The surge of Italian theorizing about epic that began in the mid-sixteenth century was part of a general effort to systematize poetic discourse by classifying and defining it according to its various genres. Aristotle's Poetics acquired unprecedented value in the second half of the sixteenth century precisely because its method and orientation suited the need to define poetry in terms of its genres and of their differences. The Greek text was made to spawn a much more systematic theory of genres than Aristotle had intended. Late Cinquecento theorization of comedy makes this amplification of the Poetics particularly apparent since Aristotle left no substantive definition of comedy, or if he did, as was promised at the beginning of Chapter 6, it was subsequently lost. The lacking discussion of comedy did not prevent commentators from erecting what they imagined would be an Aristotelian theory of comedy. Indeed, it encouraged such projections, beginning with Francesco Robortello's ‘Explicatio’ on the art of comedy appended to his commentary on the Poetics (1548), and Giovan Giorgio Trissino's discussion of comedy in the Sesta divisione della Poetica (composed c. 1549) which follows what is, for the most part, an Italian paraphrase of Aristotle's Poetics. Eventually these reconstructions become independent attempts to codify comedy, for example Antonio Riccoboni's De re comica (1579). What was proclaimed to be Aristotle's codification of epic was, in a similar way, what sixteenthcentury interpreters projected on the basis of Aristotle's brief discussion. Whereas Aristotle said next to nothing about comedy, he did devote two brief chapters (23 and 24) of the Poetics to epic, but without considering epic's distinctive attributes in any detail.

The development of French poetry and criticism in the sixteenth century cannot be understood without reference to the growth and transformation of two great urban centres, Lyons and Paris. Although there was much exchange between the cities, with figures headquartered in Paris active in Lyons and vice versa, these cities offer contrasting images of the relationship between criticism and its social and institutional milieu. Indeed, the mere presence of Lyons as a cultural centre rivalling Paris is one of the features that sets the Renaissance apart from other moments in French cultural history, for it complicates the relationship of centre and margin, capital and province, that has tended to dominate French cultural life since the early seventeenth century. Lyons was the port of entry through which the Renaissance came to France. Not only did its location, virtually on the Italian border, make it the point of exchange for all contact with the peninsula to the south, but Lyons underwent a rapid process of transformation during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that made it a city of international importance. From the early 1400s Lyons had been famous for its commercial fairs. These events, which attracted merchants from all over Europe, were initially held twice a year for six days. Then, by decree of Charles VII in 1444, a third fair was added, and all of them were extended to twenty days each. The crown's aim in promoting Lyons was to establish the city as the mercantile crossroads of Europe, thereby turning her rival and neighbour Geneva into a backwater.

Seventeenth-century French criticism has generally, and with some reason, been seen as the imposition of a set of doctrines: adherence to ‘the rules’ the imitation of selected and generalized Nature and of the ancients, according to the criteria of probability [vraisemblance] and decorum [bienséance]; the combination of pleasure and instruction; the separation and hierarchy of genres; the dramatic unities. The affirmation of these requirements began in the 1620s, and gathered momentum in the following decade. By around 1660 the neoclassical system was well in place, although it has been argued that its elaboration was only definitively accomplished in the eighteenth century. The content of these doctrines is explicated elsewhere in this volume; the emphasis here is on the significance they assume in the context of the social relationships of seventeenth-century French literature. This is explored via the objects, the implied public, the channels, and the agents, of critical discourse.

‘Criticism’ in late Renaissance France was potentially encyclopaedic in scope: its aim was, through the exegesis of profane and sacred texts, from antiquity and the early Christian era, to make the truths they contained available to the contemporary world. The focus of seventeenth-century criticism is narrower and more concentrated. Its object is a more selective range of texts, what contemporaries often referred to as belles-lettres. Poetry, including theatre, prose fiction (of a romance or a realistic type), letters, and fragmentary works of moral or social reflection (but also history) appear central, works of science, philosophy, theology marginal or absent. The tendency was to preserve, of the humanist critic's activity, only that part which dealt with the linguistic and literary qualities of the text; the concern was more with identifying legitimate sources of textual pleasure than with the text as a source of truth.

