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Characterized by Burckhardt as the father of modernjournalism, Pietro Aretino was the first vernacular writer to understand and exploit fully the resource of the printing press. But while some kinds of his writings anticipate now conventional varieties of journalism, such a label slights the more literary of his activities in drama, poetry, hagiography, and prose dialogue. The protean variety of Aretino's works made him both successor to Bembo as the leading man of letters in the 1530s and 40s and the model for the poligrafi who would succeed him. As with those poligrafi, a coherence to his activities can be seen in his posture as social critic; preeminently, in his secular compositions, Aretino writes as a satirist.

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Although Pietro Aretino's vernacular biblical paraphrases and saints’ lives were popular and greatly admired in the sixteenth century, modern scholarship often has dismissed them as commercial potboilers. This study presents the case that Aretino was a serious reformer in religion and possibly a Nicodemite. It traces his long relationship with Antonio Brucioli, who was an important conduit of Protestant writings and whose reformist Bible translation enabled Aretino's paraphrases. Relying on their letters, it examines Aretino's friendship with Pier Paolo Vergerio and his attraction to Bernardino Ochino, both of whom became apostates, and his reaction to the arrest of his confessor for having Lutheran sympathies. Aretino's biblical paraphrases were esteemed in Italian reformist circles and translated into French by a prior attached to Marguerite of Navarre's court. In England Sir Thomas Wyatt based his Lutheran Penitential Psalms on Aretino's I sette Salmi.

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