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WHY IS PETRACH CALLED FATHER OF HUMANISM
The founder of Renaissance Christian humanism was Francesco Petrarch. Born of an exiled Florentine family in 1304, Petrarch was urged by his bourgeois father to study law. Petrarch came upon the works of Cicero in the course of his reading and was led to a passion for all the classics. When his father died, he gave up law and turned to a life of scholarship, he was obliged to pursue and disseminate learning, secure individual integrity, and harmonize classical genius with divine revelation.
It was Petrarch who first undertook the collection of ancient manuscripts. He persuaded others to join him in a search through monastic and cathedral libraries that took him all over Italy and into France and Germany as well. His private library, the first of its kind, became a model for scholars and educated gentlemen, his enthusiasm was contagious. Following his example many sons of the well-to-do took up the search and began to build their own libraries. Wealthy patrons became interested and by the 15th century had founded such famous libraries as the Laurentian in Florence, St. Mark's in Venice, and the Vatican in Rome.
Petrarch lived only a generation after Dante, but in these two figures we can see the shift from medieval to modern times. His irrepressible pursuit of fame culminated in a spectacular ceremony in Rome in 1341, and he was crowned with a laurel wreath as the foremost poet and scholar of his time and thus becoming the first poet laureate of modern times. By his inexhaustible industry in scholarship he brought the mind of western Europe into sympathetic contact with classical antiquity. In the ensuing centuries Christian humanism came to mean the cultivation of the human personality so that the individual, with liberated intelligence and talent, could lead a life of dignity, self reliance, and creativeness. His "Letter to Posterity": I have always possessed an extreme contempt for wealth; not that riches are not desirable in themselves, but because I hate the anxiety and care which are invariably associated with them. Francesco Petrarch died in 1374.


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