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artist indeed—of professional skill. Three manuscripts in particular, all in the Vatican Library, testify to his passion for the act of writing. In 1357 he transcribed his Bucolicum carmen in a superb Gothic minuscule. The writing is in black, with some capitals in blue, and a sentence at the end, in red, testifies that the hand is his. In 1370 he used an even finer Gothic book minuscule to transcribe the whole of his codex De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, noting his work (“scripsi his iterum manu mea”) on the verso of its thirty-eighth folio. Even more spectacular is the original manuscript of his collection of verses, the Canzoniere, or songbook. This is also in a Gothic book minuscule, but not all of the writing is Petrarch’s, a professional scriptor being responsible for some of it. On the other hand, the recto of the first folio has a first initial decorated with multicolored branches and leaves, in Petrarch’s hand, and he continued to correct and embellish the manuscript until his death. The whole of the early Renaissance lives on in this noble page from the poet’s mind and nimble fingers.

Petrarch may be called the first humanist, and he was certainly the first author to put into words the notion that the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been an age of darkness. In the medieval university, the seven “humanities” had been the least-regarded subjects of study. Petrarch placed them first, and he laid them out as follows. First came grammar, based upon study of the languages of antiquity as the ancients had used them (including the correct pronunciation). This involved the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors. Once the language was mastered grammatically, it could be used to attain the second stage, eloquence or rhetoric. This art of persuasion was not art for its own sake, but the acquisition of the capacity to persuade others—all men and women—to lead the good life. As Petrarch put it, “It is better to will the good than to know the truth.” Rhetoric thus led to, and embraced, philosophy. Leonardo Bruni (c. 1369–1444), the outstanding scholar of the new generation, insisted that it was Petrarch who “opened the way for us to show how to acquire learning,” but it was in Bruni’s time that the word umanista first came into use, and its subjects of study were listed as five: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy and history.

It is important to grasp that at no time before the Reformation did the humanists acquire a dominant position at the established universities, which continued to be organized around the study of theology, “the queen of the sciences,” and whose teaching methods were shaped accordingly. The humanists disliked, and reacted against, not only the curriculum of the universities but their reliance on the highly formalized academic technique of public debate and questions and answers to impart knowledge. They rightly saw it as inefficient, time-wasting and so entailing long courses, seven years or more, that a theology student could not normally hope to get his doctorate until at least thirty-five, at a time when the average life span was forty years or less. The method also made it difficult for master and pupil to establish a close relationship—and the notion of friendship in study was at the heart of the humanist love of letters.

Hence the humanists were outsiders, and to some extent nonacademics. They associated universities with the kind of closed-shop trade unionism also found in the craft guilds. Universities, in their view, stamped on individualism and innovation. Humanist scholars tended to wander from one center of learning to another, picking their choice fruits, then moving on. They set up their own little academies. In 1423, Vittorino da Feltre founded a school in Mantua that taught the new humanist curriculum. Six years later Guarino da Verona did the same in Ferrara. Humanists penetrated universities as a kind of subversive, protesting element. But they also attached themselves to noble and princely households, which could make their own