Author: PETRARCH
Biography:
PETRARCH (1304-74: EB)
Petrarch was born Francesco di Petrocco on 20 July 1304 in Arezzo, Italy. His father, a lawyer, had been expelled from Florence in 1302; the family lived in other Italian towns until 1312 when they settled in Avignon in Provence, France. He was destined for the law but disliked it and after the death of his father in 1326 he was ordained instead. He entered the household of a cardinal in Avignon and later divided his time between princely courts and relative retirement at Vaucluse or elsewhere. After 1353 he lived mainly in Italy. He was a classical scholar and a collector of Greek and Latin manuscripts (though he did not read Greek). Most of his writings—orations, odes, letters, and the epic poem Africa—are in Latin. He is best known for the sequences of poems written in Italian expressing his chaste love for “Laura,” a married woman whom he first saw in 1327 and who died of the plague in 1348. In 1341 he was crowned poet laureate in Rome. He had two children by a woman whose name is unknown; they were legitimised by papal bull. In 1369 he retired to the village of Arquà, near Padua, where he died in 1374. Five of the six English translators of his work here have headnotes of their own: Henry Boyd, Thomas Le Mesurier, John Nott, Barbarina Wilmot, and Francis Wrangham (qq.v.). The one exception is James Caulfeild (1728-99), who was born at Castle Caulfeild, Co. Tyrone, Ireland, the son of Elizabeth (Barnard) and James Caulfeild. Upon the death of his father in 1734 he became the fourth Viscount Charlemont. In 1746 he embarked on a Grand Tour that lasted nine years and was spent mainly in Italy. Charlemont had a distinguished career in the Irish House of Lords and was raised to an earldom in 1763. With Mary Hickman, whom he married in 1768, he had four children, one of whom died young. Among his literary remains were memoirs published in 1810 and the scrupulously literal translation of Petrarch’s sonnets (1822) which had been part of a longer ms covering the great Italian poets from Dante to Metastasio (qq.v.). He died at his Dublin house on 4 Aug. 1799. (EB 2 Mar. 2025; Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911] 21: 310-15; ODNB 2 Mar. 2025; ancestry.com 3 Mar. 2025; Introduction to Select Sonnets [1822]) HJ