SOURCE: Braden, Gordon. “Applied Petrarchism: The Loves of Pietro Bembo.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 1996): 397-423.

In the essay below, Braden analyzes conventions of Petrarchan love poetry that Bembo employs in his letters to Lucrezia Borgia and Maria Savorgnan.

Older historicist studies of literature usually made their points by applying nonliterary information to literary texts, with results that now often seem reductive and constricting. It has been part of the enterprise of recent criticism to reverse that vector, to seek in literary sources paradigms for describing and organizing nonliterary material; and although theory provides for an exchange in both directions, the new practice can easily repeat in its own mode the mistakes of the old. In particular, recent discussion of Renaissance love poetry has generalized some of the conventions of that poetry into an increasingly popular thesis about gender relations in the period, about the lines of power...