Seventeenth-century English critics applied classically derived conceptions of the writer's aims, natural endowments, and artistic method to English literature. A flexible neoclassicism not only shaped poet-critics like Jonson and Dryden but also accommodated to the canon authors who did not fit a rigid classical paradigm, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Throughout this century of intense socio-political conflict and change, classical norms, adapted to English developments, acquired a range of new cultural meanings.

The early seventeenth-century poet-critic Ben Jonson draws mainly upon Roman sources: the rhetoricians, Seneca, and particularly Horace, upon whom Jonson based his cultural role and his belief that the critic must be an excellent poet himself. Like Horace (Ars poetica 333–46), Jonson argues poetry should combine pleasure and utility by teaching with delight. Like the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium (1.2.3), Jonson claims ‘naturall wit’ or talent, a writer's primary qualification, must be shaped by ‘exercise’, imitation and study (of classical models), and ‘art’ (knowledge of rules for effective expression). As Quintilian advises (Institutio oratoria 10.3.5-6), one must temper vigorous ‘invention’, the discovery of interesting material, with strong judgement regarding material's suitability; after giving invention free reign, one must judiciously revise.

Just as Roman authors sought to surpass Greek models, English authors must emulate the classics. Neither ignoring nor slavishly following ancient precedents, the good writer transforms them. Jonson stresses that classicism itself demands independence by echoing Seneca's claim that the ‘Ancients’ are ‘Guides, not Commanders’. Adapting a Roman boast that orators of Cicero's time equalled those of ‘insolent’ Greece, Jonson praises English Renaissance orators, culminating in Francis Bacon, for equalling or surpassing ‘insolent Greece, or haughty Rome’.

There is a significant methodological problem which has to be addressed before any ‘history’ of critical ideas about prose fiction in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can proceed. During the period in question, no writer saw works like Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590), Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate traveller (1594), Margaret Cavendish's Blazing world (1666) or William Congreve's Incognita (1692) as belonging to the same genre. Therefore, when we consider issues such as debates over appropriate style in prose fiction, or controversies about characterization in romance, it is important to remember that such issues never extended to any conception of a genre constructed by the twentieth century in response to the modern obsession with the novel.

Notions of the novel and its origins cast a cloud over considerations of both the nature of prose fiction in the period preceding the eighteenth century and theoretical ideas from the earlier period which might in some way have anticipated the work of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. A considerable body of recent theoretical writing has revisited and refocused the thesis of Ian Watt's influential Rise of the novel. The work of Lennard Davis, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, and Robert Mayer has changed our ideas of the novel's prehistory, but all these writers look back at the earlier period in order to understand more clearly the developmental model proposed initially by Watt, projecting a form of teleological determinism which hampers any chance of looking at pre-eighteenth-century fiction from within its own concerns. (Exactly the same problem occurs in A. J. Tieje's work on early prose fiction, despite his greater focus on actual works of fiction from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.)

Before Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon used the word to designate their respective works (unlike in all but a few details), the essay began to take form in the epistolary writings of Cicero and Seneca, Plutarch's Moralia, the compilations of sententiae, exempla, and lectiones of late antiquity and their humanist counterparts. Montaigne gave the title Essais to his 1580 volume as an appropriate designation for a work in which a variety of seemingly unrelated historical and moral examples culled from his readings are pondered and compared, apparently in desultory fashion, for their relative value, thereby conjugating etymologically the exagium of essay and the krinein of criticism. Similarly, the ‘fragments of my conceites’ that Bacon published in 1597 under the title Essays are a selection of adages and aphorisms from his many commonplace-books, carefully contrived to convey practical precepts in a methodical and convincing manner. In ‘Of studies’, he aptly summarizes his underlying strategy: ‘Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider’, recalling Montaigne's deliberative practice and anticipating Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve's definition of a critic as simply a person who knows how to read and who shows others how to read.

