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Book Without a Name:

Petrarch's Posthumously Published Letters on the Corruption of the Papacy and His Vision of a New Rome

by Janet Ewell

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[Editor's Note: Janet Ewell's paper was originally presented as a text with sidebar definitions of unusual words and literary terms. These have been moved to the end of this web page as a glossary, and the original text of the paper, with original layout intact, can be found here. Thank you.]

Petrarch's Liber Sine Nomine is a collection of 19 letters Petrarch chose to exclude from his Epistolae Familiares and withhold from publication during his life. In his preface to the work, Petrarch writes that he has kept these 19 from the other larger collection of prose letters "so that they would not. . . sully the whole body of my correspondence and make it hateful to the enemies of truth" (27).

As an added precaution he withheld from the work the names of individuals and any identifying particulars, as well as the names of the people to whom the letters were written: "I have quite purposely concealed their names, for if their identities were to come out into the open they would be injured if still alive or hated if dead, as though I had by preference written the letters to them knowing ahead of time that they would give them a very willing reception" (28).

What was it about these letters that required such secrecy?

Norman Zacour writes in his foreword to Petrarch's Book without a Name that nothing in contemporary or modern criticism of the Avignon papacy, not the English complaints of "favouritism toward the French, Italian complaints about its prolonged stay in Avignon, episcopal complaints about its continual interference in local church affairs, the individual complaints about the avarice of its officials. . . compares in the scope of its polemic with Petrarch's Liber Sine Nomine."

It is true that in the Epistolae Familiares Petrarch makes no effort to conceal his opinion that the papacy should be in Rome, not Avignon, but those complaints, salted in among the letters, could be dismissed as the grumbling of a chauvinistic ex-patriot living and working in an increasingly French organization--111 of the 134 cardinals appointed during the Avignon papacy were French.

It is also true that in letters to Cardinal Rossi, included in the Epistolae Familiares, Petrarch is sharply critical of the conduct of cardinals who "heap up riches. . . for the devil and his minions, who watch over you with care, number your days and most anxiously await your inheritance. Out of the money you have wrested from the poor they will erect most grateful monuments on the portals of Tartarus inscribed with your names" (22). Sharp though this criticism may be, it is moral criticism leveled at the misconduct of individuals.

In Sine Nomine his condemnations of the Avignon papacy are not only more frequent and more intense than those published in the Epistolae Familiare--they are the very substance of most of the letters--they call into question the virtue and future of the whole institution of the papacy as it existed in Avignon. He does not limit himself to the moral failings of individuals. He writes (but never sends) to Francesco Nelli in Letter 17, telling him that what Nelli is seeing in Avignon is "the wickedness of (Christ's) enemies. . . They are servants of Satan, swollen with the blood of Christ, acting wantonly and saying: ëour lips are our own; who is our Lord?'" He calls them "these Pharisees of our own time." He compares them to Judas Iscariot "who betrayed the Lord and kissed him and said: ëHail, master'" (99). The church has become "a church to which Judas will be admitted if he brings with him his thirty pieces of blood money, while Christ the pauper will be turned away from the gate" (106).

Petrarch writes that the papacy is no longer fit to represent Christ, and that God should give it into the hands of another more righteous people: "There is nothing at all left now but to pray to Christ that if our punishment is not yet sufficient he might at least consider his see (the papacy), take it from these people, and hand it to others of whom the human race need not repent and be ashamed. . . . I cannot say how bad they are" (105-6).

These letters without names contain neither a systematic examination of the papacy's faults nor an overt call to specific action. In these 19 chapters are no 19 theses. If Petrarch had wished to frame such a document, he would have been too wise to do so. No work was guaranteed to remain private. Indeed, in his brief introduction to the Sine Nomine--only 64 lines--he spends 13 lines, 20 percent of his text, discussing the need to veil one's intent. Seven lines in the first paragraph discuss his Bucolicum carmen, which he describes as "cryptic" and "understood only by a few" (27). In the next paragraph he uses four lines to tell his posthumous reader that the author remains safe by the "obscurities and omissions of this work as I was in the deliberate vagueness of the little pastoral work I just mentioned" (28).

In the third paragraph he spends five lines recounting the misadventures of his Bucolicum carmen, which "once fell into the hands of some high ranking personages . . . I . . .changed the subject" (28). It is true that he then writes, "this collection has no veil of similar kind" (28). It is quite possible that, unlike his work in the Bucolicum, he means no more or less than what he says, that in this work he says exactly what he means, that this work is guileless, unguarded, and frank, though those are virtues one rarely looks for in Petrarch.

