This is a story about how the West was resurrected.

We talk a lot on this show about the recovery of the Western ideals, right?

We talk a ton about how the values and the art and the ideals of the West

are being buried under just a mountain of crap. That's why we're young heretics

because we want to shrug off all of that nonsense, all the identity politics,

all the kind of racialism that tells us we can't be proud of reading Homer or Shakespeare or what have you.

All of that nonsense is threatening right now to bury the greatness of the West

under its giant mountain of crap.

And so I thought it would be good on this episode to talk about somebody

who is often credited with kind of digging the West up out of the grave in many ways.

In another period when a lot of kind of classical ideals had fallen out of favor.

And I'm thinking here of somebody we don't talk that much about anymore, but we should.

This is Francesco Petrarch.

We don't talk about Petrarch too much.

We talk more about his kind of rough contemporaries, especially Dante, Alighieri,

and we will, of course, talk about Dante on another episode.

We'll probably get our pal Michael Nolzon to maybe talk about Dante.

But Petrarch doesn't get as much play as he should anymore.

He used to, he was a pivotal figure in the history of Europe during the 14th century.

So this is the 1300s AD. That's where we're at right now in time.

And he did a lot of things that would set the stage for the Renaissance,

for this transformation of the world away from kind of what had been a set of medieval ideals

...