Elizabeth I (1558-1603) may never have uttered the famous words attributed to her in a letter by Sir Francis Bacon: “I would not open windows into men's souls.” Her division between conformity in public worship and private religious sensibility reverses the authoritarian view that governmental fiat determines religious conviction. Elizabeth's acknowledgment of liberty of conscience free from surveillance sounds apocryphal, but the remark does correspond to the Queen's secretiveness about her personal beliefs. Liberty of conscience was not the case when Sir Thomas More, despite his legalistic strategy of maintaining silence concerning his refusal to acquiesce to the Royal Supremacy over the church, was convicted of treason at the outset of the political Reformation under Henry VIII (1509-47). Perjured testimony that the humanist scholar, lawyer, and former Lord Chancellor of England had denied the King's supremacy in the Church of England led to his condemnation. Before his death sentence was handed down, More discharged his conscience by defending ecclesiastical unity and objecting to royal control of the church.

It is hard, said the poet Juvenal as he looked around Nero's Rome, not to write satire (Satires i.i). But what is “satire”? Sometimes a form, often a mode, it can double as diatribe, sermon, parody, joke, Utopia, dystopia, epistle, or novel; its tone ranges from fury to faint irony, anguish to amusement. Is it, then, discourse with attitude? Any sendup or putdown? It must be more than irritability or grief, and that “more” is often some fantasy, conceit, myth, invention, or persona. Like allegory, it thrives in a fallen world of ambiguous signs, Augustine's “land of unlikeness.” Not all Tudor writers explore a deconstructionist's “differance,” but some adopt a distance or difference - fiction - that distinguishes their work from lament, polemic, or sermon. When such work holds something up to amused or scornful scrutiny, and at some length, the result is satire.

“This realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world.” With these words Parliament in 1533 declared England's independence from the Pope in Rome. Although our more familiar sense of empire as a political unit encompassing far-flung territories and heterogeneous peoples was current in the sixteenth century, the meaning here concerns absolute sovereignty. An empire is a polity that owes fealty to no one under God. Because England is an empire, England's king has, in Parliament's words, “plenary, whole, and entire power”in all matters within his kingdom. In place of the overlapping patchwork of regional, national, and international jurisdictions that had characterized medieval governance in Western Europe, monarchs in England and elsewhere were intent on seeing their rule penetrate more evenly into all aspects of life in the territories under their control. This “improvement of the sovereignty,” as the Elizabethan poet and historian Samuel Daniel was to call it, had an inevitable cultural dimension.

What makes a century? It is clearly something more than the simple passage of a hundred years, but equally clearly is something less than a perfectly connected sequence of events with an interconnected beginning, middle, and end. History rarely shapes itself to the motions of the planets or to the arbitrary divisions of the calendar: as Hayden White has shown us, it is more usually shaped by the demands imposed on it by different kinds of narrative structure. Monarchs do not obligingly succumb to fin de siecle gloom in order to die with the century, nor do social or literary movements terminate with a bang the moment a century draws to an end. The sixteenth century is particularly unobliging in its relation to the calendar. Nothing of great note happened in 1500, and nothing of great note happened in 1600 either, as the timeline appended to this volume shows.

In the sixteenth century poetry followed patronage like a shadow. At a time when the newly invented printing press was disseminating texts at a rate never before imagined, writers, editors, translators, and compilers did not earn a living from their labors. Receiving a single payment for their manuscripts but no royalties thereafter, writers remained as dependent on patrons for employment, retainerships, and cash rewards as they had done in the age of scribal reproduction. To publish was not to profit, and the days when a writer might make a fortune from his pen and claim, as Pope did, to be “Above a Patron,”were still a long way off. Literature that was written at the behest of a patron, literature that aimed to attract a patron, literature that ruminated the vagaries of the patronage system, literature that deplored its shortcomings - these account for so large a proportion of sixteenth-century writing that the literature of the period has not unreasonably been described as a “literature of patronage.”

What is “literature”? Who writes it, and who reads it? What good or harm does it do? How is it related to other cultural forms? And what is the appropriate language and kind of writing within which these issues can be framed and argued? These simple questions, which provide the fodder for the complex aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras and for the theory wars of the late twentieth century, were likewise disputed in the sixteenth century. It is possible, indeed, to think of the sixteenth century as the first great age of literary criticism, in which a distinctive category of literature was established, and a distinctive way of talking about it and the other arts was developed. For Tudor writers and readers, the answers to these questions depend primarily on their understanding of literature as a kind of imitation. The word imitation is a complex one, though, for it allows two important meanings.

In A Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, William Webbe claims that the need for such a text, designed to aid readers in identifying a native poetic tradition, emerges out of the explosive proliferation of printed works and the problems they pose for exercising judgment. 'Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished, the greatest part I think . . . are such as . . . tend in some respect . . . to poetry . . . If I write something concerning what I think of our English poets, or adventure to set down my simple judgement of English poetry, I trust the learned poets will give me leave, and vouchsafe my book passage . . . to stir up some other of meet ability to bestow [travail] in this matter: whereby I think we may not only get the means, which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad, but perhaps also challenge from the rude multitude of rustical rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly course of true poetry.'

Fascination with the idea of illusionist representation pervades the history of Renaissance culture. Great artists were generally convinced that they had been endowed with a power to instil a supernatural degree of life into their artefacts. The Pygmalion fantasy can be seen as emblematic of this faith in the illusionist qualities of art. The famous Greek myth exemplifies the belief in the power of art to give life rather than to represent it. In Ovid's version of the story Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with the statue he has fashioned, and the gods answer his prayers by turning the cold marble into living flesh (Metamorphoses, x). This myth naturally captivated the imagination of many artists and writers from Donatello to Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare. The triumph of representational skill is traditionally associated with the power of art to arouse passions. This was still common theoretical currency in the Renaissance.

The painter could so subdue the minds of men that they would fall in love with a painting that did not represent a real woman. In his Treatise on painting Leonardo tells the following anecdote: ‘I made a religious painting which was bought by one who so loved it that he wanted to remove the sacred representations so as to be able to kiss it without suspicion. Finally his conscience prevailed over his sighs and lust, but he had to remove the picture from his house.’ If for today's critics illusionist virtuosity is suspect at best as a criterion of artistic worth, it was indeed highly praised by classical authority.

Around the turn of the century literary historians bestowed the name ‘Ecole des Grands Rhétoriqueurs’ on an array of writers from the latter half of the fifteenth century through to the early reign of Francis I. Thereafter, they were viewed either as latecomers in a ‘waning’ Middle Ages or as precursors of more gifted ‘schools’ of Renaissance poets. As rewriting the past has progressed, a more robust reassessment has emerged for the aggregate works of humanists, artists, diplomats, mythologizing historians, and architects named Jean Meschinot (1422–91), Henri Baude (?1430–96), Jean Molinet (1435–1507), Destrées (?), Jean Robertet (?–?1502), Octavien de Saint-Gelais (1468–1502), Guillaume Cretin (?1472–1525), André de la Vigne (1470–1515), Pierre Gringore (1475– ?1539), Jean Marot (?1463–1526), Jean Bouchet (1476–1557), Jean Parmentier (1494–1529), and Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1516) – with Petrarch, Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pisan, and others on the margin.

Their improved rank in the evolution of Renaissance culture has stemmed from: discounting the polemic agenda of sixteenth-century arts poétiques; recognition of intertextual recollections as indices of artistic continuity; modern methodologies of decoding poetic language as a cultural artefact; and deeper conversance with the creative flair of this loose coterie which theatrically memorialized the liturgical festivals and offcial functions of the newly enriched bourgeoisie. They dramatized courtly gestures in the palaces of the powerful, ennobled the deeds of Burgundian dukes, the House of Austria, and embellished venturous policies of Louis XI and Charles VIII. No longer are these poets disparaged for the virtuosity of their rhyme couronnée, rétrograde, léonine, équivoquée bilingue, double or triple, rauque, fratrisée, enchaînée, annexée, and so on.

Debates on hermeneutics play a prominent role in Renaissance intellectual life. How should one read in order to grasp the full meaning and value of a text? What issues should the commentary address? Whether applied to the Bible or to ancient poetry, these questions arise constantly. Two very different methods are at work. One considers that old texts are still relevant and alive; interpretation, in this case, stresses examples worth imitating or hidden meanings that will affect readers' morals or beliefs. The other is more historically minded and attempts to understand a work according to its cultural context, as a witness to a lost civilization. Let us consider these two methods – allegorical and philological – in turn.

