Melancholy and the modern consciousness of Francesco Petrarca: A close reading of melancholy, acedia, and love-sickness in the 'Secretum', 'De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae' and 'Canzoniere'

The most important classical Greek heroes were believed to suffer from a physical, mental, and spiritual illness shown negatively to alter their general state of being. Attributed to an excess of black bile in the body, the earliest documented form of this ailment came to be known as "melancholy;" paramount among its effects was the emergence of a severely split being sincerely pursuing Virtue, yet markedly susceptible to the Passions that threatened to veer him off his course.;The manifestations of this malady pervade his oeuvre as a whole: repeatedly in his immense repertoire, Petrarch - at least in his proliferation of an artistic or lyrical "io" or self--surfaces as a fragmented if not strictly binary figure both tormented by his incumbent passions and resolutely determined to overcome them. Petrarch's often autobiographical figures are ruled by conflicting inner forces which leave them paralysed, indecisive, and helpless before Fortune, in a new position foreshadowing the anthropocentric and, to a degree, "bipartite" "modernity" soon to flood the continent.;Through a close reading of three of his most celebrated texts - the Secretum, De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae, and the Canzoniere, this study will seek to posit Petrarch as a fundamentally melancholic and "accidioso" writer whose condition of internal and social rupture more generally speaks to the emerging "crisis of modernity" which he perhaps first sets to the center stage of his period.;In the Middle Ages, traces of melancholy are found in the sin of acedia still today considered a rather "medieval" vice. Globally defined as a state of "general apathy," acedia was believed more egregiously to affect solitary religious figures devoted to prayer. The dawn of Humanism in Western Europe, however, saw this notion extended to the more general scholar, and featured as (arguably) its first protagonist, 14 th-century humanist Francesco Petrarca.