On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia)

Petrarch claims that the proper end of learning is moral: understanding what virtue is, loving it, and acting on it. He rejects the view that mastery of natural science and Aristotelian doctrine is the measure of a learned person, arguing that such knowledge can leave a person vain and unimproved. Knowing the properties of animals, plants, or stones, he says, does not make anyone better. Instead, he privileges self-knowledge, ethics, and the persuasive power of language to move the will. The text thus reframes ignorance as a matter of what one fails to know about the good rather than about nature.

The work grew out of a personal slight. Petrarch wrote it in response to four young men in Venice, associated with his circle at the time, who judged him a good man but without real learning. Because it is an invective in the rhetorical tradition, its tone is deliberately sharp and its portraits of opponents are caricatured. Readers should treat it as a performance of self-defense as well as an argument, and should not assume it fairly represents the philosophical positions of those it attacks. Its polemic is part of how humanists staked out intellectual territory.

Petrarch does not deny that Aristotle was a gifted thinker, but he charges contemporary Aristotelians, especially those influenced by Averroes, with arrogance and with endangering Christian belief. He argues that their celebrated science tells us little about human happiness or salvation, and that devotion to a pagan authority had become a substitute for moral seriousness. His preference is for Plato, Cicero, and the Church Fathers, particularly Augustine. This alignment became a template for later humanist criticism of scholastic philosophy, though it was more a rhetorical stance than a systematic rival doctrine.

The De ignorantia continues themes that run throughout Petrarch's Latin prose, including the primacy of moral reflection, the value of solitude and reading, and the struggle of the will. Its debt to Augustine is especially visible, since Petrarch treats inward knowledge of oneself and God as more important than speculative science, a view that echoes the concerns of the Confessions. Scholars often read it alongside the Secretum, where Augustine appears as a dialogue partner, to see how Petrarch developed an introspective humanism that fused classical eloquence with Christian moral psychology.

A frequent oversimplification takes the title and tone as an endorsement of anti-intellectualism. Petrarch is not rejecting study; he is arguing for a different hierarchy of knowledge, in which ethical and rhetorical learning governs the rest. He remained a voracious reader and collector of classical texts. Another misreading treats the work as a founding charter for a clean break between medieval and Renaissance thought. In practice, Petrarch drew heavily on Christian and Augustinian tradition, so the text is better understood as a redistribution of emphasis within inherited authorities than as a repudiation of them.

The work was written in Latin, and English readers typically use the translation included in the Chicago anthology The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr., which presents it in a selection of Petrarch's thought. Readers should be aware that anthology translations may abridge or select portions of the text, so consulting a complete scholarly edition is advisable for close study. Because the invective's tone and sarcasm depend on Latin idiom, notes and introductions in any edition are valuable for understanding its rhetorical register.