In the early modern period, vernacular medical texts treated midwifery, herbal remedy, bloodletting, household ‘physick’ and a number of other topics that respond to the general and pervasive concern for healthy living in the sixteenth century (Pelling, 1998). In these exceedingly practical texts, the vernacular made medical knowledge more accessible and thereby increased readership. It also dissolved the integrity of the Latinate traditions dealing with gynecology, herbals, and medical diagnostics. In other arenas, however, the vernacular was not meant to give patients the power to diagnose or treat themselves or more generally, to reach a broader audience. It sought to maintain the integrity of the Latinate tradition even as it moved it into the vernacular. This presentation investigates this alternative role of the vernacular. Drawing on studies of the history of the book, this presentation focuses on surgery texts, in particular, a set of editions of Giovanni de Vigo’s Practica universale in cirugia, published in Venice between 1549 and 1560. These editions were learned; they claimed a classical heritage, an academic system of reference, and an elite audience. As the editors and translators of these editions struggled with variant Latin sources, classical conventions, and linguistic precision, they articulated a set of ideas about how a vernacular language could be cultivated: how it could transform the Latin tradition of surgery into a vernacular one without diluting its definitions and principles (at which point, it could more effectively counter the claims of empiricists); and how it was a more constitutive part of the language debates of the sixteenth century (the questione della lingua), which have heretofore been seen to turn on the literary expressions of Italian, found in Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.