Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
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“very circumstances … illustrate abundantly the ups and downs of Fortune,” as well as for the “many strung up on the rack of Fortune, many showered with riches, and many being whirled around on her wheel with great force.”90 The treatise, a long series of brief dialogues between Reason and Joy and Hope on the one hand, Sorrow and Fear on the other, is in two parts, both of which represent the “unpredictable and sudden changes” of human affairs as an “ever present war with Fortuna, in which only virtue can make us victorious.”91 The first, in which Reason counters Joy and Hope’s expressions of pleasure in beauty, long life, wealth, position, health, prestige, political success, and so on with the Stoic reminder that all such worldly goods are passing, focuses intently on the spiritual and existential problems attendant on good fortune. Many have “endured losses, poverty, exile, imprisonment, torture, death, and grave illnesses worse than death,” but Petrarch has “yet to see one who could bear well riches, honors, and power.”92 The second, in which Reason seeks to dissuade Sorrow and Fear from reacting negatively to various misfortunes—from loss of social standing, poverty, and sickness to cramped quarters in which some are forced to live—with variations of the same reminder that lack of worldly goods is in reality lack of nothing, focuses on the myriad ways in which good fortune is subject to natural decline, sudden reversal, and a constant sense of insufficiency.93 As a whole, the work, which we might understand as a humanist extension of the mirror for princes tradition, aims to teach those who are in any number of senses rulers to keep themselves at an emotional remove from the world, arguing that such a steadfast rational and virtuous attitude to fortune is what makes good government possible.
The De remediis culminates in an extended memento mori, which is presented as an antidote to both unreasonable pleasure in prosperity and unreasonable pain in misfortune at once.94 This resolution to the problem of fortune is influenced not only by Stoics such as Seneca and Cicero, who encouraged melete thanatou as a means to detach from the external world, but also by the early writings of Augustine, for whom meditatio mortis is similarly the key to attaining virtue, the reorientation of cognition from self and world toward the true apprehension of God.95 In Petrarch’s treatise, Reason argues that “death calls not for fear but for contemplation,” because only in constant meditation on mortality can humans know themselves as temporal, created beings: “The most harmful of all human ills is to forget about God, yourself, and death. These three are so intimately connected that one can hardly consider them separately.”96 Meditation on death encourages a religiously correct and philosophically dispassionate attitude toward wealth and prosperity, as borrowed, not owned—the status, as we have seen, of merchant wealth in particular, according to Dives and Pauper.97 At death, riches “will return to whence they came, namely, Fortune’s hands. And from there they will pass again and again, from one to the other, and never stay with anyone for long” because “all this time you have had the use of someone else’s goods. Nothing of your own is being taken away from you, but only what you borrowed and are finished using is being called back.”98 In dying, humans join a great mortality community, as “those who stand around your bed, those who you saw before, those you heard of, read about, or could have known, and all those others, either born before or to be born, any place, any time, in the future, they all have taken or shall take this journey.”99 The daily contemplation of death is presented here, at the culmination of the work, as the ultimate means by which to counter both of fortune’s two faces, the good and the bad.
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