Imitation and Mimesis in the Renaissance

From Petrarch's sonnets to Milton's epics a major characteristic of Renaissance literature is the imitation of earlier texts, and the Renaissance contains a vast and perplexing array of writings on the theory and practice of imitation. Although these writings often exhaust themselves in vindictive and ferocious ad hominem polemics—one need only recall Julius Caesar Scaliger's Orationes against Erasmus—and dwell at length on what now appears to many a sterile and fruitless debate over whether or not Cicero should be the only model for Latin prose, these treatises on imitation can offer considerable guidance for the interpretation of Renaissance literature. The theories of imitation help structure one's expectations as to the types of relations between text and model which one is likely to find, although they also amount to a strong warning against the difficulties of discovering and analyzing these relations.