This book contends that Petrarch's humanist philosophy and concept of self are defined above all by his efforts to care for and cultivate the self through spiritual exercises, and particularly through the literary practice of writing. Plagued by a strong sense of fragmentation and inner exile due to his acute awareness of the flux of time and the scattering impact of society, Petrarch returned to the ancient idea that self, or soul, is not a given presence but a state of mind from which we are exiled and that we need to attain through constant practice. The goal of philosophy, he therefore argues, is not to provide us with systematic knowledge but to shape and cultivate the self through spiritual techniques, which for him consist mainly of writing. To demonstrate these claims and examine his humanist philosophy, this book has explored Petrarch's various attempts to use writing as a spiritual technique, the ways in which these uses absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that ultimately arose from his efforts to cultivate the self through writing.

Petrarch's attempts to care for the self through the practice of writing are a dominant feature of both his vernacular poetry and Latin works, with each corpus displaying different uses of writing and diverse type of goals that he strived to attain.