Why Avignon and the Vaucluse? The Organization of the Petrarch Seminar
The Duality in Petrarch: Avignon vs.
the Valley of Vaucluse
The Goal of the Seminar
Thematic Organization of the Seminar
SYLLABUS
Works Studied
The Duality in Petrarch: Avignon vs. the Valley of Vaucluse
Rarely if ever has anyone been more aware than Francesco Petrarca (l304-l374) of living at the juncture between two epochs. Consciously caught between the religiously dominated world of his own time and the ancient secular society he glimpsed in his study of the pagan classics, Petrarch desperately strove to achieve some kind of amalgamation of the two. Deeply sensing his separation from his contemporaries, he looked back to glorious ancients like Cicero and Augustine, separated from him by centuries of mediocrity, and forward to posterity in whom he placed whatever hope he had for the redemption of a thousand years of history. Although his seemingly modern preoccupation with defining his inner life and his sense of alienation and anxiety render him congenial to present-day readers, the character of his conflicts and his solutions to them, being historically conditioned, are often obscure. The focus of this seminar falls on Petrarch's years in Provence, a crucial phase in the life of one of the principal intellectual figures in the birth of the modern world.
Petrarch was eight years old when his family arrived in Avignon in l3l2, only three years after Clement V had established himself and the papal court there. Although he made frequent trips to Italy and Northern Europe, often lasting years, Petrarch spent most of his life in Avignon and the neighboring area until the summer of l353. From l337 his preferred residence was in the Valley of the Vaucluse about twenty-four kilometers from the city. In June l353 he left Provence for Italy, never again to return.
Residence of the Roman Popes between l309 and l376, Avignon in these decades was the crossroads of Europe, enabling Petrarch to encounter the hordes of important visitors who came to the Curia, and keep abreast of the latest political and religious issues. At the same time he passionately desired the solitude of the Valley located at the point where the Sorgue River plunges under the rocks of the steep mountain face. The two sites of so much of his experience, the Vaucluse and Avignon, embodied geographically the deep tensions maturing within Petrarch's soul between the poet and the rhetorician, the life of contemplation/scholarship and that of the orator. Although he honestly detested Avignon for its humiliation of Rome and for the ostentation and venality of the papal court, he needed this city, now center of the Western world, as a locus for his glory. The periodic seclusion of the poet in the Vaucluse itself reflects a profound ambivalence. The Provençal countryside provided him tranquility for his scholarship and religious meditations but a withdrawal made so publicly could not fail to surround him with a quasi-mythic aura creating an audience anxious to read his works.
In old age Petrarch recalled the first time he saw the Vaucluse at sixteen when on a visit there with his father (Sen. l0,2): "When we came to the source of the Sorgues, I remember as well as if it had happened to-day how, struck by the extraordinary beauty of the spot, I thought to myself in my childish way, 'Here is a place most suited to my nature, which, if I ever get the chance, I should prefer to great cities.'" Seventeen years later he bought a house there where he spent four of the most productive periods of his life: l337-l340, l342-l343, late l345-l347 and sum. l35l-spring l353. The insistent influence of the Vaucluse in Petrarch's work is shown by the collection of Petrarch's texts translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, "Petrarch at Vaucluse. Letters in Verse and Prose" (Chicago, l958). A smaller but just as significant collection could also be made for his time in Avignon.