Aristotle's Poetics and the Rise of Vernacular Literary Theory

“Aristotle's Poetics and the Rise of Vernacular Literary Theory." The article attempts to use the octavo edition of Aristotle's Poetics printed by Paulus Manutius in 1536 as a means of reconstructing the personal and political background to the literary debates of the 1530s. Engaged in a struggle with his relations over the future of the Aldine press, Paulus hoped to revive some of the enthusiasm of his father's time with a new series of Greek editions. Copy for the Poetics was provided by an influential family of Florentine exiles, the Pazzi, who during the early 1530s were cultivated by the French ambassadors as a possible means of fomenting anti-imperial activity in Italy. Friendship with the Pazzi made Paulus an intimate of the literary circle that gathered at the French embassy. Compact and published with a translation that made the Greek at least comprehensible, the Aldine text of the Poetics attracted the attention both of the committed Latinists of Padua and of the champions of the modern vernacular literature. Its ideas influenced Speroni's Dialoghi, and passed through them into Joachim du Bellay's Deffence et Illustration de la Longue Française.