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Petrarch’s Plague Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic

–Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic

Plague returned to Florence with a vengeance in the summer of 1363. In this heightened atmosphere of renewed anxiety, Petrarch redoubled his criticisms of astrologers who deluded the living with predictions of when the latest pandemic would end. An anxious populace hung on their every word. “We do not know what is happening in the heavens”, he fumed in a letter to Boccaccio in September, “but impudently and rashly they profess to know”.15 A pandemic was a business opportunity for astrologers who peddled their words to “parched minds and thirsty ears”.16 Petrarch was hardly alone in pointing out that the astrologers’ conclusions had no basis in astronomical data or the spread of disease. They sold false hope and certainty in the marketplace. Petrarch longed for a more reasoned response to pandemic with better tools than the science of the stars.

What then of medicine? Petrarch was famously skeptical about physicians who claimed too much certainty and authority. He believed that physicians, like everyone else, needed to acknowledge their own ignorance as a first step towards knowing anything. Ignorance itself was “pestiferous” — a disease to be rooted out and eradicated even if there was no vaccine.17 While professing great respect for the art of healing, he had no patience with what he slyly dubbed “pestilential incompetence” in his Invectives against the Physician.18 Plague alone did not reveal medicine’s failure but it brought its limits into stark relief.

Petrarch befriended some of the most famous physicians of his age and stubbornly debated their advice regarding his own health as he aged. “When today I see young and healthy doctors falling ill and dying everywhere, what do you tell others to hope for?”19 Petrarch expressed this sentiment in a letter to the famous Paduan physician and inventor Giovanni Dondi upon hearing of the premature death of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo in 1370. Del Garbo wrote one of the most important plague treatises of the fourteenth century, dedicated to preserving the health and well-being his fellow Florentines after his experience of the first pandemic. Ultimately, he succumbed to this disease.

In the end, physicians were as human as anyone else; their learning did not confer any greater immortality on them or their patients. Petrarch continued to live, following some but not all of the medical advice he received, especially for the discomforts of scabies, a skin ailment he described as quite the opposite of “a brief and fatal illness” such as plague — “I am afraid that it is a long and tiring one”.20 Although he did not believe that medicine had any special powers of salvation, he respected the combination of learning, experience, caring, and humility that were the hallmarks of the best medical practitioners. Like his brother Gherardo, who cared with faith rather than medicine, and unlike the astrologers, who manipulated data to fulfill their prognostications, good honest doctors were also his plague heroes.

Writing from Venice in December 1363, Petrarch noted some flattening of the curve where he was but did not think the plague had ended elsewhere. “Still it rages widely and horribly” he wrote.21 Offering a vivid portrait of a city unable to bury its dead or properly mourn, he observed the latest tragedy but no longer openly grieved. It seems he was learning to live with plague.

In 1366, Petrarch brought to conclusion his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, which included a dialogue about plague. “I dread the plague”, proclaims Fear, ventriloquizing the escalating anxiety about this “omnipresent danger”.22 Petrarch’s Reason pragmatically observed that fear of plague is “nothing but a fear of death”.23 In a moment of dark humor, he joked that it was better to die in so much good company during a pandemic than to die alone. As for the survivors, Petrarch could not resist pointing out how many of them were undeserving of their good fortune. The good perished while “this vermin, so hardy that no plague, not death itself can exterminate them”,24 endured. No one said plague meted out death with any justice.

A year later, in 1367, Petrarch returned to Verona – the place where he’d joyfully rediscovered Cicero’s lost letters in a monastic library in happier times, and where he’d heard of Laura’s death, so many years ago. The city had suffered greatly during the second pandemic but there were signs of revival underway. Nonetheless, he could not say in all honesty that Verona, or indeed any city that he knew, was as magnificent and prosperous as it had been before 1348. The medieval Italian communes were economic powerhouses whose business dealings traversed the entirety of Eurasia but this prosperity was imperiled. Once again, he found himself thinking about how his world had changed — and not only because of plague. War, politics, the decline of commerce, the sorry state of the church, earthquakes, bitterly cold winters, and general lawlessness were also to blame. He saw the late medieval economy contract, observing the rippling effects far beyond his own world. As he wrote in a letter reflecting on the twenty years since the 1348 outbreak, “I shall admit that I know not what is happening among the Indians and Chinese, but Egypt and Syria and all of Asia Minor show no more increase in wealth and no better lot than we do”.25

Petrarch knew that “plague” was a word of great antiquity, but he considered the experience of “a universal plague that was to empty the world” to be new and unheralded.26 He also understood that plague “really does not disappear anywhere”.27 It had been a twenty-year scourge. He composed this anniversary letter for one of his few remaining childhood friends, Guido Sette, who was archbishop of Genoa. By the time the courier reached Genoa, Sette was no longer alive to read his words. Once again, Petrarch’s pen seemed to foretell the end of another of life’s chapters.

In the spring and summer of 1371, plague returned to the Venetian Republic. Petrarch rebuffed further invitations to escape the maelstrom. He acknowledged how dangerous the cities had become again, in the “jaws of a plague, raging far and wide”, but he had found “a very pleasant, healthful place” from which he would not budge.28 By then Petrarch had retired to the house he built in the picturesque hill town of Arquà (today known as Arquà Petrarca, not far from the COVID-19 hotspot of the Veneto), just south of Padua. Even the impending approach of war did not deter his resolve to remain in the home where he spent his remaining years with family, writing letters to friends and perfecting his collection of poems, nominally in honor of Laura’s memory but also about the nature of time and mortality.

In this bucolic setting, Petrarch continued to receive unhappy news from plague-ridden Italy. Another childhood friend, the papal legate Philippe de Cabassoles, passed shortly after they exchanged letters reaffirming the power of their lengthy friendship. Petrarch once again recorded this loss in the pages of his Virgil. In October 1372, he wrote a letter to his physician friend Dondi consoling him on “sickness and deaths in your family”.29

Petrarch never explained what finally led him to acknowledge in 1373 that he had read his dear friend Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed twenty years earlier). He claimed that a copy mysteriously arrived at his doorstep, yet it seems impossible to believe that he had not known this work until then. Petrarch declared that he skimmed rather than imbibed the Decameron: “If I were to say I have read it, I would be lying, since it is very big, having been written for the common herd and in prose”.30 No one should believe this disingenuous dismissal of the defining book of his generation. It was a joke between two great writers.

Petrarch forgave the author’s moral lapses in the most salacious tales because he appreciated the seriousness of its message, about how human failings — greed, lust, arrogance, and the corruption of church and state — helped to incubate a pestilential world. He especially praised the book’s beginning, admiring the magnificent perfection of Boccaccio’s vivid description of Florence under siege during “that plague-ridden time”. Petrarch paid his friend the ultimate compliment by translating the final tale (regarding the patience and fortitude of a young peasant woman named Griselda married to an arrogant nobleman who tested her in every possible way) from Tuscan into Latin to make it more widely available to readers unfamiliar with the author’s native language. “I have told your story in my own words”.31 Yet in some sense, Petrarch had been doing this ever since 1348 by collecting his own plague tales, finding different ways to express the full spectrum of emotions that this disease evoked.

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