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BARBAROUS BRAHMINS, CONQUEST, AND ITALIAN IDENTITY IN PETRARCH'S DE VITA SOLITARIA

This essay analyzes Petrarch's views of the Indian Brahmins, elaborated by the author in De vita solitaria. In spite of the lack of previous critical attention to the subject, Petrarch's image of the Hindu sages as barbarous savages is an extremely significant repudiation of a centuries-old tradition of Christian authors, who mostly elevated the Brahmins to a model of asceticism, as opposed to the laxity of people of their own faith. Omitting the similarity between ideals of Christian and Hindu asceticism implicit in the writings of his Christian predecessors, Petrarch is able to fashion a less stern model of solitary life compatible with the dignity he attributed to earthly human existence and the scholarly persona without openly disparaging the severe ideals of renunciation circulating within Christianity since antiquity. In De vita solitaria, Petrarch's Brahmins, and India in general, lose the transcendental aura attributed to them by centuries of Orientalist discourse and are ultimately presented as a cultural curiosity gratifying the congenital inquisitiveness of the Italians and their colonizing ambitions.