Among the Fathers of the Church there arises a principle that will command biblical exegesis throughout the Middle Ages: the Scriptures have several simultaneous meanings. Each episode or statement is normally endowed with four stratified senses: the literal or historical meaning, its connection with the teaching of Christ, its moral value and finally its spiritual or eschatological dimension. The designations of these four steps can vary and their order can change, but two rules remain firm: (a) the hidden senses are superior to the obvious story; (b) this grid imposes a compulsory method on the commentary.

In the Middle Ages this ‘quadruple interpretation’, with its mechanical procedures, was applied early on to pagan literature and, more particularly, to ancient myths. The most spectacular illustration is the systematic unfolding of Ovid's Metamorphoses according to the fourfold method. In its different versions, Latin or French (from the early fourteenth century till around 1530), the Ovide moralisé aims thus at making ancient mythology appear compatible with Christian truth: Phaëton represents Lucifer and his revolt against God; Diana is a figure of the Trinity, and so on.

The production of literature in early modern Germany was conditioned by the complex socio-political organization of the Holy Roman Empire. In contrast to other Western European lands, the Empire lacked a vibrant literary capital, similar to Paris, London, or Madrid, that functioned as a centre of learning, a gathering place for aspiring intellectuals, and a mass market for the consumption of their works. Book publication was scattered throughout the Empire from major printers in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Strasburg to smaller presses at individual courts. Literary criticism was similarly dispersed, and only a few works, such as Martin Opitz's Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624), attained an influence that transcended the boundaries of an imperial city or territory. The flowering of poetological speculation at a particular place and time was most often determined by the presence of a single energetic person, or an unusually productive group of poets, but their influence frequently remained limited to their immediate environment and ended with their deaths.

Literary criticism in the Empire was generally produced in two places: the courts, both secular and ecclesiastical, and the cities, at municipal grammar schools, gymnasia, and universities or at private gatherings of poets in literary societies. Occasionally, the courts were the prime sponsors of the schools, as was the case in Heidelberg where the Count of the Palatinate appointed the first humanist lecturers in the 1450s, or in late sixteenth-century Munich where the ruling Wittelsbach family financed the ambitious Counter-Reformation programme at the Jesuit gymnasium. Writing about literature was carried out by the functionaries of these courts or schools, whose primary duties lay elsewhere, in education, law, theology, local government, and, less frequently, medicine and natural science.

Although not often linked to the issue of literary criticism, patronage, as the dominant social relationship in Renaissance Europe, inevitably affected the processes of literary judgement. Before and amid the emergence of a market economy of literary relations, most writers depended upon the support and/or the goodwill of the rich and powerful. ‘Since both poets and critics were closely connected with the ruling aristocracies, either by birth or by the system of patronage’, remarks Vernon Hall in one of the few works to consider the social dimensions of literary criticism, ‘their definition [of poetry] was in aristocratic terms’. The Renaissance, Hall argues, founds its literary categories on the grounds of social rather than aesthetic discrimination. Almost every work of literature produced in the Renaissance bore some mark of the hierarchical organization of the society in which it was produced. Through an elaborate system of reward, patrons sustained certain genres, styles, and authors; at the same time, they actively discouraged others by means of sanctions that ranged from simple stinginess to active censorship and corporal punishment. Because they emphasize the ways that political forces impinge on the very aesthetic values that purport to transcend the grimy world of politics, recent developments in criticism – particularly American new historicism and British cultural materialism – have prepared us to attend anew to the relationship between structures of political power and the practices of literary criticism in the Renaissance.

A central problem in Renaissance literary criticism – the establishment of the vernacular as a legitimate medium for literary utterance – is itself in part a function of the effect of courtly power on aesthetic choice.

Criticism and crisis are etymological friends. Throughout history, literary criticism and cultural crisis have tended to follow convergent trajectories. Renaissance humanism, above all, was responsible for generating a language that would not only reflect the cultural crisis at hand, but base that crisis in its own distinctiveness as a period. The deepest, most central impulses of humanism are thus critical. If, as Frank Kermode asserts, crisis ‘is a way of thinking about one's moment, and not inherent in the moment itself’, then one may infer that crisis, and with it criticism, speak in a discourse peculiar to this temporal displacement. The critical temper, in its cultural as well as literary dimension, fixes the Renaissance view of time squarely within the Greek concept of κρí;σις [krisis] as designating a moment both of separation and of decision. The present volume has as its chief aim to register the discourse – the voices and modulations, as it were – of this moment.