Born of otium, Montaigne's Essais represent originally his attempt to capture and tame the chimeras and fantastic monsters which idleness and leisure generated in his mind. Progressively, however, he perceives disorder as natural order, and discursive inconclusiveness as a prerequisite to the immediate reproduction of the reality of his thought and self. In opposition to those who sought definitions and conclusions, Montaigne was increasingly concerned with comparisons and differences, viewing the essay finally as a record of diverse occurrences, irresolute and contradictory ideas: ‘I am unable to stabilize my subject’, he writes, ‘it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness’.

The querelle des femmes was a pan-European but primarily French textual phenomenon. Although its successive attacks on, and defences of, women represent a rhetorical controversy between men about women, it was nonetheless one of the significant sites of gender debate in pre- and early modern Europe. The querelle survived sporadically in Europe for four centuries, but was not responsible for the changes in cultural and material settings and conditions necessary for women to become authors and publish their work. It tended, rather, to be symptomatic of factors for inertia and change beyond its bounds, or else functioned parallel to developments for and by women elsewhere: in England, for instance, women did not begin to counter misogynist attacks until comparatively late (Jane Anger, Her protection for women, 1589), and their challenges tend not to range beyond the internal authority, rules, and rhetoric of the querelle.

Its earliest feminist contribution, Christine de Pisan's Livre de la cité des dames (1405), initiated a mode of feminist literary criticism in the form of diagnosis and critique of the pathology of representations of women in the Western textual tradition, most immediately the Roman de la rose.

This diagnostic criticism challenged textual manifestations of masculine authority over women, exposing it as rooted in ideology rather than Nature and Reason as men claimed; as such, it was one of the founding conditions for women's writing other than ventriloquistic of the masculine tradition. However, its function was to serve broader challenges to misogyny rather than as specifically textual criticism.

English literary criticism between 1580 and 1670 is often regarded as the poor relation of Europe. The classicizing remarks of many English critics in the period might seem on the face of it to justify this opinion. In 1591 Sir John Harington, in his defence of Ariosto's Orlando furioso, claimed that neoclassical critics ‘would have an heroicall Poem (as well as a Tragedie) to be full of Peripeteia, which I interpret an agnition of some unlooked for fortune either good or bad, and a sudden change thereof: of this what store there be the reader shall quickly find’. Aristotle does argue that anagnorisis (Harington's ‘agnition’) and peripeteia (‘reversal of fortune’) should ideally coincide (Poetics 1452a), but he would balk at Harington's conflation of the two into a composite which can be liberally sprinkled over any heroic poem. Edmund Spenser also shows a weak grasp on neoclassical principles and vocabulary in his Letter to Ralegh, appended to The Faerie Queene (1590). He shows some awareness of Horace's recommendation that a heroic poem should not begin ‘ab ovo’ (Ars poetica 147): ‘a Poet thrusteth into the middest, … and there recoursing to the thinges forepast, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all’. But his critical remarks are belied by his practice: The Faerie Queene does not begin in the middle of a single action in anything like the sense that Spenser, or Horace, claimed it should. In the same period George Puttenham presented his Arte of English poesie (published 1589) in the form of a rhetorical manual, which minimizes the importance of narrative structure in favour of the schemes and tropes of rhetoric.

