Any historical study of Renaissance sonnet sequences must begin in the nineteenth century. Though obviously neither sonnets nor sonnet sequences were literally invented in the nineteenth century, the extensive, explicit, theoretical scrutiny of them begun with the Romantics has fundamentally shaped understandings of both sequences and the Renaissance ever since. The term “sonnet sequence” was thought up by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1880, and at least sixteen sonnet anthologies, dozens of articles and essays, and over two hundred and sixty sonnet sequences appeared through the century. The renewed interest in the sonnet eventually resulted in the critical apparatus still ordinarily used today to describe sonnet sequences: the familiar vocabulary of sonnet “conventions,” of Petrarchism and its attendant ideology. This critical apparatus has become so pervasive as to seem self-evident; what could possibly be more obvious than Petrarchan cliches? As the concise introduction to Sidney's Astrophil and Stella in the seventh edition Norton Anthology of English Literature puts it,