Giacomo da Lentino is, if not the inventor of the sonnet, the first sonneteer whose works have come down to us. Dr Ernest H. Wilkins has studied exhaustively the problems of the sonnet's origin; his conclusions can be accepted as virtually definitive. The present study is oriented, not toward a reconstruction of the sonnet's antecedents, but rather toward a more detailed analysis of Giacomo da Lentino's sonnets themselves, as the first specimens of a subsequently important genre. It is by analyzing the twenty-four love sonnets that we find among his extant poems, rather than by speculating upon hypothetical sonnets which may or may not have preceded them, that we can hope to achieve some understanding of the earliest tendencies of the love sonnet; these tendencies clearly constitute the genre's nascent tradition, with implications that extend far beyond Giacomo's own sonnets.