Whenever Petrarch's significance for the history of European thought and sentiment is assessed, a great deal of attention is given to his ‘melancholy'. Apart from his poetry it is the Secretum which presents most clearly this aspect of Petrarch's inner life. In this work Petrarch analyzed his sentiment under the name of accidia. Literary critics since Sainte-Beuve have seen behind this concept the same psychic malady that beset Werther or René and, more recently, Baudelaire. Scholars, on the other hand, have tried to locate Petrarch's accidia in a more or less linear development from acedia, the medieval sin of spiritual negligence, to modern melancholy, Weltschmerz, or ennui.