Petrarch, Augustine, and the Order of Hermits in the Early Humanist Movement

BORELLI MARCELA

París

Conferencia; La philosophie et la théologie des augustins au XIVe siècle; 2025

Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes - Campus Condorcet

This paper examines the relationship between Petrarch and the Hermits of Saint Augustine, situating their connections within the broader revival of Augustinian scholarship in the fourteenth century. While Petrarch is often regarded as the initiator of humanism, his intellectual formation emerged from a milieu in which Augustinian friars played a central role in recovering, editing, and reinterpreting the works of Augustine. The Order’s efforts to construct its identity—especially amidst the controversies over Augustine’s tomb and the authorship of the Rule—generated a renewed engagement with the Church Father’s writings, providing the cultural and institutional background for Petrarch’s own encounter with Augustine.Through figures such as Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, Bartholomew of Urbino, Jean Coci, and Bonaventura da Peraga, Petrarch entered a network of scholars devoted to both classical and Christian antiquity. The gift of the Confessiones from Dionigi marked a turning point in his moral and literary development, inspiring a lifelong dialogue with Augustine’s thought. Petrarch, in turn, influenced a younger generation of Hermits, most notably Luigi Marsili, to whom he bequeathed the same Confessiones at the end of his life—an act symbolically returning Augustine’s book to its “true house.”By tracing these exchanges, the paper argues that early humanism did not arise in opposition to religious culture but was deeply entangled with the intellectual practices of mendicant orders. The collaboration between Petrarch and the Augustinian Hermits illuminates a shared project of moral renewal, textual recovery, and the reappropriation of antiquity.