Petrarch is traditionally called the father of humanism and considered by many to be the "Father of the Renaissance"

He argued that God had given humans vast intellectual and creative potential to be used to their fullest. He inspired humanist philosophy which led to the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance. He believed in the immense moral and practical value of the study of ancient history and literature-..that is the study of human thought and action.

He is best known for his Italian poetry...however he was an enthusiastic Latin scholar and did most of his writing in that language. He once wrote in a letter to a friend (He was a prolific letter writer) that he had caused his own plague to spread over Europe,....one which caused people to take up pen and paper and write and read.

Francesco Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to call the Middle Age as the Dark Age.

From The Canzoniere

You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes, 
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,
in my first vagrant youthfulness,
when I was partly other than I am,

I hope to find pity, and forgiveness,
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,
between vain hope and vain sadness,
in those who understand love through its trials. 

Yet I see clearly now I have become
an old tale amongst all these people, so that
it often makes me ashamed of myself;

and shame is the fruit of my vanities,
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge
of how the world's delight is a brief dream

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To make a graceful act of revenge,
and punish a thousand wrongs in a single day,
Love secretly took up his bow again,
like a man who waits the time and place to strike.

My power was constricted in my heart,
making defence there, and in my eyes,
when the mortal blow descended there,
where all other arrows had been blunted.

So, confused by the first assault,
it had no opportunity or strength
to take up arms when they were needed,

or withdraw me shrewdly to the high, 
steep hill, out of the torment,
from which it wishes to save me now but cannot.

It was on that day when the sun's ray
was darkened in pity for its Maker,
that I was captured, and did not defend myself,
because your lovely eyes had bound me, Lady.

It did not seem to me to be a time to guard myself
against Love's blows: so I went on
confident, unsuspecting; from that, my troubles
started, amongst the public sorrows.

Love discovered me all weaponless,
and opened the way to the heart through the eyes,
which are made the passageways and doors of tears:

so that it seems to me it does him little honour
to wound me with his arrow, in that state,
he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed.

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