Introduction -- Historical solitude -- Imitation and anachronism -- Themes of ancient theory -- Petrarch and the humanist hermeneutic -- Petrarch: the ontology of the self -- Petrarch: falling into shadows -- Poliziano: the past dismembered -- Sixteenth-century quarrels: classicism and the scandal of history -- Imitative insinuations in the Amours of Ronsard -- Du Bellay and the disinterment of Rome -- Wyatt: erosion and stabilization -- Accommodations of mobility in the poetry of Ben Jonson