The doctrine ut pictura poesis (‘as is’ or ‘as in painting, so is’ or ‘so in poetry’) lies at the heart of Renaissance aesthetics, the central theme and presiding dogma of the theory and practice of painting and poetry alike. Accompanied by the ‘witty antithesis’ attributed by Pliny (De gloria Atheniensium 3.347a) to Simonides of Chios, the chiastic poesia tacens, pictura loquens (‘painting is mute poetry, poetry a talking picture’), Horace's defining tag (Ars poetica 361) appears in virtually every treatise on art or poetry from the early Renaissance to the close of the Enlightenment. Now explicitly in the rehearsal of the Horatian and Simonidean watchwords, the ubiquitous ‘comparisons’ or ‘parallels’ of poetry and painting, or the recurrent paragone debating the relative value or ‘precedence’ of the Sister Arts, now implicitly in the perennial references to poetry not merely as Aristotelian ‘imitation’, but as painting, limning, drawing, sketching, colouring, depicting, or portraying, ut pictura is the universal presumption of all writers on poetry and poetics. It offers thus a key to understanding both what poetry was thought essentially to be and aim for and the place it occupied as the dominant mode of high cultural expression.

Yet despite the crucial role it played in Western aesthetics from the mid-fifteenth century down to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon of 1766, finally rejecting the doctrine on the basis of a critical reassessment of the formal ‘boundaries’ defining the irreducible differences between the so-called Sisters, the theory's actual content is surprisingly meagre. There was on one hand the set of commonplaces drawn from a scattering of ancient authorities and loci classici: the passages on imitation, plot, and the relationship between poetry and history in Aristotle's Poetics;

The ideals for education elaborated in rather piecemeal fashion in Italy during the course of the fifteenth century were promoted with astonishing efficiency throughout northern Europe in the early years of the sixteenth century, changing established habits of thought and transforming the language of nearly every discipline. Throughout the sixteenth century Latin literature (and, to a lesser extent, Greek literature) provided cultural, moral, and intellectual norms and, perhaps most important of all, a linguistic model, outside of which it became problematic, or at least eccentric, to operate. But it was no smooth takeover, nor yet complete. The humanists' programme was based on a dichotomy, insisting as it did that all education had to be transmitted in a foreign language. Moreover, it depended not only on the acquisition of Latin (that had always been true), but of a Latin, the ‘good’ classical Latin of the humanists, which had been the product of a historically distinct period in antiquity and could only be re-created by rigorous application of rules and the imitation of ‘correct’ authors. As the authors deemed correct were pagan authors, the bilingual situation of the educated élite was doubled by a bicultural situation in which Christian and pagan elements existed in an often uneasy symbiosis.

The century abounds in programmes for education, real or imagined, culminating in the rigorous organization of the Jesuits. But whether one looks at the rules of the Academy at Geneva (1559), the Lutheran programme of David Chytraeus (1564), the syllabus in force at the municipal school at Bordeaux (first published in 1583, well after its foundation), or the various states of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum, one is less struck by local or even confessional differences than by the overall homogeneity.

The title of this chapter may appear doubly anachronistic. On the one hand, the word aesthetics was first used by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten only in 1735. On the other, the philosophy of beauty and taste that it came to designate relates to a ‘system of the arts’ (literature, music, sculpture, architecture, painting centrally – with theatre and dance) that itself has been held not to have been established until well into the eighteenth century. No doubt the elements, theory, and practice that constituted the system developed over many years. But it is not evident that they owe anything very specific to ‘Cartesianism’ – let alone to René Descartes – and terms like ‘Cartesian aesthetics’ have mostly meant vague ideas about the adoption of certain concepts as source of inspiration and artistic guide. The intention of this chapter is quite different. First, it will show that sixteenth-century debates in what were once the sciences of the quadrivium raised most of the issues basic to what we now call aesthetics. Second, it will show that Descartes picked up these issues, giving them large place in his work: whence they became typical of debate about art in his time. So it will propose, thirdly, that the meaning of later aesthetic argument is seen more clearly through this Cartesian lens. In the eighteenth century Descartes's greatest impact may well have been in aesthetics. He ‘was not a man of letters’, wrote Edward Gibbon in 1761, ‘but literature is under deep obligation to him’.

