The vernacular language was a topic of great interest across Italy throughout the sixteenth century; most were interested in setting standards of good writing based on the models of Petrarch and Boccaccio as promoted by Pietro Bembo. Florentines differed especially in that they came to distinguish literary style from the language itself, and focused on the study of language. They modified the tools of humanistic study, developed for Latin and Greek, by distinguishing between the study of living languages and dead ones, sinceliving languages constantly undergo change and development. They also used a biological model, arguing that a language is like a living thing with its own life cycle. Most Florentine writings from the 1540s and 1550s came from a circle of friends who often collaborated with one another: Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Giovan Battista Gelli, Cosimo Bartoli, Carlo Lenzoni, and Giovanni Norchiati. Although they are now best known for their arguments about the history of the language, in fact they devoted many years to the study of modern language practice.

In the 1540s, Piefrancesco Giambullari and Giovan Battista Gelli published books in which they argued that the Florentine language was not a debased form of Latin, but derived from Aramaic and Etruscan. Their claims divided the Accademia Fiorentina for a number of years, and earned them the nickname “Aramei.”They relied especially on the writings of Annius of Viterbo, whose fraudulent works seemed to them to provide information about the region and its people that was absent from Roman sources. Their arguments about language history were unsatisfactory to many; efforts to refute them effectivelyinspired years of further research. Yet even those who opposed them were interested in finding ways to study peoples, languages, and customs. Ancient models of historical writing focused on politics and public actions, but in order to study groups of people, customs, or languages, newer approaches were needed.