The rhetorical complexion of literary criticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focuses attention on the poet as ‘maker’ of the text rather than on the reader (listener) as ‘maker of sense’ of the text. To talk, as Horace does, of the poet's aim is to presuppose an author-centred approach: readers are dismissed in the Ars poetica with the throwaway remark that the old prefer profit while the young pursue pleasure. In the last third of the seventeenth century, at the high point of French neoclassicism, concern for clarity was paramount and seemed to place the reader in a wholly passive role: the Cartesian Bernard Lamy wrote in De l'art de parler (1675) that in order to attain a gentle and clear style, ‘one should leave nothing to the reader to guess’. It would be misleading however to take at face value this apparent neglect of the reader. Theorists of poetry and rhetoric have always been concerned with the affective impact of language, and literary critics of the Renaissance and seventeenth century give voice to the issue of reader-response by building on the rhetorical inheritance of Horace, Aristotle, and, increasingly in the seventeenth century, Longinus.

Horace's Epistula ad Pisones, known usually as the Ars poética, remained a dynamic presence in the literary criticism of the Renaissance and seventeenth century, though it had been familiar since the Middle Ages. Dolce's Italian version appeared in 1535, Jacques Peletier du Mans's French translation in 1545 was first published anonymously in 1541, and the first English version, by Archdeacon Drant, appeared in 1567.

Before the late seventeenth century, the language of criticism develops within the rhetorical tradition. Renaissance discussions of style accordingly centre on prose, a focus reflecting the cultural priority of the humanist paideia over vernacular poetry throughout the period. The fullest and most important of such discussions occur in the great scholarly neo-Latin rhetorics, although these subsequently inform vernacular rhetoric, as well as poetics, music theory, and art criticism. Because stylistic concepts evolve within the pan-European culture of neo-Latin humanism, it seems possible to sketch a general outline of Renaissance stylistics; yet because the cultural and political functions of these rhetorical categories shift from country to country, such an overview needs to be supplemented by consideration of specific national contexts. This chapter will therefore examine the dominant trends in Renaissance stylistics but also their divergent ideological exfoliation in France and England.

Renaissance terminology for stylistic analysis draws upon four principal categories, all borrowed from classical rhetoric. Style may be described in terms of (1) the genera dicendi – the Roman categories of low/plain, middle, and grand style (or their Greek equivalents); (2) its classical prototypes; for example, a style may be labelled as Senecan, Tacitean, or Ciceronian; (3) its characteristic features, especially syntactic; Renaissance rhetorics thus classify styles as periodic, curt, copious, laconic, pointed, loose; and (4) the related distinction between Attic (brief), Asiatic (copious), and Rhodian (intermediate) styles. These categories are not exclusive; one may describe an author as using an Asiatic middle style or pointed Senecan brevity. Nor are they unambiguous. In Renaissance (as in classical) rhetoric, for example, the plain style includes an informal conversational manner, the type of speech characteristic of ‘low’ persons, the unartistic plainness of logical/scholastic argument, and a graceful cultivated urbanity.

While the word ‘epigram’ entered the French language at the end of the fourteenth century, it remained rare until the sixteenth, and the earliest citations of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary all date from the sixteenth century. Likewise, the term did not become common in German until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The modern epigram does seem in some respects to be truly an invention of the Renaissance. And like the other truly Renaissance genres, the emblem and the essay, it is a genre whose development was directed to some extent by its etymology as it was assembled from a combination of classical models and medieval subliterary gnomic traditions. The word meant ‘inscription’ in the classical languages, and Renaissance epigrams too were often meant to serve as literal or figurative inscriptions for real or putative monuments or works of art.

Naturally, the epigram was not an entirely new form. In Germany the Baroque epigram was in some respects closer to the medieval Spruch than to the classical epigram. In French poetry, short-form verse, ending with a proverb or a famous line of poetry, was common in the later Middle Ages following the example of Eustache Deschamps, and these short forms were even discussed in some detail in the arts of seconde rhétorique. Since late antiquity, gnomic sayings had been stretched into distichs or other combinations of rhyming verse for mnemotechnic considerations, in ways that often turned them into epigrams in all but name. Like the ancient epigrams, these short poems provided tituli, or captions and inscriptions, for mosaics, tapestries, and stained glass windows.

