Plutarch’s image in Petrarch between direct knowledge and intermediate sources

Abstract

Plutarch’s works enjoyed great success in late Antiquity and in the Byzantine Empire. Mainly due to the dismissal of the Greek, in the medieval Latin West they fell into oblivion, only to come back into vogue during Humanism. Using as a research tool the methodology proposed by Hardwick – Stray 2011: 1, according to which reception studies all that “has been transmitted, translated, excerpted, interpreted, rewritten, re-imaged and represented”, the article attempts to investigate one of the obscure points in the history of the reception of Plutarch’s work: the origins of this reborn interest in the West. Already during the first half of the fourteenth century, Plutarch’s thought and work aroused the curiosity of the circle of intellectuals that gravitated around the Avignon of the popes and Petrarch. In Petrarch’s works there are traces of a decent knowledge of Plutarch’s writings; knowledge that could derive from the attendance of Greek-speaking intellectuals, such as Barlaam of Seminara, or, more importantly, from the reading of intermediate sources influenced by the writing of Plutarch, such as Gellius, Arnobius, Macrobius, Jerome and, probably, Florus.