Today the bestselling and prize-winning author Sarah Bakewell takes us back to the mid-fourteenth century. This was a time of great hardship when politics was violently fractured and when the plague was ripping across Europe. But at this singular moment in Western history two figures of genius, Petrarch and Boccaccio, started their pioneering literary work. In doing so they became, as Bakewell explains, ‘the first of the great literary humanists’.
This is the starting point of Sarah Bakewell’s new book, Humanly Possible, a broad and sweeping history of humanism. In this episode she takes us back to these uncertain first moments, when first Petrarch and then Boccaccio started to hunt for ancient manuscripts and to distil their learning into ambitious literary works of their own.
Sarah Bakewell’s new book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking*, Enquiry and Hope. It will be published next week.
*In homage to this freethinking, we’ve given Sarah a little more leeway (three years instead of the usual one) than usual this week.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: 1348. Parma. The Black Death spreads around the Italian peninsula as well as much of the rest of Europe. The writer Francesco Petrarch, living in Parma, does not catch it, but many of his friends die, including "Laura", the woman who inspired many of his most beautiful love sonnets.
Scene Two: 1349. Parma, Padua and Florence. This first outbreak of the disease recedes (though not for long). Driven by a pervasive sense of loss, Petrarch - now mostly living in Padua - starts gathering copies of the letters he had written to friends over the years.
Scene Three: 1350. Florence. Petrarch and Boccaccio meet. Petrarch is passing through Florence, visiting the city of his exiled family's origins for the first time in his life.
Memento: A cutting from one of Petrarch experiments with one his laurel bushes.
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Sarah Bakewell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1348 fits on our Timeline
S.C. Gwynne: R101 – The World’s Largest Flying Machine (1930)
Peter Moore: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
[From the archive] Philip Hoare: Albert and the Whale (1520)
[From the archive] Bernard Cornwell: The Battle of Waterloo (1815)
Lady Hale: The Rights of Women (1925)
[Live] Flora Fraser: Pretty Young Rebel (1746)
Mike Jay: Psychonauts (1885)
David Veevers: How the World Took On the British Empire (1660)
Leah Redmond Chang: Renaissance Queens and the Price of Power (1559)
Andrew Spira: Botticelli, Perugino and Dürer (1500)
Serhii Plokhy: The Collapse of the Soviet Union (1991)
[From the archives] Craig Brown: Beatlemania (1963)
Honor Cargill-Martin: The Notorious Empress Messalina (48 AD)
Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams (1940)
Simon Winchester: Knowing What We Know (1924)
Rebecca Struthers: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and Watchmaking History (1572)
Luke Turner: Men at War (1943)
Amy Jeffs: Tales from Medieval England (1327)
Nicholas Orme: A Year of Great Promise (1480)
[From the archives] Jane Rogoyska: The Katyń Massacre (1940)
Join Podbean Ads Marketplace and connect with engaged listeners.
Advertise Today
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Irish Songs with Ken Murray
History Obscura
Historycal: Words that Shaped the World
The Rest Is History
Everything Everywhere Daily