Hard upon a century that had rediscovered Latin and restored it as a language for humanist prose, Bembo could not even begin his argument about the vernacular, set in 1505, without first addressing the place of Latin, and his enactment of Ercole Strozzi's transformation from Latinist to Italianist marks a generational shift.

In fact, he begins, in what might be his strongest chapter, by taking to task Italianists who study "literature of emigration" in a rather single-minded way.

In the literary sphere, the distinguished Italianist Lina Bolzoni -- a pupil of Nicola Badaloni, author of Giordano Bruno: tra cosmologia edetica (Ban: De Donato, 1988), has started to apply her work on the literary memory in La stanza del/a memoria (Turin: Einaudi, 1995) [3] to some of Bruno's Italian dialogues; while pupils of her own, such as Maria Pia Ellero, are producing innovative work on the linguistic and literary codes in which Bruno presented his philosophical ideas.