Italian Humanism and Its Frontier: Anti-Arabism, Epistemic Dispossession, and the Making of Westernness in Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)

This talk offers a sociological reading of Petrarch’s representation of otherness within the context of fourteenth century proto-colonial, and exclusionary dynamics. By reading the birth of Italian humanism in its wider geopolitical context and through the lens of ethnicity, I aim to break with national narratives that have typically situated the Fourteenth century, il Trecento, and debates on Petrarch and humanism, within internal histories of political and cultural developments in the Italian peninsula. Petrarch's sweeping condemnation of Arabic knowledge at a time when Latin intellectuals were still catching up with Arabic authorities in science, medicine, and philosophy is an emblematic proto-Orientalist gesture. It can be read as one of the first cases of attempted purification of European epistemic boundaries from what was the medieval imbrication and hybridization of multilingual sources of knowledge and epistemic authority. Petrarch is at the root of an emerging "white reason" as an imagined epistemic canon that is no longer in debts with alien, particularly Oriental, civilizations. He is indeed one of the first modern intellectuals by combining an othering of non-Western knowledge, renewed imperial aspirations (as in his poem the Africa), and condemnation of what will become the Middle Ages as an age of barbarism and contamination of Greek and Roman sources.