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Mount Ventoux

The Italian poet Petrarch wrote a well-known letter about his Ascent of Mont Ventoux on April 26, 1336, written around 1350, which he published as one of his Epistolae familiares (IV, 1). In this letter, Petrarch claimed to be the first since antiquity to have climbed a mountain for the view, and this originality is often a part of depictions of the Renaissance.

Contents

[edit] Contents

Petrarch's letter is addressed to his former confessor, Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. It says he ascended the mountain with his brother Gherardo, exactly ten years after they had left Bologna. They began at the village of Malaucène at the foot of the mountain. On the way up they met an old shepherd, who said he had climbed the mountain fifty years before, finding only rocks and brambles, and that no-one else had done it before or since. The brothers continued, Gherardo continuing up the ridge they were following, Petrarch ever trying for an easier, if longer, path.[1] At the top, they found a peak called Filiolus, "Little Son"; Petrarch reflected on the past ten years, and the waste of his earthly love for Laura. They looked out from here, seeing the Rhone and the Cévennes, but not the Pyrenees (which are twenty miles away). At this point, Petrarch sat down and opened his Augustine, and immediately came upon "Men go to admire the high mountains and the great flood of the seas and the wide-rolling rivers and the ring of Ocean and the movement of the stars; and they forget themselves." Petrarch fell silent on this trip down, reflecting on the vanity of human wishes and the nobility of uncorrupted human thought. When they arrived back at the little rustic Inn late at night from where they started at dawn, Petrarch wrote this letter as he says,

While the servants were busy preparing our meal, I withdrew quite alone into a remote part of the house to write this letter to you in all haste and on the spur of the moment.[2][3]

Lyell Asher writes in his book Petrarch at the Peak of Fame that Morris Bishop states that Petrarch was the first recorded Alpinist.

In "The Ascent of Mont Ventoux", a letter to a former confessor, Petrarch famously admits to having ascended a peak for no other reason than to admire the view. As a failed conversion narrative, the letter is ultimately as gratuitous as the climb it recounts. Noting a number of similarities between climbing the mountain and composing the letter, I argue that the literal ascent he describes is a figure for his literary ascent, through condemning the climb. Petrarch figuratively condemns the letter, censuring what he does even as he does it.[4]

In the reference book Famous First Facts (a record of first happenings, discoveries, and inventions) it says:

Account of mountain climbing of importance was written by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), who lived mainly in Italy from 1304-1374. In April 1336, "to see what so great an elevation had to offer," he climbed the peak of Mount Ventouz in Provence , France , which is 6,263 feet (1,900 meters) high. In a letter to the Augustininan monk Dionigi di San Sepolcro, he later wrote: “I stood like one dazed, I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read if Athos and Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain less famous.[5]

[edit] Historic doubts

It is often claimed that Petrarch was the first to climb Mont Ventoux, but Jean Buridan had made an ascent earlier in the 14th century, and German writers of the 10th and 11th centuries left records of mountain ascents.[6]It is certainly implausible that Petrarch sat down and wrote the six thousand words we have, in elegant Latin with correct quotations from the classical poets, before dinner after an eighteen-hour hike up and down a mountain.[7] In fact, whether Petrarch himself climbed the mountain has been doubted by modern scholars; according to Pierre Courcelle and Giuseppe Billanovich, the letter is essentially a fiction written almost fifteen years after its supposed date, and almost a decade after the death of its addressee, Francesco Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro.[8]

[edit] Modern reception

Jakob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy declared Petrarch "a truly modern man", because of the significance of nature for his "receptive spirit"; even if he did not yet have the skill to describe nature. [9] Petrarch's implication that he was the first to climb mountains for pleasure, [10] and Burckhardt's insistence on Petrarch's sensitivity to nature have been often repeated since.[11] There are also numerous references to Petrarch as an "alpinist",[12] although Mont Ventoux is not a hard climb, and is not in the Alps.[13] The implicit claim of Petrarch and Burckhardt that Petrarch was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since antiquity was debunked by Lynn Thorndike in 1943.[14]

