Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Regn, Gerhard
• Huss, Bernhard

Titel

Petrarch's Rome: The History of the Africa and the Renaissance Project

Ist Teil von

• MLN, 2009-01, Vol.124 (1), p.86-102

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

Bibliografía de la Literatura Española

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The coronation privilege (privilegium laureationis) refers to Petrarch as poeta et historicus, alluding above all to the two great Latin works, far from completed at the time, in which the glorious history of Rome is depicted.3 The one is De viris illustribus, a collection of exemplary Roman lives from Romulus to Titus in which history is conceived of as magistra vitae; the other is the verse epic Africa, intended as a new Aeneid, whose subject is the deeds of the Roman general Scipio Africanus Major during the second Punic War (218-201 BC). VII, 699-708; just as explicitly, both are criticized from the vantage point of the god who is observing them.35 This imports nothing less than that human actions in history are no longer indicative of the divine plan according to which God governs historical events.36 One last time, the text confirms that the renaissance under the sign of Rome that Petrarch advances in the Africa is something more and something other than a merely archaeological endeavor.