These letters are highly rhetorical in that they are created, crafted, and honed by his literary genius in accord with the conventions of rhetoric: that is, they are designed to persuade his readers, especially his posthumous readers, of the dire situation in which the church finds itself. For all the vehemence of his opinions there is nothing in his introduction or in the texts themselves to suggest that these letters are any less carefully composed or painstakingly edited than his other works which he published in his life-time. Petrarch was comfortable deprecating his Epistolae Familiares's style, saying that he carelessly threw it off. In the Sine Nomine he makes no such polite moue.

These letters are craftsmanly, rhetorical, rather than spontaneous, but they contain almost none of the introspection and indirection characteristic of his other letters. Here is no sign of the scholar-Petrarch who reported, "I flee error and fall into doubt, which I hold in lieu of truth. Thus I have finally joined that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, and doubts everything--outside of the things that it is sacrilege to doubt." In these letters, he is certain.

These letters are not in a contemplative voice, but a very active one, and they carry with them the certitude of the justice of their position, though it may be that he felt the need to obscure exactly what that position was behind the veil of metaphor, allusion, and exemplum. It is ironic that these letters in a sure voice are the letters that he had to withhold from circulation until after his death.

In addition to the criticism of the papacy in Avignon, three of the letters in the Sine Nomine reveal Petrarch's support for Cola di Rienzo (see sidebar) and his enthusiasm for a renewed Roman empire with a strong centralized leadership in Rome and the papacy reinstated in the lawful "center of the world." His support of Cola, who represented merchant and guild interests at the expense of the those of the great noble houses of Rome, coincided with the end of his relationship with his patron Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, the son of one of the houses in questions. Perhaps the strength of his support of Cola in Sine Nomine, would not have set well with members of Italy's other noble houses on whose good will he depended in the years after 1353 when he left Avignon.

To say that the Sine Nomine is highly crafted and highly rhetorical is to say that is written using the devices of rhetoric with the intent of persuading its readers, both the reader to whom it is addressed (who sometimes never saw the letter) and the readers after Petrarch's death--posterity, the audience for whom he consciously wrote--of his opinions on the papacy, the church, and Italy.

Rhetoric is the creation of discourse--written or oral--crafted with intent to persuade the audience. It is not solely an intellectual or a logical exploration of a topic, but rather an attempt to evoke the interests, values, and emotions of the audience. Rhetorical language uses certain devices, such as the metaphor, parallelism, repetition, and a host of others, the time-honed heritage of the western world, both to structure and to decorate the discourse in such a way as to engage and convince the audience. Rhetoric was, to Plato and Socrates, the means to share the wisdom acquired through philosophy with the less-thoughtful audience. In rhetoric lies the seed of propaganda, with propaganda's power to manipulate the audience. When a work is subject to rhetorical analysis, it is not so much the rhetor's mind that is revealed, as it is his intent in the discourse that can be discerned.

Petrarch frequently structures his works as comparisons between two unlike things, one concrete, the other abstract. When the comparison is an extended narrative, such as "Ascent of Mont Ventoux" the rhetorical device is an allegory, with the actual physical assent of the mountain being the concrete experience, and his increased spiritual vista being the somewhat difficult-to-define abstraction. When the comparison is more brief, or lacks narrative, or is less highly narrative, it is called a metaphor.

In Letter 1 of Sine Nomine the dominant structure is an extended metaphor based on a shipwreck, beginning just 22 words into the letter and ending when Petrarch closes the letter by calling Vaucluse "the calmest harbor" (35). As with "Ascent of Mont Ventoux," the concrete situation is easy to understand and the abstraction is more difficult to define: A ship, with a "fool (who) has too much confidence in calm weather" at its helm, is dangerously hugging the shore while safety is to be found in deeper water. The oars are worked by "unskilled hands," and the "keel is forced deep by burdensome cargo" (33). The abstraction to which this concrete ship refers is the church with the pope as the helmsman, 12 new cardinals at the oars. The waters are the turbulent times; the shore, earthly power; the burdensome cargo, the fruit of avarice. So much is relatively obvious.

