ABSTRACT
A cognitive style is a compendium of one or more identifiable patterns or regularities underpinning an artificer’s cognitive acts of production in the course of his or her creative life. Petrarch’s practice of imitation can be depicted, rather, as a two-phase cognitive process. First, as an act of consumption in and by which his personal belief/knowledge space was enlarged and enriched with the contents of his readings of the classics and, second, the desire to produce original literary artifacts that encapsulated one or more aspects of these classical contents. Purposive evolution, as a means of creative imitation, would be a significant component of Petrarch’s cognitive style. Petrarchism thus represents a kind of Petrarchan humanism in spirit if not precisely in the manner of Petrarch’s cognitive style. Humans make sense of a new experience by attempting to match and assimilate that experience against an existing schema in their respective belief/knowledge spaces.
