This introductory chapter sets out the terms of engagement for what follows: it defines Latin erotic elegy and its chaste rewriting by Petrarch; and it problematises Thomas Greene’s influential analysis of Renaissance imitatio. It establishes the broad research questions considered throughout this study and discusses the previous literature from which this book has developed. Two sub-sections engage with the theoretical interventions this project makes in terms of dialogic reception methodology and in reading problematically ‘lascivious’ verse. The first reconfigures Greene’s narrative of cultural loss as something more positive as borne out by the texts under consideration, and also discusses the question of what allows us to connect one text with another. The second sub-section explores the term ‘erotic’ as applied to the poetry read in this book, its problematic relationships to literary morality and pornography, and asks what the cultural potential of the erotic might be in each historical period under review.