To what extent is the church in trouble? A metaphor is not a logical proof, and a man cannot be excommunicated for a metaphor. Petrarch writes:

We have just now looked upon the pallor of him who falls (the helmsman, the pope), we have now heard the cries of the wretched who are shipwrecked, the weakened belly of the ship has burst open, the scattered tackle now floats about on the water. Oh, if only the Father in heaven, "seeing the ship gone astray for loss of its master, himself might steer his own vessel through the dark waters," to keep afloat that which he has redeemed from his enemies at such great price! Otherwise I fear greatly that we may be driven by the storm to perish either at the hands of pirates or on the rocky shore. (34)

Two paragraphs later he writes "But look about you to see if there is some plank to which we might together cling and so swim to dry land" (35).

He continues the image of the shipwrecked church in Letter 12 where he writes, "We must soon perish, overcome in a vast flood of evils, and if divine love does not bring an end to the faithlessness of mankind, the church will suffer a tragic shipwreck" (83).

This echoes the despair in Letter 6 where Petrarch writes, "If Christ does not comes to redeem us, all is over with us" (62).

Petrarch further suggests that the woes of the church are not minor when, in Letter 1, he makes a brief discursion from his nautical metaphor to speak of the pope's illness and portending death. He suggests that the death of a bad pope will not solve the problem, calling his death a specific remedy, but the church's problems a universal disease: "Alas, how much more fortunate it would have been if he had furrowed the earth with his father's plough rather than boarded the fisherman's craft. What am I to say? I am certainly aware that a specific remedy (this pope's passing) will not cure a universal disease. But what more is to be done?" (34)

Several other rhetorical devices figure largely in the development of this letter. An apparent favorite of Petrarch's, congeries, also called accumulatio, is an accumulation for effect of phrases that essentially say the same thing. Petrarch writes of the pope's failings: "Rage, madness, shameful sloth, burning desire for the stormy shore, reason's realm abandoned to fortune, the disreputable grossness which comes from the urging of foul greed--these are what have done it."

In the same paragraph Petrarch uses further congeries as he writes of the pope's coming death: "And so he goes to receive his deserts, a feast for the sharks, pointed to by all, the butt of their wit, a universal joke, the jest of dinner tables--in a word, a fable forever for all who sail these waters" (34).

While each of the letters in Sine Nomine contains congeries, in Letter 17 Petrarch outdoes himself, perhaps winking at his audience. (The word congeries comes from the Latin congerere, meaning to heap up.) Speaking of the corruption of Avignon, he writes:

Look, now you can see with your own eyes, you can feel with your own hands, what this newest of Babylons is really like--burning, seething, repulsive, frightening. Neither that Babylon on the Nile which Cambyses built nor the older royal Babylon of Semiramis in Assyria matches it. Having vanquished even the rivers of the lower world, the Cocytus and the Acheron, the Rhone has certainly surpassed the Nile and the Euphrates. Whatever faithlessness and fraud, whatever harshness and haughtiness, whatever shamelessness and unbridled lust you have anywhere heard or read about, whatever impiety and immorality is or was ever to be found scattered about in the world, you may see it there all piled up, all heaped up.( (98)

Petrarch makes much use of literary and biblical allusions. Petrarch's two principle sources for allusions in Letter 1 are the Aeneid and the New Testament. From the Aeneid he draws on Palinaurus, a sleeping helmsman who is pitched overboard by the sea and drowns, as well as on the powerful descriptions of storms and lost ships. That the Aeneid is the story of the founding of Rome, not Avignon, would not be lost on his audience.

From the New Testament he mentions Peter, the first bishop of Rome, when he speaks of the church as "the old seaman's little boat" or "the fisherman's craft," which is "too small for such waves" (33). With mention of Peter comes the images of the man able to walk on the water with the help of his Lord, and the leader of the church whose net caught more fishes than could be lifted from the water. The Fisher of Men leapt from his fishing craft and swam naked for two hundred cubits when he saw the resurrected Christ on the shore. All these images of Peter contrast painfully with the shipwrecked papacy Petrarch portrays.

In other letters in the Sine Nomine Petrarch alludes to the Babylonian captivity to evoke images of the chosen people in exile, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Revelation's mother of harlots; as well as the purported history of four labyrinths; and Semiramis to imply bestiality, pedophilia, homosexuality, incest and other activities inappropriate to those who would undertake the cure of souls. Allusions to Greek and Roman literature often evoke stories of descents and escape from Hades, while history even as recent as 1330 is used to remind the audience of "outstanding soldiers and splendid leaders, the best kind of walls" (103). Mary, the mother of Christ is evoked to portray Rome.