Renaissance Neoplatonism was the creation of the fifteenth-century Florentines Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and had a profound and far-reaching impact on the cultural as well as the intellectual and religious life of Europe for well over two centuries. It contributed a forma mentis that transcended disciplinary and national boundaries without necessarily coming into direct conflict with other contemporary mind-sets, those we associate with Aristotelianism, Protestantism, Ramism, neo-scholasticism, Hermeticism, Copernicanism, Tridentism, and so forth. Literature and its interpretation only played an ancillary role in what was at heart a philosophico-theological movement anchored in the concerns of medieval Catholicism but inspired by the attractive example of Plato's newly discovered dialogues on the one hand and by the dauntingly technical commentaries of the Neoplatonists on the other. But it did mean that the Platonic dialogue, with its dramatic shifts from interrogation to exposition to myth to fable to quotation to dialectical division in various sequences and combinations, was set up not so much as the literary but as the hermeneutical model; and that Plato's style, with its lucidity, suppleness, and figurative and ironic variety, became acknowledged as a way of doing philosophy that was in marked contrast to the wrangling of the schools and to the analytic systematizing of Aristotle. Plato became not only the great alternative to the Stagirite as a philosopher but a more profound and compelling alternative to Cicero as a model rhetorician.

One of the obvious issues the Platonic dialogue poses is that of genre. Ancient doxologists, such as Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the philosophers 3.49–51, 58–61, had divided up the dialogues rather crudely under such heads as ‘political’, ‘ethical’, ‘logical’, ‘physical’, and ‘obstetrical’; but this could not satisfy those who were impressed by the dramatic unity of many of Plato's masterpieces and by the complexity and variety that subsisted in that unity.

Cosmography or the description of the constitution of the world, comprising astronomy as well as geography, is related to poetics either by analogy (poems being taken as metaphors of the cosmos, the object of cosmography) or by exposition (in poetry aiming partially or totally at practising the writing of cosmography). Both relations will be considered here, as well as some effects of the scientific revolution on them. Since it is, of course, impossible to be exhaustive, only some of the most representative texts will be mentioned and broad characteristics will be highlighted, rather than specific differences.

The analogy between cosmos and logos, establishing unity and harmonious variety as the basic rules of classical rhetoric and poetics, is already present in Plato. Augustine develops this analogy in a variety of influential texts. Among the other ancient sources, Macrobius, who stressed the similarity between Virgil's poetry and God's Creation (Saturnales V.1.19–20), is one of the most important. In the early Renaissance, the theme reappears in many prescriptions for artistic variety, also inspired by the Byzantine tradition following Hermogenes and ‘imported’ into Italy by George of Trebizond. Angelo Poliziano, for example, developed in detail the Macrobian comparison between Virgil's work and God's Creation in his ‘Manto’ (1482, lines 351–67), where the vivid descriptions of the poet's text are said to mirror the most ‘variegated species’ [discors facies] of the beauty of the world. Many Renaissance authors claimed a similar beauty for their works. The theme of poetry as an analogue of the world because of Its ‘energetic’ descriptions and the Concordia discors of their variety is repeated by Vida (De arte poetica, III.64–75), Ronsard (‘Elégie à Des Masures’, 1–13), Vauquelin de La Fresnaye (Art poétique, III.659–75), Tasso (Discorsi del poema eroico), and others.

Renaissance concepts of the relationship between artistically composed language and the true nature of things are usually bound almost inextricably with the presupposition that the genesis of literary composition lies in rhetoric and in the imitation of model authors. As Scaliger puts it (Poetices libri septem, v.x): ‘We have a method of expressing the nature of things, for we imitate what our predecessors have said in exactly the same way as they imitated nature’. Even so, not all sixteenth-century concepts of literature entail literary imitation. It is, for example, virtually absent from writing which primarily invites an allegorical rather than a rhetorical reading. Allegorical interpretation may draw on other authors as repositories of information, but it is an essentially non-rhetorical mode in that it fundamentally depends on the reader's freedom to substitute one sign for another or one signified for another according to associative formulae which have nothing to do with concepts of style found in classical rhetoric. In rhetorically constituted discourse, meaning is derived from the choice and arrangement of words. In the sixteenth century the influence of classical rhetoric was paramount, and the lessons of humanist rhetoric were largely lessons in how to write like admired exemplars of literary expression in the ancient languages. The history of literary criticism in our period is therefore to a large extent a history of which models were recommended for imitation, of instructions as to how they were to be imitated, and of the side-effects of such prescriptions.

