Religions 2012, 3, 699–709; doi:10.3390/rel3030699 OPEN ACCESS religions ISSN 2077-1444 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Article Francesco Petrarca and the Parameters of Historical Research Ronald Witt William B. Hamilton Professor of History (emeritus), Duke University, 129 Carr Building, Campus Box 90719, Durham, NC 27708-0719, USA; E-Mail:
[email protected] Received: 25 June 2012; in revised form: 29 July 2012 / Accepted: 31 July 2012 / Published: 20 August 2012 Abstract: Although scholars in the first two generations of humanism wrote the histories drawing heavily on ancient Roman sources, Petrarca was the first humanist historian to focuses on the history of ancient Roma. Because he was also the earliest to approach ancient Romans as historically conditioned human beings, he was able to see the achievements of the Romans in historical perspective. At the same time he was unable to separate mythology from history and acknowledged the effect of divine and diabolical forces on the course of human events. Keywords: humanist historiography; historical perspective; Dark Ages; secularization Scholars of Italian humanism have long recognized that the conception of their movement as constituting the rebirth of ancient culture had a religious origin ultimately traceable to the Christian belief in the rebirth of the sinner in Christ, that is, the recovery of divine acceptance lost for the human race by the fall [1,2]. The rebirth that occurred in baptism prefigured the vast majority of medieval reform movements in that in one way or another, the latter aimed at restoring the spiritual purity that had been lost over the centuries.