In a letter written to a friend, Giovanni Colonna of the Order of Preachers, Petrarch describes a tour the two had taken through the ruins of the ancient city of Rome. Fascinated by the surroundings of his beloved city, Petrarch nevertheless refrains from portraying the actual sites present to his eyes but rather flies on the wings of his imagination to the absent events and people to which the ruins allude: “here was the palace of Evander, there the shrine of Carmentis, here the cave of Cacus, there the nursing she-wolf and the fig tree of Rumina with the more apt surname of Romulus.” Starting thus with the description of the mythical origins of the city, Petrarch then continues his journey in space and time, advancing mostly linearly through the ages of Roman history, from these mythical origins through the glory of the Empire and early Christianity to the time of Constantine. He then concludes this short chronicle, lamenting not only that what is left from the glory of Rome is mere ruins but also that the significance of the ruins is mostly forgotten: “For today who are more ignorant about Roman affairs than the Roman citizens?” Ignorance, he adds, that is in turn complemented by the “flight and exile” (fugam exiliumque) of the many virtues that flourished in bygone times.

In the letter De studio eloquentie, probably written in 1345 to his friend the poet Tommaso da Messina, Petrarch writes:

Starting his discussion of eloquence with the traditional division between the realms of rhetoric and philosophy, Petrarch's definition of philosophy in this statement is nonetheless significant. Animi cura – the care of the soul, the purpose of which is the correction of life and conduct (vitam et mores) through the cultivation of virtue, is the true aim of philosophy. For Petrarch, then, the true domain of philosophy is not the pursuit of abstract knowledge but rather the practical goal of the attainment of the appropriate way of life.

In the previous chapter, I discussed Petrarch's attempt to overcome his sense of flux and exile in time through the writing of poetry of desire, an attempt intrinsically intertwined with his experience of desire. The act of writing such poetry, as we have seen, serves for Petrarch as the constant aspect of his existence, as well as a personal ritual and a meditative exercise that allow him to return over and over again to the moment of falling in love, his golden age, and thus to abolish the incessant passage of time. In addition, Petrarch also claims that by writing poetry about his noble object of desire, he is transformed into it, becoming virtuous and steadfast. Nonetheless, this attempt to overcome time through the writing of poetry, as the previous chapter demonstrated, could provide the poet with only limited and ambiguous results, making him both beyond time and subjected to time, both present and absent to himself at once. In his portrayal of this essential ambiguity governing the impact of writing and desire on the self, Petrarch was rejecting both Dante's assertion in the Commedia that desire and the writing of poetry of desire can lead to the complete transcendence of the flow of time and the Augustinian claim that the impact of desire and writing on the self is essentially negative and hence that the two must be discarded.

Petrarch's attempt in his collections of letters and the Secretum, described in the previous chapter, to use writing to care for his own self, to provide him with authority and control over desire and the emotions, is in direct opposition to the nature of writing in his vernacular poetry. As shown in Chapter 1, in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, writing is always dominated by desire and longing and serves to rekindle and intensify the poet's desire and emotions. By that, writing allows him to return to the golden age of his youth and to keep his hope for poetic immortality alive, providing him with a sense of being and presence. From the Stoic perspective, however, as the poems imply, such writings – because they serve as instigators and associates of earthly desire – only lead the self further away from virtue into the exile of fluctuation and change. Petrarch's ethical goal in the Latin writings is therefore largely to detach himself from the matrix of desire and writing that dominates his writings in the vernacular.

In the first Eclogue of the Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch alludes directly to this division between his Latin writings, which were influenced by Virgil, and his writings in the vernacular. He attributes the many problems and cares that plague his life to his youthful decision to leave behind the benevolent impact of Virgil (Dulcissimus Parthenias) and adopt instead a new, misguided style: “But an age followed after / Bolder; I dared with no guide make my own way into the forest, / Dense as it was, unafraid of the savage beasts that roamed in it.

This book contends that Petrarch's humanist philosophy and concept of self are defined above all by his efforts to care for and cultivate the self through spiritual exercises, and particularly through the literary practice of writing. Plagued by a strong sense of fragmentation and inner exile due to his acute awareness of the flux of time and the scattering impact of society, Petrarch returned to the ancient idea that self, or soul, is not a given presence but a state of mind from which we are exiled and that we need to attain through constant practice. The goal of philosophy, he therefore argues, is not to provide us with systematic knowledge but to shape and cultivate the self through spiritual techniques, which for him consist mainly of writing. To demonstrate these claims and examine his humanist philosophy, this book has explored Petrarch's various attempts to use writing as a spiritual technique, the ways in which these uses absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that ultimately arose from his efforts to cultivate the self through writing.

Petrarch's attempts to care for the self through the practice of writing are a dominant feature of both his vernacular poetry and Latin works, with each corpus displaying different uses of writing and diverse type of goals that he strived to attain.