Letter 5, a brief letter of only two paragraphs, is not structured as an extended metaphor, but is no less rhetorical. One of Petrarch's favorite rhetorical devices is the metonymy. In Letter 5 he uses a synecdoche, a type of metonymy. He refers to the Rhone River (certainly not guilty of blaspheme or misuse of sacred powers) to represent the establishment of the papal court in Avignon: "the savage Rhone, so like hell's boiling Cocytus or Acheron" (58). Frequently in the Sine Nomine the Tiber is a synecdoche for Rome, the Nile for Egypt or especially Assyrian-dominated Egypt with its second Babylon, the Sorgue for Vaucluse, and the Rhone for the papacy corrupt beyond redemption.

He refers in Letter 5 to the cardinals by their epithet "the heirs of the fishermen" (59). How apt to bring to the audience's mind the contrast between the original and the 14th century versions as he discusses a shipwrecked papacy. Peter is "the fisherman."

He develops the greater part of this letter with antitheses, building on the contrast between the institution at Avignon and the life of Christ's original Twelve:

It is astonishing to recall those earlier ones, and then to look upon their successors covered with gold and purple, made proud with the spoils of princes and nations--to see luxurious palaces in the place of the over-turned boats, to see mountain-girding walls instead of the little nets with which so long ago on the billowing waves of the Galilean lake they sought with much difficulty a bare living, and with which on the Lake of Gennesaret they toiled all night and took nothing (though when morning came they took a huge number of fishes in the name of Jesus). It is shocking to hear now the lying tongues, to see the parchments devoid of truth turned by their dangling seals into nets to entangle a credulous host of Christians--also in the name of Jesus, but for the works of Belial. They are soon scaled, cooked in the flames of cares and the "coals of desolation" (Psalms 119, 2-4), and go to fill the pit of a greedy belly. It is shocking to see pious solitude replaced with shameful comings and goings and swarming troupes of the most debased hangers-on, to see rich feasts in place of sober fasts, rude and revolting slothfulness for sacred pilgrimages--instead of the naked feet of the apostles, to gaze upon the prancing snow-white mounts of thieves, bedecked with gold, covered with gold, champing on bits of gold, soon to be shod in shoes of gold if the Lord does not curtail this debased excess . . . You poor, worn ancients! (59)

The last line of this extended quotation is an apostrophe, a turning aside from the ostensive audience of the letter (Lapo da Castiglionchio) to address the original apostles. It is a device Petrarch uses frequently for its intense emotional effect. He addresses the emperors Charles and Constantine, and also Christ, elsewhere in the Sine Nomine.

The closing lines of the letter suggest in three metaphors that its author is out of sorts--a congeries of metaphors: "You cannot get fresh water from a brackish well. It is natural that the breath from an ulcered breast be offensive, that the words of the wounded soul bitter" (60). The last of the three metaphors lacks the expected verb "be" used in the previous clause. The reader might expect It is natural that. . .the word of the wounded soul be bitter. This ellipsis of the verb in the second clause is called a zeugma.

Letter 4 is to the Roman people in an attempt to persuade them to demand that Cola di Rienzo be returned to Rome to stand trial. As in Letter 17, discussed below, Petrarch does not seem to know exactly who he wishes to inspire, or toward what precisely he wishes to inspire them. It appears he wants to foment a public outcry against the Avignon court's intervention in what should be a purely Roman affair, Cola's trial. Whoever his intended audience may be, Petrarch developed this rather lengthy letter through the rhetoric device of parallelism (Petrarch dishes out a healthy portion of guilt in the process.):

But IF it is claimed that by the law of "common country" then he should be punished where he is presently held captive,how much more truly in his case is the "common country" Rome where he was born and raised and did whatever it was that he was accused of? Here (in Avignon) on the contrary he has done nothing to be either praised or blamed. If, however, unlike your forefathers, your courage has declined with your fortune and has so degenerated that to demand justice seems rash to you whose forefathers found nothing difficult, then at least ask for what can be asked of any barbaric nation living under law, namely that your fellow citizen not be denied public hearing and the right to make a public defense, so that he who did everything in the light of day and indeed shed on the world as much light as a man could, may not be condemned in darkness.

