Overview

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive literary Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and Greco-Roman culture in general. My Secret Book (Secretum) records ""the private conflict of my thoughts,"" in the form of a dialogue between Franciscus and Augustinus in the presence of a beautiful woman, Truth personified. The discussion reveals remarkable self-awareness as Petrarca probes and evaluates the springs of his own morally dubious addictions to Fame and Love.

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9780674003460

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Reviews

An aristocratic devotion to our culture continues to manifest itself even today in the most prestigious centers of study and thought. One has merely to look at the very recent (begun in 2001), rigorous and elegant humanistic series of Harvard University, with the original Latin text, English translation, introduction and notes.--Vittore Branca Il Sole 24 Ore

As a work of autobiography—or, rather, of literary self-fashioning—Petrarch’s Secretum evokes many comparisons but admits few equals…Nicholas Mann is to be applauded for having produced a volume that at last does full justice both to the elegance of Petrarch’s prose and to the sophistication of his thought…There can be no doubt that Mann’s volume is a jewel in the crown of Petrarchan scholarship. It deserves to be cherished by readers for generations to come. -- Alexander Lee * Renaissance Quarterly * It’s the careful, hard-working crew at Harvard University’s I Tatti Renaissance Library who produced the best translation of 2016 with this meticulously-rendered and marvelously sensitive scholarly edition of Petrarch’s most quietly astonishing work, a work of plaintive and rigorous self-examination cast in the form of a dialogue with St. Augustine. The I Tatti Library has been uniformly excellent, but even so, this volume stands out. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Monthly *

Author Information

Nicholas Mann is former director of The Warburg Institute and professor emeritus, University of London.

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