SOURCE: Navarrete, Ignacio. “Introduction: Bembo, Petrarch, and Renaissance Belatedness.” In Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance, pp. 3-14. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

In the excerpt below, Navarrete argues that the Prose della volgar lingua “contains the first overt application of imitation theory … to the vernacular.” In the process of applying the theory, which was previously reserved for Latin models, to Petrarch, Navarrete maintains, Bembo “transforms Petrarch from a mere linguistic model … into a classical model subject to transformation and competitive emulation.”

In its strictest sense, Petrarchism is the result of the transfer to the vernacular of models of literary history originally elaborated within the context of an attempt to ameliorate composition in Latin through the imitation of Cicero. The figure most associated with this transfer, both during the Renaissance and today, is Pietro Bembo, who in his landmark dialogue-treatise, the Prose della volgar...