In the last three letters of the Sine Nomine--never sent--Petrarch uses auxeses, enthymemes, apostrophes, metaphors, allusions and exempla to suggest that the Avignon papacy is corrupt beyond redemption. In Letter 17 Petrarch heaps congeries upon congeries (a crescendo of congeries is an auxesis):

In savage judgment they decree that he was neither God nor king . . .Day and night they exalt Christ's name with the highest praises, they vest him in purple and gold, they deck him with gems, they salute him and prostrate themselves before him in worship, and meanwhile they buy him and sell him. . .crown him with thorns of base wealth as though with his eyes thus veiled he will not see them befoul him with spittle from the filthiest mouths, taunt him with the viperous hissing, and wound him with the lance of their poisonous deeds. With all their strength they drag him again and again to Calvary--scoffed at, naked, helpless, scourged--and to blasphemous applause, they nail him once again to the cross. (100)

Letter 17 also uses enthymeme to engage its audience. As the audience must do the work of supplying the abstract portion of a metaphor, thus leaving the author less accountable, so the audience must provide the suppressed premise of the syllogism framed as an enthymeme. Logically, the syllogism Petrarch implies with his enthymeme as he writes Francesco Nelli, ("just as gold may be found in the muck--or better, refined in the fire--I first found your friendship, brighter than gold" (98)) should be stated

Avignon is muck

You are gold and found in Avignon

Therefore Gold can be found in muck, or

 

Avignon is the fire of hell

You are gold and improved by Avignon

Gold is refined in hell-fire.

The major premise of the syllogism, concerning the nature of Avignon, is missing. It is the audience that must frame the derogatory premise.

In the metaphor of the pustule in Letter 17 Petrarch leads his reader again to suspect that the papacy as it exists in Avignon is moribund:

What at the outset had been a wound capable of treatment has finally grown putrid; for, I confess, the ugly sore had begun to fester even before our own time, as we know from our forefathers. Often, however, an incompetent doctor, and often too the headstrong patient itself, contributed to the unchecked growth of an infection which had been more annoying, you might say, than fatal. Now it's coming to a head, and all the puss is bursting forth in our day. (106)

In an apostrophe, Petrarch addresses Emperor Constantine, whom Petrarch and his contemporaries believed had granted to Rome secular supremacy over the western half of the empire. He speaks as if the supposed Donation of Constantine were a mistake: Oh foolish and wasteful prince! . . .What were you doing?. . .(W)hat in fact you did was to pass the administration of the state, founded so long ago by other hands, to the hands of those who were humble but are now haughty. . . .I do not know whether or not you hear these words; for that matter it would make no difference if you do, for you made it impossible to change anything even if you were to return. To restore anything you have to be more of a builder than a wrecker. (100-1)

Does Petrarch hope that a strong reformer from inside the papacy can set things right? As in the metaphor of the shipwreck and in the metaphor of the infected patient, so in the metaphor of the clean and dirty streams in Letter 17, he suggests it is unlikely. He may be hinting with allusive language that, like Israel of old, the papacy has lost its calling:

Even if any one of us, like a clean stream mixing into a muddy torrent, has been enrolled among that number (the Avignon court) . . .he has long since lost his native hue and has been completely dissolved into the nature and foreign ways of the many others. There is nothing at all left now but to pray to Christ that if our punishment is not yet sufficient he might at least consider his see (the papacy), take it from these people, and hand it to others of whom the human race need not repent and be ashamed. (105)

Petrarch does hint at a remedy, sometimes metaphorically or through an exemplum in Letter 17. He writes, "There is no Christian who does not know that this (corruption) is so, who does not grieve, or who would excuse it. But while one person waits for the other, you can see how the evils increasingly go unpunished." In the next paragraph he writes of two luminaries, presumably the papacy and Rome, and reminds his reader that

governments of mortals are themselves mortal, if the passage of time demands that the two luminaries of the world be extinguished and the two swords blunted. . . (and we need not despair that after they have been utterly destroyed all these things will rise again all the higher)--if, as I said, we in our day have to face the serious threat that these high authorities will be destroyed, God! How glad I am . . .that so great a blame is to be shared by the barbarian Germans, savage and fierce, and the barbarian French, soft and effeminate. (106-7)

In an apostrophe to Christ, Petrarch points out that the good Catholics of the church are at some level responsible for not resisting the corruption. He contends that the corrupt institution is afraid of the people: "(W)hat have we who used to be lords of nations been turned into, if not sheep to be eaten? If only we were merely sheep to be sheared, or milked--but no, we are sheep to be eaten. We let ourselves be chewed, consumed, devoured by those who, if we began to resist, would themselves seem like sheep before lions" (101)

Continuing to address Christ, his prose mirrors that of his exhortation to the Roman people, trying to excite them to speak out in the defense of Cola: "They would not seem to be outstanding as they have for so long. At present our lethargy is greater than their audacious cowardice; quite wickedly they feed upon our tolerance while at the same time hating it. And what will amaze you even more, we whom they despise on the surface they fear deep down. They pretend contempt, but it is really fright" (102).

