This book reproduces, with slight alterations, the first half of a doctoral thesis presented to the University of Cambridge in 1978. What the book offers is a comprehensive, even if not actually exhaustive, account of the corrective principles which underlie Berni's rewriting of Boiardo's epic. It is therefore deliberately conceived as a study of the specific motives for Berni's intervention rather than of the aesthetic results that derive from it. The chapters comprise; Phonology, Morphology, Grammar, Syntax, Versification, Lexis, Cliche, Propriety, and The Mechanics of Reconstruction.