The literary salon is among the few truly original institutions in the history of French culture. The literary assemblies first noted in sixteenth-century France were naturally not without precedent – notably in sixteenth-century Italy. However, no other country ever produced a tradition of such gatherings. For, whereas most European nations at one time or another knew some degree of salon activity – salons were particularly prevalent throughout Europe in the eighteenth century – only in France did salons flourish without interruption for nearly two centuries. During that time, a veritable culture developed in the salons. The influence of that culture was so powerful that at certain periods – particularly in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries – French culture seemed almost synonymous with salon culture. An important aspect of salon culture' influence can be noted in the definition of literary criticism as it was first practised on a large scale in France.

In France the salon tradition really began around 1610, when the Italian-born marquise de Rambouillet, having deemed the French court insufficiently sophisticated, decided to establish an alternate court in her townhouse near the Louvre. The Revolution of 1789 brought the salon tradition to an abrupt end, just as it terminated so many other institutions that had flourished under the ancien régime. The salon did resurface in the nineteenth century. Once the tradition had been broken, however, the new assemblies recovered neither the flavour nor the prestige of their precursors.

While the true tradition was still alive, the salons were not yet referred to by that name – ‘salon’ designated only the formal reception rooms in which assemblies were generally held in the eighteenth century rather than the gatherings themselves.

Credit for canonizing Petrarch's fourteenth-century Rime sparse usually goes to Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525). Squeezing out of Petrarch's 200-year-old Siculo-Tuscan literary idiom the seeds of a factitious cultural heritage, Bembo promoted a style that spoke oddly to Italy's competing regional centres, much less to the emerging national literatures of monarchies outside of Italy. Yet Petrarchism became the dominant lyric style not only in Italy but throughout Europe. Divergent critical views of Petrarch inscribed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on the Rime sparse and Trionfi offer compelling evidence. They construct a narrative of multiple Petrarchs, heterogeneous versions of the Rime e trionfi conformable to opposing ideologies at different times and in different places. In their light we may better understand Petrarch's place in a divided Italy, an imperial Spain, a monarchical France, and Protestant England.

The earliest Florentine biographies of Petrarch by Filippo Villani (1381), Pier Paolo Vergerio (1397), Leonardo Bruni (1436), and Giannozzo Manetti (1440s) reclaimed Petrarch's Florentine ancestry and depicted him as sympathetic to the republican spirit of civic humanism, but they offered few comments on his vernacular poetry. Commentaries written under the auspices of despotic rulers in northern Italy a century later, however, read and interpreted the Italian verse on different horizons. Each supports claims sympathetic to the aristocratic, autocratic, and expansionist interests of Ghibelline monarchism or Venetian oligarchy, and each asserts a special relationship with the historical Petrarch who spent the longest period of his Italian residence in northern territories, first at Milan where he served the Visconti (1353–61); then at Venice (1362–7); and finally in Padua and Arquà (1368–74) where Francesco da Carrara granted him an estate.

Robert Burton's complaint in 1621 that he could find no publisher willing to print his mammoth book in Latin marks the achievement of a kind of revolution during the sixteenth century. As the result of a conscious campaign and numerous polemics, first developed in Italy, then continued in France, the results of which were simply transferred to England, the major vernacular languages of Western Europe had by that date effectively dislodged the monopoly held by Latin on all forms of serious, written or printed, enquiry. When, just a century earlier, intellectuals or scholars wished to address the widest audience of their peers, there was no choice about the language: Erasmus's Moriae encomium [Praise of folly] (1511), More's Utopia (1516), Polydore Vergil's Anglicae historiae libri XXVI (1534). But in 1614, Sir Walter Ralegh offered a far larger historical project to this wider public as The history of the world. In the same year, Professor Edward Brerewood published an equally ambitious project (on the very subject of vernacular languages and their relation to Latin): Enquiries touching the diversity of languages, and religions through the … world. And perhaps the most ambitious of all projects had earlier appeared in Sir Francis Bacon's The advancement of learning (1605). Both Brerewood's and Bacon's texts were subsequently translated into Latin – a sign of both the lost dominance and continued prestige of the ancient lingua franca.

The general history of this displacement has long been known, and its causes not far to seek: the rise of nation-states and consciously cultivated national literatures, the explosion of literacy made possible by print and mandated by Protestantism. The rise of vernaculars fits seamlessly into the story of our progressive modernity; it seldom detains us. But just what kind of, and how significant a, phenomenon this is might give us pause.

