Perhaps no author within or outside of the canon of Western literature wrote as extensively on the topic of as did Francesco Petrarch. While many of our modern associations with the term may find some of their origins traceable as far back as Petrarch's career, the term solitude carried with it much different associations in his century than it does for us today, influenced as we are by the Romantic tradition and especially by Wordsworth's absorption with the idea of as an ideal state for self-conscious reflection on the individual's personal history and its meaning. No less than three of Petrarch's major prose works-the De otio religioso, the De vita solitaria, and the Secretum-confront the topic of directly, and we can also point to many letters, poems, and portions of his treatises that either directly or indirectly reflect Petrarch's virtual obsession with solitude. In Petrarch we are confronted with an author who was at once the most politically connected intellectual of his century-we are even tempted to call him a public intellectual-and yet who constantly invoked his desire for solitude, for an escape from the many distractions and seductions that the cities and courts of his society offered. For Petrarch these were invariably places where desire lurked and power held sway, so that the life of was often invoked as an alternative-a counter-cultural locus, perhaps-where freedom from temptation and subjection was imagined as an escape from the negotium of worldly life. There is much in Petrarch's writings on the solitary life that is wishful and that we might characterize as merely compensatory in a life that was otherwise quite active and engaged, but there is also a
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Jan 1, 2003
Thomas E Peterson 
Open Access