The process by which Renaissance humanists sought to apply their systematic scholarly judgement to the encyclopaedia [decision] together with their sense of a time ripe for cultural reappraisal and self-identity [separation] is at the fulcrum of the literary-critical initiative that extended throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The scale of this enterprise is complex and multiform. Strongly resistant to chronological segmentation as it is to enshrinement in ordered, self-contained units of critical activity, any history of reading – and that, arguably, is what this volume undertakes to scan for the period in question – founders on the temptation to ‘read’ the literary past as an edifice of integrated building stones, permanently set in critical mortar and in danger of collapse when the canon inscribed on those blocks is reconfigured by successive generations.

By the time Marguerite de Navarre had completed most of the Heptaméron (1540–5), French Renaissance prose fiction was already very much a porous literary artefact. The fluidity of the form itself – its resistance to definition or reduction to structural uniformity – was fully advertised in the ranging nomenclature by which shorter prose fiction was known to its French readers: devis, récit, conte, histoire, and nouvelle. Largely immune to differentiation, these terms, despite occasional attempts by modern critics to identify taxonomic distinctions, were used almost interchangeably to designate a literary form whose structure, content, and style were rooted not only in the home-grown literary culture of medieval France (the fabliau, profane and largely devoid of moral appeal, and the exemplum, didactic and prescriptive), but in the more crafted aesthetic format of Italian prose fiction, notably Boccaccio's Decameron, where artistic effect seemed frequently to marginalize, if not eclipse, a humanist policy of moral earnestness and sovrasenso. Of special relevance is the fact that unlike Italy and its early Renaissance experimentation (especially in the Decameron) with metrical cadence [cursus] in artistic prose, there is little indication that French prose fiction writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were able fully to bridge the gap between poetics and the dictamen prosaicum. Theories of prose fiction and the kinds of technical distinctions that one might expect in related critical settings thus found themselves, as will become clear, largely excluded from the poetic arts of writers such as Sebillet, Du Bellay, Peletier du Mans, and Ronsard.

Critical speculation about the arts and, more particularly, about literature attained a level of high sophistication in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, as social and economic growth within a dozen or so city-states gave rise to concurrent intellectual flowering, focused around self-conscious movements. The most influential of these movements was humanism, and more specifically two types of humanism: civic humanism, with its philosophy of vita activa-politica [active-olitical life] by which literature and civic life were drawn together in clear opposition to the ideals of scholarly withdrawal encouraged by Platonism; and vernacular humanism, with its defence of the vernacular against Latin as well as of the Moderns against the Ancients, ‘encouraging the moderns to seek to rival antiquity in their vernacular languages and literatures’. After imitating the Ancients, philosophers and poets dared to surpass them: the generation of Marsilio Ficino was succeeded by that of Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano.

While Florence could justifiably lay claim to being the cradle of civic humanism, it was in Venice that the largely theoretical dimension of Florentine speculation on the role of the city-state matured into what became a way of life envied by Western intellectuals everywhere. The Venetian aristocracy's focus on civil and commercial activity that had stunted letters during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, made it, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europe's best-educated ruling class. Even if the philological production of the Florentine studium, with the rise of commercial printing, dominated the Quattrocento by the century's close, Venice emerged as the hub of European cultural endeavours.

Seventeenth–century Spain (alternately referred to as part of the ‘Golden Age’, as the Baroque, or, more recently, as ‘Early Modern Spain’) was, like our own post–modern era, analytical, self–reflexive, and sceptical, a period as committed to cultural commentary and even indictment – in spite of the repressive ethos of the Counter–Reformation. As a result of the inevitable controversies which ensued, this period, like today's postmodernism, stages an ongoing interrogation of categories in a variety of ways that are visible both in the literature and art being produced at that time and in the provocative theorizing to which they gave rise.

In terms of literary production, both periods likewise concern themselves very centrally with the power and constraints of mimesis. Like postmodernism, the Baroque is the cultural expression of a society bent on critically appraising the myths of the preceding era which viewed itself as paradigmatically ‘modern’. Both movements undermine a humanist vision – be it that of Erasmian humanism or secular humanism. Both likewise overtly discredit utopic cultural structures – be they imperial or Marxist. In other words, both demythologize – that is what the crisis of legitimacy is all about. The Baroque like post–modernism is much more form–conscious than the age that preceded it, and to which it is responding. The existence of these two movements, in addition, was first perceived in the plastic arts and only thereafter in literature. Both exploit the same literary figures: antithesis, oxymoron, paradox, catachresis, hyperbole, and example.