He studied grammar and rhetoric at Padua under Giovanni Conversini and periodically with Vittorino da Feltre.
In 1413 he completed his first Latin work, the Argumenta super aliquot orationibus et invectivis Ciceronis ["Arguments on some speeches and invectives of Cicero"].
Thereafter he worked on his Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae, the first history of the Latin language and its literature, which he had begun by 1425 but did not finish until 1437.
He spent his final years writing various tracts expounding religious arguments and died in Padua in 1446 or 1447.
[18] Polenton himself explicitly places it in the tradition of the "De viris illustribus" and always refers to it as "vita scriptorum illustrium".
The first edition was worked on until around 1426, and it is preserved in an incomplete and non-autograph in the manuscript Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 121 (R), as well as in four loose folios used as endpapers in another codex.
The second edition was probably finished by 1437, and contains the autograph from Codex Ottobonianus, and about twenty manuscripts that descend from it one (on the possible existence of an intermediate version, see once again Ullman 1928, xvi-xx).
For contrastive examples of the two editions, one may compare the two vitas of Virgil, reprinted and translated in Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp.