Petrarch, Mont Ventoux and the Modern Self

Petrarch's letter about the ascent of Mont Ventoux has in recent decades increasingly been read as an imitation of the conversion of St Augustine. However, few scholars have explored Petrarch's radical interpretation of St Augustine's theology and the profound critique the letter seems to propose of this Church Father's conversion ideology. My suggestion is that by virtue of the wanderer's apparently failed imitation of his model's conversion, the author of the letter reads Augustine in a way that results in a fundamentally different interpretation of the self than that of the Church Father, thus making Petrarch a far more complex thinker than we often are willing to acknowledge.