Note 519 — Chapter XV

As for Petrarch's contempt for Italian, see Senil., V, 2. Petrarch there says to Boccaccio, that Donato degli Albanzani "tells me that in your youth you were singularly pleased to write in the vulgar, and that you spent much time on it." He adds that Boccaccio had then composed the same kind of work as he himself had done, apparently referring to the Rime. He seems to refuse to consider the prose works in the vulgar as being literature at all. It is probable even that the accusation that he disliked and envied Dante, from which he so warmly defends him (cf. Fam., XXI, 15), had this much truth, that he disliked the language of the Divine Comedy in his absurd worship of Latin. But though he could not see it, the Divine Comedy is the first work of the Renaissance just because it is written not in Latin, the language of the Church, but in Italian, the language of the people. There lay the destruction of the Middle Age and the tyranny of the Ecclesiastic. For with the rise of the vulgar rose Nationalism, which, with the invention of printing, eventually destroyed the real power of the Church. It was a question of knowledge, of education, of the power of development and life.