has been possible to reveal in more detail the complex dynamics between network and competing communities generated by Petrarch’s oeuvre in early modern Italy.