Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo.

Martin L. McLaughlin. (Oxford Modern Language and Literature Monographs.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. viii + 314 pp. $70. ISBN: 0-19-815899-8.

Not many books live up to their blurbs. This one does: "the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on imitation, covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and vernacular works." McLaughlin has produced a masterful synthesis, judicious, light of touch, and deft at selecting cogent examples from an extraordinary amount of material. The decision to treat the theory and practice of his authors leads McLaughlin to examine the style, primarily the diction, of all of their works, both in Latin and volgare. He is particularly good at sketching an author's stylistic development. The focus on diction also allows McLaughlin to trace the development of Ciceronianism from Petrarch's discovery of Cicero's letters to the strict Ciceronianism of Bembo and the early Cinquecento.

The comprehensiveness of the book is its major strength. Besides surveying the works of the numerous authors under discussion, both in prose and in verse, McLaughlin has assimilated all of the relevant scholarship. He does not begin with Petrarch, the fons et origo of Renaissance imitation, but Dante, and adds informative chapters on two other Trecento figures, Boccaccio and Salutati. The part of the book on the early Quattrocento includes not only the major authors - Bruni, Poggio, and Valla - but the humanist educators Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder, Gasparino Barzizza, Antonio da Rho (whose De imitationibus eloquentie remains in manuscript), and Guarino Veronese. The section devoted to the vernacular humanism of Alberti and Landino also treats their Latin writing in detail.

One does not expect originality in a work of synthesis, and much of what McLaughlin says is familiar. Nevertheless, some of the insights are new, e.g. the dating of the famous exchange between Poliziano and Cortesi to 1485 at the latest. McLaughlin is especially good on Cortesi, whose stylistic judgments he often endorses, and points out something often ignored: in the 1490s Cortesi's Ciceronianism was the revolutionary position, while Poliziano was defending the eclecticism practiced throughout the Quattrocento. McLaughlin's customary method of examining an author's career and stylistic development provides a needed corrective to most discussions of Cortesi, who was by no means a strict Ciceronian in his late work. The last two chapters are the most innovative part of the book. By placing the debate between Giovan Francesco Pico and Bembo in the context of the exchange of letters between Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro on the compatibility of eloquence and philosophy and discussing the younger Pico's earlier work, McLaughlin provides a more nuanced account of the affiliations between Ciceronians and eclectics at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries.

McLaughlin's focus on diction, valuable as it is, is also the book's one limitation, as he comes close to forgetting Quintilian's admonition, "Imitatio . . . non sit tantum in uerbis." The "purely stylistic viewpoint" (63-64) neglects other aspects of a work and the relationship between form and content. McLaughlin rarely considers the allusive uses of imitation, the ways in which authors adapt a passage in order to enter into some sort of dialogue with their predecessors, the subject which Thomas M. Greene treated so superbly in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. And McLaughlin makes no effort to relate the theory and practice of imitation to political and cultural developments in Italy. "Non omnia possumus omnes." Within the limits he has set for himself McLaughlin has written an extraordinary book, and it should become the standard work on its subject.

G. W. PIGMAN III California Institute of Technology