The present survey traces the theory and practice of dialogue from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the two centuries when the form most flourished in Western European letters. During this period, the theorists of dialogue, who were often also its practitioners, conceived of their enquiry as engaging the broadest issues of language and social behaviour. The study of the genre is at once critical and historical, since writers of dialogue develop their ideas both within an intellectual exchange and within a larger social context. Recent studies have accordingly examined Renaissance dialogue either in its formal aspect (as literary structure and the articulation of argument) or in its referential aspect (as a mirror of society and a record of language).

The humanist dialogue arose in Italy around 1400, contemporary with the revival of Greek studies and with new styles in the visual arts. Generally a learned composition written in Latin, the dialogue of this initial period reflects the new philosophical freedom and eclecticism which were fostered by the rise of mercantile communes and by the weakening of papal authority through schism. Appropriately, the favoured model is the Roman orator Cicero, whose dialogues depict the leisurely philosophizing of learned optimates. While providing arguments on opposite sides of a question [in utramque partem], Cicero leaves his debates unresolved and hence implicitly open for the reader to decide.

Although no Quattrocento writers of dialogue formulate explicit theories of the genre, their choices of theme and structure imply a critical awareness of specific goals in reviving classical forms.

The studies by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, and others, of the impact of the ‘new science’ on seventeenth-century English literature assumed an unproblematic demarcation between science and literature. Since the 1950s this notion has been challenged, both by new trends in ‘literature and science’ (from cyberspace to the rhetoric of science) and by recent historical scholarship. In particular, as this brief sketch will suggest, the historical complexity of the relations between natural philosophy and literature in the early modern period belies not only the traditional assumption of a separate science which ‘influences’ literature, but also the more recent intimations that science simply is literature. In the Renaissance proper (say, until 1630) the methods, goals, and individuals involved in the two clusters of disciplines overlapped in a number of ways. During the seventeenth century new developments in both science and literary criticism tended, sometimes self-consciously, to define the two fields as separate and even opposed. Although one can see in these trends the foundations for our modern sense of a gulf between science and literature, at the time such a gap was not so readily apparent.

Carrying on an ancient tradition, natural philosophy in the Renaissance searched for certain, causal knowledge about nature primarily through the interpretation of and commentary on authoritative texts. Bookish methods promised more exciting results than ever once they could be applied beyond the writings of Aristotle and his scholastic commentators, already central to the medieval curriculum. Thanks to humanism, a vast number of newly discovered ancient works about nature became available: late antique commentaries on Aristotle (for example, Philoponus, Simplicius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias); accounts of pre-Socratic, Epicurean and Stoic, hermetic and Neoplatonic cosmologies and philosophies; and new works and better versions of old ones by still canonical figures, like Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen.

In the seventeenth century, comedy is a genre in search of an identity. Its association with traditions of popular entertainment and the absence of coherent classical principles give it lower prestige than tragedy or epic, and writers set out during this period to articulate criteria which will define and enhance its literary value. Much early criticism concentrates on form. In France, writers of pastoral stress the value of a new regular and non-tragic drama in the Italian mode, and prefaces often focus on questions of structure applicable to both tragedy and comedy. Ben Jonson's comments in his Discoveries themselves much influenced by Daniel Heinsius and Julius Caesar Scaliger, draw attention to features common to both genres, and the same outlook informs Pierre Corneille's first Discours where he applies to comedy some of the principles outlined in Aristotle's Poetics. Corneille's theoretical analysis is complemented by a series of critical readings (Examens) of his own early comedies which often single out deficiencies in construction or subject their specifically comic features to strict formal scrutiny. Such structural approaches imply that comedy is worthy of serious consideration, but do little to distinguish it from other genres. Terminology is often imprecise, and at the beginning of the century in France the term comédie may be used to designate any kind of play from farce to tragicomedy. Most comedies claim to represent life as it is, unlike tragedy with its historical plots, but there can be great variety among the texts produced. In his preface to La veuve (1634), Corneille defines the genre as a reflection of the tastes of his (increasingly refined) audience [‘La comédie n'est qu'un portrait de nos actions et de nos discours’].

