This essay presents Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) as the founder of a transtemporal and transnational intellectual community, often called "humanism", based on Petrarch's principles of imitation and philological restoration of ancient texts. Rather than building a structured network, Petrarch addressed a virtual community of the living, the dead, and posterity. The essay explores this communitybuilding, as Petrarch created an early modern communication platform based on the ancient epistolographic model, placing himself alongside one of the canonical authors of antiquity, Cicero. Stylised as corpora of transtemporal affection, the Petrarchan collections of letters, marked by familiaritas and amicitia, perform temporalities under construction: the contemporaries of the present provided a resonant space for discussing specific problems arising from both ancient tradition and present life, thus linking past and future, even if a community capable of fully appreciating the Petrarchan "world" was still to come. Indeed, this anticipated future was arguably realised in the reception of Petrarch's figura auctoris in the Florentine biographies of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), Filippo Villani (1325–1407), Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), and Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459). Huss and Longinotti ask how these later readers responded to Petrarch's vision of a community yet to come partly by postulating a work in progress between the so-called Middle Ages and a Renaissance in the making, partly by highlighting their strategies of using Petrarch’s temporality, and partly by constructing competing perspectives to define their own specific communities.