Petrarch then offers his readers an exemplum to support his contention that the corrupt powers are full of hatred and fear. He uses three extended narratives in the Sine Nomine: One is the oft-quoted story in Letter 18 concerning the cardinal and the prostitute, to illustrate the carnal sins of Avignon. In Letter 14 he tells of two cardinals, one of whom lied to all the petitioners at the gate, encouraging them for his own amusement, while the other was appalled at the behavior of the first. When the second asked if the first were not ashamed to delude these simple men, the first retorted to the kinder of the two, "Rather, you should be ashamed to be so slow-witted that you haven't been able in all this time to learn the arts of the court" (88). Petrarch used this tale as an exemplum of the duplicity in the court.

In Letter 17 he writes, "Here is an example to demonstrate both (the fear and the hatred) at once" (102). If the audience could bear in mind the purpose of the exemplum, it becomes a strong if veiled editorial encouraging the reader to resistor abandon the papacy in Avignon. The exemplum goes thusly:

Pope John XXII (1316-1334) from Avignon wished to destroy the Christian and Italian city of Milan but was stopped at the city gate--the city had no walls--but was defended "by outstanding soldiers and splendid leaders, the best kind of walls" (103). (Petrarch ironically refers to this as a "sacred and pious undertaking.") An advisor suggests that the pope could save the expense of the military expedition by removing "both papacy and empire from the city of Rome and Italy and transfer the papacy to our homeland in Cahors, the empire to Germany" (104). The pope laughed bitterly and retorted that then he and his successors would become "bishops of Cahors" and

"the emperor, . . .a German prefect, while whoever remained in Rome to rule in spiritual matters would be pope or if in temporal matter emperor(.) While thus you think you're wiping out the name of Italy you raise it up and restore it to its old dignity. Let's hang on to the reins of the papacy while heaven allows, and do our best to stop the Italians' taking back at some time what is their right. How long we can prevent it I don't know. But let's not argue about titles; whether we like it or not, Rome will remain the head. (105)

Letters 18 and 19 are climaxes both of anti-Avignon criticism and of rhetoric. Letter 18, never intended to be sent, abjures the reader to flee Babylon. This may be taken metaphorically not only on the noun Babylon, but also on the verb, flee. Letter 19 indulges in bellicose oxymorons, hoping "Christ may succor his anguished bride by the just attack of mercenaries, by a healing plague, by the merciful inclemency of the heavens, finally by some manifest catastrophe, since the proud and hardened heart of Pharaoh (the pope) remains untouched by threats and warnings" (120-1)

Letter 19 was addressed to Nelli, but never sent to him. In it Petrarch addresses and elaborate apostrophe to Emperor Charles IV, who also never saw the letter. The audience for whom Petrarch wrote this letter is posterity. It is to engage posterity that he crafts congeries of erotesis. Of posterity he asks:

Who will raise up this oppressed world once more? Who will avenge the distress of Rome? Who will reestablish the old ways, gather the scattered sheep, reprove the errant shepherds and lead them or drag them back to their proper place? Will there never be a limit to licence and crime? Or is it in vain that the Holy Spirit spoke thus through the prophet: "These things you have done and I kept silence. You mistakenly thought that I was like you; I shall reprove you and shall decide these things before your eyes. Consider this, you who are forgetful of God, lest I tear you to pieces and there be no one to deliver you" (Psalms 49, 21-22). Consider this, I say, consider this, you enemies of God. He speaks to you! (119)

Thus in his Liber Sine Nomine, Petrarch created a book written to posterity, a book highly rhetorical in nature, which called into question the virtue and future of the whole institution of the papacy as it existed in Avignon.

