Stoic psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch's De remediis

Abstract

The course of Stoicism in Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from about 1350 to 1550, has not by any means been fully charted. It is generally agreed that a renewal of Latin Stoicism there gathered momentum with the humanist Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) and was bound up with his desire to write philosophy in an elegant Latin that educated laymen, as well as professional scholars, could understand. The kind of letters Petrarch wrote, in fact, are close in spirit to the urbane letters of moral and spiritual guidance written by the Roman Stoic Seneca to his younger friend and disciple Lucilius – intimate and moving, yet instructive. Petrarch's renewal of Stoicism moved along two main paths. The first was his presentation, in De vita solitaria and De otio religioso , of a Stoic / Christian way of life in which cultivation of the scholarly life and ethical perfection are one. Petrarch's model looks remarkably like Seneca's sapiens – that self-sufficient sage, as rare to find as the phoenix, delineated in the Dialogues . The second was Petrarch's elaboration of Stoic psychotherapy in his huge compendium, De remediis utriusque fortunae , based on a mutilated work of similar name attributed to Seneca. The principles of psychotherapy that Petrarch advocates, he tells us explicitly in De remediis and in his more intimate Secretum , are derived mainly from Cicero's Tusculans , the richest Latin source on the subject, and also from Seneca's De tranquillitate animi and the Letters to Lucilius.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.