Petrarch's De 'Remediis' and its reception in Bohemia

In the first part of the article, the author discusses the didactic work De remediis utriusque fortune, in which Petrach's Augustine-inspired pessimism finds its extreme expression. In the second part, the article points out that in Bohemia the reception of Petrarch as a moralist was fundamentally different from the usual image of him as a humanist. It discusses the appeal that Petrarch's moral philosophy had for reform-minded figures like Rehor Hruby z Jeleni (c. 1460-1514) and Mikulas Konac z Hodiskova (c. 1480-1546), and analyzes Jan Ceska's Reci a nauceni hlubokych mudrcu (Words and teachings of the great sages c. 1500), a florilegium based for the most part on De remediis. On the basis of a comparison of 1 Ceska's translations and paraphrases of De remediis, the author concludes (in opposition to Josef Macek) that in Ceska's work Petrarch's rigorous, inwardly oriented Augustinian concept of Virtue is superseded by the essentially more open, concept of Reason oriented to this world, and that Petrarch's pessimism is thus reinterpreted in the spirit of positive, confident proto-Reformation thinking.