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg describes Petrarch's ascent of Ventoux as "one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs," namely between the medieval period and modernity. He also uses it to illustrate his theory of intellectual history: "The description of the ascent of Mont Ventoux exemplifies graphically what is meant by the 'reality' of history as the reoccupation of formal systems of positions."[15] According to an article by Walther Kirchner he refers to Petrarch as "the first recorded alpinist" [16] and Lyell Asher (Morris Bishop) it was a "milestone in Western intellectual history."[17][18]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Petrarch himself applies this to his spiritual failures; this passage is one of the reasons the whole letter is regarded as allegory.
  2. ^ Robbins, Jill, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Chapter 2 "Petrarch reading Augustine: "The Ascent of Mont Ventoux" pp. 49-50, University of Chicago Press 1991, ISBN 0226721108
  3. ^ Bishop, pp. 102-112; "hastily and extemporaneously" - quotes and translation from Bishop, as are the choice of points to summarize and the comment on the Pyrenees.
  4. ^ Asher, Lyell, Petrarch at the Peak of Fame; PMLA, Vol. 108, No. 5. (Oct., 1993), pp. 1050-1063.
  5. ^ Famous First Facts: A Record of First Happenings, Discoveries and Inventions in World History. International Edition. Publisher: H.W. Wilson Company, New York & Dublin (2000), p. 414.
  6. ^ Michael Kimmelman, "NOT Because it's There", New York Times, June 6, 1999. See also Lynn Thorndike, Renaissance or Prenaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan., 1943), pp. 69-74.
  7. ^ So Bishop, p. 112
  8. ^ O'Connell, Michael, "Authority and the Truth of Experience in Petrarch's 'Ascent of Mount Ventoux,'" Philological Quarterly, 62 (1983), p.507, citing Billanovich, Giuseppe. "Petrarca e il Ventuso," Italia medioevale e umanisrica 9 (1966), pp. 389-401, and Courcelle, Pierre, "Petrarque entre Saint Augustin et les Augustins du XIVe siecle," Studipetrarcheschi 7 (1961), pp. 51-71.
  9. ^ Burckhardt, Civilization, Part IV §3, beginning. convenience link.
  10. ^ E.g. Bishop, p.104:"the first recorded Alpinist, the first to climb a mountain because it is there."
  11. ^ E.g. Kimmelman, who sees Petrarch's letter as early environmental writing.
  12. ^ E.g. Ernst Cassirer: The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, tr. Hans Nachod, p.28:"The colorful description of this enterprise has startled many readers who have been amazed to see a man of his epoch venturing to climb a mountain for a view like a modern alpinist"
  13. ^ Bishop, p.102,104
  14. ^ Thorndike, op cit.
  15. ^ Blumenberg, pp. 341, 342
  16. ^ Kirchner, Walther; "Mind, Mountain, and Ideas"; Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 11 no. 4 (October 1950), pp. 412-447
  17. ^ Asher, Lyell Petrarch at the Peak of Fame; PMLA, Vol. 108, No. 5. (Oct., 1993), pp. 1050-1063.
  18. ^ Ferrari, Lena M. [Review of "Petrarch and His World" by Morris Bishop]. Italica, vol. 42 no. 3 (September 1965): pp. 289-291.

[edit] References

  • Bishop, Morris Petrarch and His World. ; Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University Press 1963
  • Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (tr. Robert M. Wallace). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983.
  • Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, (1868) tr. Middlemore; New York, Macmillan 1890.
  • Michael Kimmelman, "NOT Because it's There", New York Times, June 6, 1999.
  • O'Connell, Michael, "Authority and the Truth of Experience in Petrarch's 'Ascent of Mount Ventoux,'" Philological Quarterly, 62 (1983),
  • Lynn Thorndike, Renaissance or Prenaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan., 1943), pp. 69-74. (The JSTOR link is to a collection of several letters in the same issue.)

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