Petrarch didn’t invent the sonnet, however, for that honor is owed to an obscure (though brilliant) poet named Giacomo da Lentini, who was a notary for King Frederick II of Sicily, writing nearly a century before the celebrated Tuscan. If the sonnet was a mechanism for creating modernity, then da Lentini is the engineer whom we must credit. And yet even the most adept of engineers must draw from materials not of their own crafting. {read}