Literary culture in Tudor-Stuart London was dominated by no single institution such as the Florentine chancery, the Roman curia, the Parisian academies, the University of Leiden, or the language societies of the German imperial cities. It was a product, rather, of the many intersecting influences that helped to make London the second-largest European metropolis by the later seventeenth century. As the seat of the court, London was frequented by the English ruling class and by nobility, scholars, and diplomats from throughout Europe. The centre of a commercial empire with outposts in the major cities of Europe and the Mediterranean, London was also home to a wealthy and socially mobile merchant class receptive to learning and religious reform. The legal proceedings of Parliament and the other chief courts of the realm, as well as the educational and social activities of the Inns of Court, drew Englishmen from throughout the realm into an orbit where eloquence was at a premium. As the main conduit for government revenue and the transfer of landed wealth, seventeenth-century London became home to the marriage market, social season, and leisure and luxury industries that attracted an urbanizing gentry for whom investment in culture was among the least expensive forms of conspicuous consumption. In keeping, then, with its political and economic pre-eminence, Tudor-Stuart London exercised a dominant influence on literary culture throughout the realm. The 1557 act incorporating the Company of Stationers of London and giving them authority over printing throughout England restricted the printing of books to London and the two presses at Oxford and Cambridge.

No single image, perhaps, better captures the elusive relationship that printing bore to Renaissance literary criticism than the frontispiece of Guillaume Budé's De studio literarum recte ac commode instituendo (1532). Beneath the title, Josse Bade, the renowned Parisian printer of Budé and Erasmus, inserted a woodcut of a printer pulling hard on a press bar, flanked by an inker knocking up the balls on one side, and on the other, two typesetters busy composing. Although it seems to suggest a particular correlation between the best-known Parisian shop of the time and the latest manifesto of France's most celebrated humanist, the image proves to be merely Bade's ordinary device, and a somewhat formulaic one at that. Budé's book in turn registers little awareness of the new medium through which it was destined to pass, and his silence points to the curious fact that while print culture and a new literary consciousness seem to have developed in parallel, they often did so in relative ignorance of each other.

This unwitting indifference could cut both ways. Etienne Pasquier, one of the most perceptive casual critics of contemporary French writers, had little that was perceptive to say about printing except to note with irony that ‘the inventor of artillery was a monk, and of printing a knight’. Notwithstanding the remarkable blind spot that many contemporaries experienced with regard to the ‘print revolution’, modern scholars have been tempted to find in the invention of printing a key to any number of pivotal changes in Renaissance intellectual life.

Within the loose system of literary genres that existed in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, lyric has an especially problematic trajectory. For one thing, lyric is always – even today – the most fugitive of genres when it comes to a theory of its identity. And for another, the period in question is probably the starting point of the modern idea of lyric productions as short, intense, and exquisite redactions of impassioned speech – a notion that is much further developed in the Romantic period, but has recognizable beginnings in the early Renaissance. One consequence of this latter view is that lyric theory comes to seem almost a contradiction in terms: where it is assumed that speech can be idealized into poetry and poetry naturalized into speech, a poetics of lyric like those of epic or drama can seem beside the point. Moreover, the disparity between the available terms of lyric theory and the actual productions of the genre becomes arrestingly evident in this period. In many ways the most acute poetics of the early modern lyric is written out in poems themselves, such as Garcilaso de la Vega's Egloga tercera (written c. 1526, published 1543) and Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes calender (1579), where poets and their audiences often find the common ground for genre orientated conversation they otherwise lack. Hence the emergence of lyric in this period – its separation from the other genres, its theory and practice – must be sought in many untoward places, and witnessed alongside other events.

What role did an increasingly comprehensive and critical reading of the rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian play in the development of Renaissance ideas about literary criticism? Of obvious initial interest is the insistence in the mature Cicero and in Quintilian that the trainee orator should, in the first place, read the poets, historians, and ‘writers, or learned contributors to all good arts’, and, in the second place (for the sake of practice), praise, interpret, and correct them, pointing out their failings and the aspects that required a critical response. The influence of such prescriptions must be observed by the reader in other chapters of the present volume: here the interface between Renaissance students and the rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian alone can be sketched in, with some central attention to those passages in the new curriculum texts that can be expected to have assisted with a refinement and an enlargement of the contemporary view of the rhetorical functioning of language, and a sharper focus upon what distinguished rhetorical prose from poetry.

Of the major curriculum rhetorical texts inherited by the early fifteenth century from medieval usage, the most important were Cicero's De inventione and the approximately contemporary Rhetorica ad Herennium. The former makes few references to language and even fewer to poetry, whilst the latter provides little specific analysis and instruction in prose style, despite being a ‘complete’ rhetorical ars. The ‘mature’ rhetorical works of Cicero, by contrast, and the much more comprehensive rhetorical textbook of the early imperial rhetor, M. Fabius Quintilianus, the Institutio oratoria, entered the teaching curriculum fully only in the fifteenth century.