Boileau published his Œuvres diverses in 1674, when he was thirty-eight. The volume comprises revised versions of poems already published as well as works seeing print for the first time. The most substantial of the newly published works, a translation of Longinus, is also the only one specifically named in the title: Œuvres diverses du Sieur D*** avec le traité du Sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours traduit du grec de Longin. An introductory text, ‘To the Reader’, accounts for the presence of the translation: ‘I originally made this Translation to instruct myself rather than with the intention of giving it to the Public. But I believed that people would not be offended to find it here following the [Art poétique], with which this Treatise has some relation, and in which I have even inserted several precepts that are taken from it.’ The modesty of this statement finds an echo in the ‘Préface’ to the translation itself (pp. 333–40). There, after presenting a brief anecdotal sketch of its presumed author, Cassius Longinus, Boileau says that the treatise manifests its author's qualities: ‘His sentiments have something about them that marks not only a sublime mind, but a soul that is far above the ordinary’. He therefore has no regrets about the time – ‘some of my evenings’ – he has spent translating such an excellent work, especially since he is in a position to say with confidence that ‘it has hitherto been understood only by a very small number of scholars’ (p. 336).

This treatment of Sir Philip Sidney's An apology for poetry supports the views that his humanistic defence of literature [poesis] is, in its broadest interpretation, Ciceronian; that his conception of the poetic ‘image’ derives from the scholastic analysis of Christian psychology; and that his most pervasive literary debts are to Aristotle and Horace. It emphasizes, in addition, the importance of Aristotle's Rhetoric in Sidney's analysis of poetic subject-matter in relation to the materiae of the other arts and sciences; and, on the basis of sources untraced until now, shows that, by rejecting Neoplatonic attitudes towards poetry, his argument is more consistent than previously recognized.

Since poetry has fallen from ‘the highest estimation of learning’ to be ‘the laughing-stock of children’, Sidney proposes to bring four ‘available proofs’ to its defence (96.2–4). For ease of reference, we shall refer to these proofs as (1) by antiquity, (2) by etymology, (3) by ‘kinds’, and (4) by purpose. Each of the last three arises reasonably out of its preceding proof, and, as will be apparent, overlaps to some degree with each of the other proofs. Taken together these constitute Sidney's central argument and form, even before their subsequent recapitulation and amplification, just under half of the treatise as a whole (96.8–115.34).

The first proof is primarily introductory and argues for the pre-eminence of poetry on the basis of its antiquity. In most cultures the earliest, and often the most distinguished, writings have been in verse, and this has even been true (anticipating the fourth proof) of historians and philosophers.

The notion of vraisemblance [probability], which is in some sense the keystone of French neoclassical poetics, has both a technical content, indicating to the poet how to secure the audience's engagement with the text, and a more ideological content, referring to the social and moral ideas in virtue of which the work will be judged. It is the latter sense that is dealt with here.

The link between the notion of vraisemblance, as a criterion of artistic validity, and ethical judgements appears in Georges de Scudéry's statement, apropos of Corneille's Le Cid, that, although the historical original of Chimène did in fact marry the Cid, ‘it is not probable that an honourable maiden should marry her father's murderer’. He is here using the term ‘vraisemblable’ to denote the realm of general truth (as distinct from particular historical truth), which Aristotle identifies as the object of poetry. The Académie Française agreed with this: the poet's task is to purify his material of the dross of historical contingency, in keeping with ‘the universal idea of things’: he is to consider what is proper for a young woman in general rather than what Chimène actually did, and because her behaviour belies ‘the moral propriety [‘la bienséance des moeurs’] of a young woman presented at first as virtuous’, it offends vraisemblance. (This looks like an accusation of inconsistency rather than impropriety. But the Académie's term for inconsistency is ‘inégalité’.) In other words, the question, for these critics, is not whether Corneille has made Chimène's behaviour credible: it is intrinsically incredible.