It appears we have a hopeless romantic on our hands here, folks. Petrarch, a guy that seems to define an aching heart, a longing for love, but an everlasting pursuit of it, for his muse and his object of desire is unattainable. Petrarch is considered to be the ‘Father of Humanism.’
Humanism you ask? Well, think of it as a multi-disciplinary course of scholastic endeavor that promoted study in in logic, natural philosophy, medicine, law and theology, in addition to a score of other disciplines that would round out and shape a human being (mostly men at this time) to be exceptional citizens, with clear and eloquent thought and writing.
Petrarch’s education allowed him to flourish as a writer, and as a poet, to be more specific. He would write in Italian, a Demotic mode that branched away from using Latin, allowing for access to his work by, perhaps, lower castes and subjects outside of intellectually elite circles. This was radical for the sixteenth-century.
Petrarch was all about the common vernacular, but used it so well to convey his passion and love for ‘Laura,’ a woman he adored from afar, never able to fully possess her, creating a mode of prose called ‘Cathexis.’ Cathexis is a fixation of desire, a focusing of erotic energy, something that when harnessed can create wonderful, artful prose and poetry. This was a device that Petrarchan writers and emotive, passionate sonnet writers of the times would utilize to reach the ‘other,’ the epicenter of the passion and love their work sought to reach out to, or internalize back into themselves.
For Petrarch, Laura could be reached in a sense, by creating his encounter with her on the page, and in a sense allowing that love and affection, passion and emotion, to live forever, in his words. Holy moly everyone, that’s some heavily romantic stuff right there, I’m sweating right now…
Concepts that come out of Petrarch are Eros and Thanatos. We are all a result of lovemaking and passion, Eros, but this act creates life that inevitably and immediately, through birth, is subjected to mortality and death, or Thanatos. It related the ideas of sexual and physical love to death; think of it as having an orgasm so hard and powerful, you feel like you’re dying, or could do so right afterwards. Or light a smoke…
Elizabethan Literary Culture 