The terms ‘Port-Royal’ and ‘Jansenism’ serve in different ways as metonyms for the (originally theological) ethos of Augustinian pessimism which dominated a significant part of French thought and writing in the later part of the seventeenth century. Port-Royal was the name of two convents: one in the Vallée de Chevreuse, near Paris (Port-Royal-des-Champs), now in ruins; and the other in the city (Port-Royal-de-Paris), currently a hospital. The communities associated with the two sites were, first, an order of Cistercian nuns, reformed by Angélique Arnauld, who had become abbess in 1602, and of which Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran and student contemporary of Jansen, became spiritual director in 1634, following the nuns' move to Paris in 1625–6. Secondly, a group of laymen, the so-called ‘solitaires’ or ‘Messieurs de Port-Royal’, who occupied the rural convent from 1637, and who founded in the vicinity a series of respected schools (‘les petites écoles’), whose most celebrated pupil was Jean Racine. The term ‘Jansenism’ stems from the name of the bishop of Ypres, Cornelius (gallicized Corneille) Jansen, whose seminal (posthumously published) work, the Augustinus (1640), provided the principal theological point of reference for the movement. Neither term is fully definitional or comprehensive; but both have to some extent become interchangeable shorthands.

Taken first at a theological level, the current of Augustinian pessimism was a phenomenon associated with the Catholic (or Counter-) Reformation which, in its various (and on occasion conflicting) manifestations, replied to or, in this case, arguably reflected the Protestant Reformation of the previous century.

Interest in Stoicism and Epicureanism was rekindled in the early modern era as a result of the intensive study, on the part of humanists, of ancient texts, some of which were works of high literary as well as philosophical merit. For this reason, even though neither of these classical philosophical systems was centrally concerned with literary criticism, their revival had important repercussions on the interpretation of literature and on matters of style.

Stoicism

The main tenets of Stoicism were well known to scholars of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, above all through the philosophical writings of Seneca. In the 1580s, however, Stoic philosophy began to become much more fashionable – a trend which lasted until the 1660s – due principally to the efforts of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius. From his immensely popular De constantia (1584) to his authoritative edition of Seneca (1605), Lipsius presented a comprehensive and attractive account of Stoicism. He saw his mission as both philosophical and literary. On a philosophical level, Lipsius wanted to convince his contemporaries that Stoicism was the philosophy best suited to their needs; he did this by emphasizing the similarities, rather than the differences, between Stoicism and Christianity, and by presenting the often criticized Stoic doctrine of emotionlessness as a feasible and rational response to the political turbulence of the times. In literary terms, Lipsius wanted to reverse the judgement of earlier humanists such as Erasmus, who admired the moral content of Seneca's writings but who, like many ancient critics, regarded his writing as, at times, flat and prone to enigmatic obscurity.

The new criticism that emerged at the end of the fourteenth century in Italy had its roots in the movement to revive classical studies known as humanism. The humanists, however, sowed the seeds of an ambiguous legacy; they wrote critical essays on liberty, the ideal state, and the quest for the good, but they also produced propaganda for their states that ignored injustice at home and rationalized – in the name of peace and security – a policy of terror and aggression abroad. But this humanism – whatever its long-term force – could not have flourished either in its civic or more contemplative forms without the innovations of Petrarch. He was the first to couch modern concerns in the classical Latin of Cicero and Livy. Embracing civic, literary, philosophical, and religious themes, his writings include criticism in the form of letters, a Latin epic poem after Virgil's Aeneid, and lyric poetry in Italian.

There was a gulf nevertheless between the fifteenth-century humanists and Petrarch. They had access to a tradition Petrarch never knew: the Greek philosophers, orators, historians, tragedians, and poets. After the invention of the printing-press, the humanists of the later fifteenth century had at their disposal a variety and volume of classical and modern texts that would have amazed Petrarch: the new technology of movable type allowed more books to be produced in the last fifty years of the fifteenth century than all the scribes in Europe had written prior to that time.

Other features distinguish this first century of humanism from the periods before and after it: the dominance of Latin over the vernacular as the lingua franca of serious criticism; the enormous mobility of leading writers of the period, who moved typically between cities and courts; the related importance (for a mobile literary culture) of the epistolary genre as the essential medium of expression for the humanists; the rise of a number of distinct and different regional humanisms in the Italian city-states, each with its own local character; and lastly, yet most importantly, the disdain inherent in the ideology of Renaissance humanism for social justice.