Biography

Petrarch was an Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. He developed the Italian, or "Petrarchan", sonnet, and his "Coronation Oration" is considered the first manifesto of the Italian Renaissance. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of Classical authors led him to travel, visiting men of learning and searching monastic libraries for Classical manuscripts. He was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age. Petrarch’s father, a lawyer, had been obliged to leave Florence in 1302 and had moved to Arezzo, where Petrarch was born. William Henry Seward references him in a letter, dated August 9, 1859, written from Avignon, France during his visit there.