Petrarch's 1345 discovery of the text of Cicero's letters may have inspired his desire to collect his own correspondence. Indeed, in this period before the development of Montaigne's essay, before the printing press and periodicals--he is almost exactly a hundred years too soon to profit from Guternberg's invention, which came across the Alps to Italy in 1462---these letters represented a major prose genre. They are the speeches he never delivered, the conversations that distance prohibited, the editorials and letters to the editor he never published, the essays and the rebuttals to the essays' critics that he could never give.

His Epistolae Familiares were largely written during his 1351-1353 stay in Provence. In 1359 he had this collection of letters copied onto parchment with another copy by 1364. In 1366 he added letters, bringing the collection to 350 letters in 24 volumes.

The nineteen letters in the Liber Sine Nomine, withheld from publication until Petrarch's death, form a single book, a Liber, on the theme of two cities: Rome, referred to as "Jerusalem," "Sion," "the rightful center of the world," the chaste and beautiful, though sometimes ravished, Lady; and Avignon, "Babylon-on-the-Rhone," "the labyrinth," the "sewer," the "pustule," the brassy and corrupt harlot exalted beyond her degree, who lords it over her Lady Rome, thinking the Lady is dead or vanquished. These letters reflect both his outrage as a moral philosopher and his proto-nationalism.

The earliest of the 19 letters may have been written as early as 1342 and the latest appears to come from 1359.

Petrarch, it seems, was successful in withholding publication of Sine Nomine until after his death. In his preface he anticipates that those whom he offends in the letters will "rant and rave, thunder and flash" (28) but by the time of his death the papacy was three years away from its return to Rome, and Pope Innocent VI (1352-1362) had relieved some of the pressure on the pustule by prohibiting the granting of innumerable benefices to one recipient and by urging prelates to reside in their sees.

The Sine Nomime was included in 1554 Basil edition and republished in the 1581 version of his complete works, but outside of letter 18, with its tale of the goat-like cardinal and the prostitute, which made the rounds in translation during the Protestant Reformation, it seems to have excited little interest for 400 years

Guiseppe Francassetti, who published Petrarch's other letters in both Latin and Italian in 1859, refused to print Sine Nomine "as being unworthy of a Catholic and a Franciscan tertiary" but in 1885 it was translated into French, and in 1895, Italian. At that time the collection received its first significant study.

In 1925 Paul Piur provided a text based on the best available manuscripts and the cultural milieu in which it was written. It is his edition that Paul Zacour used for his Petrarch's Book without a Name. Published in 1973 in one edition, it appears to be the only English version available, while the 1925 Piur remains the standard Latin text.

Fewer than one percent of the 678 entries on the subject of Petrarch in WorldCat, an international on-line card catalogue, appear to deal with the work.

Allusion, a brief reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event. It allows an author to bring to his audience's mind the passion, the narrative, setting, and characters, and the morals of that to which he alludes.

Antithesis, repetition of contrasting, even negating elements.

Apostrophe, a turning aside from the topic at hand to address some person or thing, either present or absent.

Auxesis, arrangement in ascending importance.

Congeries, an accumulation of statements or phrases that essentially say the same thing. (Also accumulatio.)

Enthymeme, omission of a logically implied clause or sentence. Loose logic.

Epithet, a term used as a descriptive substitute for the name or title of a person, such as The Great Emancipator for Abraham Lincoln

Erotesis, a question raised but not answered, designed to engage the audience.

Exemplum, an anecdote or short narrative used to point a moral or sustain an argument

Irony, expressing a meaning directly contrary to that expressed by the words.

Metaphor, a comparison which imaginatively identifies one thing with another, dissimilar thing, and transfers or ascribes to the first thing (the tenor or idea) some of the qualities of the second (the vehicle, or image). Unlike a simile or analogy, metaphor asserts that one thing is another thing, not just that one is like another

Metonymy, the substitution of a word for a related word. "The pen is mightier than the sword."

Oxymoron, a paradox reduced to two words, usually in an adjective-noun ("eloquent silence") or adverb-adjective ("inertly strong") relationship, and is used for effect, complexity, emphasis, or wit:

Parallelism, recurrent syntactical similarity. In this structural arrangement several parts of a sentence or several sentences are developed and phrased similarly to show that the ideas in the parts or sentences are equal in importance. Parallelism also adds balance and rhythm to the sentence.

Synecdoche is a substitution of a part to the whole: "A hungry stomach has no ears,"

Zeugma, the ellipses of a verb from one of two or more usually parallel clauses. "Passion lends them power, time means, to meet."

First published June 10, 2002; last updated June 12, 2002

Copyright 2002, GJL