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Petrarch and the Black Death: From Fear to Monuments

1972; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 19; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2857093

2326-0823

Renée Neu Watkins,

Byzantine Studies and History

It was Petrarch's lot to live through the massive onslaught of bubonic plague in 1348 known as the Black Death. In poetry and prose, he recorded his subjective response. We know him indeed more intimately than any other man of the late medieval West. This paper concerns the way he looked at the event—the way he responded to private losses and to public calamity. My plan is essentially narrative, to tell a psychological story. The story helps to illuminate both Petrarch's creative processes and the way the Black Death touched and modified cultural history. Petrarch scholars have recognized, of course, the centrality of the theme of death in his work. Of Bosco's Francesco Petrarca , it has been said, ‘Seeking a single key, [Bosco] views the sense of life's transitoriness as the radiant core of the Petrarch phenomenon … ‘.