The fourteenth-century Italian poet and humanist Francis Petrarch probably wrote more letters than anyone before him. His correspondents included emperors and popes, kings and other powerful rulers, cardinals and archbishops, scholars and teachers, poets, warriors, physicians, and a great many friends. Now, with this two-volume edition, the translation into English–in their entirety, for the first time–of Petrarch’s two great complementary collections of letters is complete. The Letters of Old Age includes 128 letters written by Petrarch from about 1361 until 1373 shortly before his death. Because they represent the mature judgment of his later years, the letters are especially important in illuminating Petrarch’s central role at the dawn of Humanism. Writing to Boccaccio, Petrarch shares his ideas on literature and culture and translates Boccaccio’s famous Griselda tale into Latin. To Pope Urban IV he writes about the rightful location and proper role of the Church. Letters to Emperor Charles IV discuss matters of statecraft and political rectitude (and include a reply to the emperor’s request that Petrarch authenticate two letters believed to have been written by Julius Caesar and Nero.) The letters also touch on such concerns of the day as astrology, diet, gout, pestilence, and servants–as well as on such timeless topics as fame, friendship, and solitude. The collection is divided into eighteen books of varying length, the last consisting of Petrarch’s unfinished autobiographical letter “To Posterity.” Based in the 1501 editio princeps and supplemented with variants from four 15th-centrury manuscript editions, this superb translation takes its place alongside Aldo S. Bernardo’s translation of Petrarch’s Letters on Familiar Matters, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as “a monument to the beginnings of Humanism.”