Paul Videsott examines the fate of the vernacular non-literary written language in Northern Italy from its first appearance up to 1525 (the year of publication of P. Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua). For this, he undertakes a scriptological and scriptometric analysis of 1165 non-literary Old North Italian texts with a total of 558,892 words from 35 writing centres. Overall, one result is that the North Italian dialects displayed a far greater autonomy towards the emerging Tuscan norm than was the case in France for the Northern French dialects vis-à-vis the imperial Parisian standard language.