ABSTRACT
The European Renaissance, let us say, began on Easter Sunday, 8 April 1341. That is when the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca – to be known in English as Petrarch — received a crown of laurel on the Capitoline Hill in Rome and made a speech on the significance of the ceremony, a speech which is also a manifesto. The announcement joins the reverence for a distant and prestigious cultural past that we associate with humanism in its later history to a more immediate and selfish passion. The iconic power of Petrarch's name is part of it, but there is also the immense corpus of his own writing. For two centuries after his death he is one of the most consulted and imitated post-classical authors throughout Western Europe. In Northern Europe and in England especially, another segment of Petrarch's prose has an almost comparable impact, since it supplied him with a reputation as a proto-Protestant.
