AT SOME POINT in January or early February of 1347, Petrarch
briefly visited the remote Carthusian monastery of Montrieux,
where, four years before, his beloved brother, Gherardo, had
pledged himself to live in perpetuity as a renditus, one who took
the same vows as a monk but who was not cloistered. In the day and
night he spent at Montrieux, Petrarch spoke privately with
Gherardo, had lively discussions with other residents, and attended
religious services celebrated by the brothers with "angelic
singing." Unwilling to disturb the rigid discipline of the
monastery longer, he reluctantly departed the next morning
accompanied by the prior and the brothers to the limits of their
property and he imagined them continuing to watch him until he
disappeared from view. Returning to the Vaucluse, still "mindful of
that whole blessed sweetness which I drank in with you," and
troubled that in the course of the hasty visit he had not been able
to say many things that he would like to have said, he decided "to
express in writing what I was not able to do in person." The body
of the work that was to become the De otio religioso was composed
sometime during Lent or between February 11 and March 29 of that
year. Not untypically, however, Petrarch continued to add to the
text as late as 1356, and the finished treatise was probably not
dispatched to Gherardo until 1357. This first English translation
by Susan S. Schearer faithfully and elegantly presents Petrarch's
exordium to the life of contemplation and offers the reader a fresh
view into the spiritual world of fourteenth-century humanism.
Ronald G. Witt's introduction places the work into its historical
and intellectual context, discusses its structure and development,
and examines Petrarch's characteristic synthesis of Christian and
classical sources. First English translation. Introduction, Notes,
Bibliography, Index of Citations, General Index.
General
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