Petrarch seems at first to have smiled with sensible contempt at so impertinent a farce; but will it be believed that his friends, and among them Donato and Boccaccio, advised and persuaded him to treat it seriously, and to write a book about it?
Petrarch accordingly put his pen to the subject.

He wrote a treatise, which he entitled "De sui ipsius et aliorum Ignorantia--" (On his own Ignorance, and on that of others).
Petrarch had himself formed the design of confuting the doctrines of Averroes; but he engaged Ludovico Marsili, an Augustine monk of Florence, to perform the task.

This monk, in Petrarch's opinion, possessed great natural powers, and our poet exhorts him to write against that rabid animal (Averroes) who barks with so much fury against Christ and his Apostles.

Unfortunately, the rabid animals who write against the truths we are most willing to believe are difficult to be killed.
The good air of the Euganean mountains failed to re-establish the health of Petrarch.

He continued ill during the summer of 1370.