Style, the muscle of the soul. Theories on reading and writing in Petrarch's texts

With his deep passion for the Roman poets and historians and with his effort to transform the cultural agenda through a revival of Antiquity, Petrarch inaugurated new reading and writing practices that would influence and dominate future generations for centuries. Celebrated as the "father of humanism," he articulated a modern conception of authorship and a new understanding of self However, a close reading of Petrarch's writings reveals from time to time a radical scepticism towards the assumptions underlying the hermeneutics of the humanists. The experience of historicity and of the radical instability of the world challenged the notion of a centred and coherent self. In other words: at the same time that he maintained the connection between authorship and identity Petrarch seemed to formulate as well a deep distrust of the concept of author itself.