Ascent of Mount Ventoux - Historic Doubts

Historic Doubts

It is often claimed that Petrarch was the first to climb Mont Ventoux, but Jean Buridan had made an ascent earlier in the 14th century, and German writers of the 10th and 11th centuries left records of mountain ascents. It is certainly implausible that Petrarch sat down and wrote the six thousand words we have, in elegant Latin with correct quotations from the classical poets, before dinner after an eighteen-hour hike up and down a mountain. In fact, whether Petrarch himself climbed the mountain has been doubted by modern scholars; according to Pierre Courcelle and Giuseppe Billanovich, the letter is essentially a fiction written almost fifteen years after its supposed date, and almost a decade after the death of its addressee, Francesco Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro. Lyell Asher argued, indeed, that the ascent of the mountain was a figurative account of writing the letter itself.