This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is concerned with rhetoric, poetics and aesthetics as they are to be found in early modern texts, and equally with the thought that allows us to make sense of the early modern as a conceptual category. For Immanuel Kant, aesthetics is a way into the perception, knowledge and judgement of objects. Much of Kant's Third Critique is concerned with nature. As several critics have noted, the increased attention given to apparently undervalued documents does tend to legitimate that attention through an appeal to what such documents can tell us about commonly discussed material, most obviously Shakespeare. The book focuses on either an aspect of the body related to the sense of reading or on the deliberate disavowal of the body and its senses.