SOURCE: Richardson, Brian. “From Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo's Rime, 1529-1535.” The Modern Language Review 95, no. 3 (July 2000): 684-95.

In the following essay, Richardson traces how Bembo circulated his poems in manuscript while at the same time he “set about using the resources of the Venetian printing industry in order to consolidate and enhance his reputation as a poet.”

The Venetian patrician Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) is recognized today as the crucial figure in the Petrarchan lyric poetry of sixteenth-century Italy: not the most gifted poet of the century, but the one who by his example set the standard for the rigorous imitation and emulation of his fourteenth-century model. As he approached his sixtieth year at the end of the 1520s, his poetic reputation was high: high enough, indeed, for verse to have been wrongly ascribed to his pen.¹ However, his influence in this field had been established...