The first instinct of the humanist interested in formulating a theory of discourse was to go back (as for so much else) to an ancient prototype. As far as poetics was concerned, by far the most influential, as well as the most comprehensive, prototype was the Ars poetica of Horace, in which the humanists had an authoritative text on poetic composition to set beside the old and the newly discovered rhetorical treatises of Cicero. Although widely available in the late Middle Ages, the Ars poetica entered the age of print without much medieval impedimenta but with two sets of mainly explanatory annotations of respectable antiquity – one by Porphyrion from the third or fourth century, the other attributed to Acro and dating from the fifth century. These were frequently reprinted and they set a trend towards a prescriptive reading of Horace's poetics. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries commentaries proliferated. It was primarily in commentaries on texts that humanist scholars evolved, applied, and propagated the modes of reading which underlay the theory and practice of literary composition that they promoted so effectively. It follows that the commentaries they wrote on this, the very model of critical theory, are an integral part of the history of criticism, although the present survey cannot pretend to be more than a superficial sampling of this important material.

The first humanist commentary was published at Florence in 1482 and is the work of Cristoforo Landino (Christophorus Landinus) far better known as the author of the Neoplatonic interpretation of the Aeneid contained in his Disputationes Camaldulenses (?1480).

Although medieval Europe, like all cultures, enjoyed wit and satire, Renaissance humanists and others had a specific interest in classical views of the risible and in definably classical genres. The interest, however, was seldom expressed with much subtlety even by major critics. When Sir Philip Sidney, for example, briefly mentions the ‘bitter but wholesome Iambic, who rubs the galled mind’ and the gentler ‘Satyr’ who ‘sportingly never leaveth till he make a man laugh at folly’, or when Joachim du Bellay advises the French to give up inept native forms and imitate such poets as Horace in ‘modestement’ taxing the age's vice, the limitations of Renaissance genre theory are clear. Renaissance scholars and writers thought about the history of satire and the nature and function of humour, but thanks in part to a tendency to prize the moral and didactic with just a nod or two at the recreative, their speculations – even those of the great Isaac Casaubon – lagged behind the imaginative complexity of actual practice. A certain unease in Renaissance commentary on satire and humour can also be explained by the need, when following the ancients, to adapt classical genres and styles to a culture with dukes and kings, not senators and emperors, to new media and new means of censorship, and to a religion that urges us to love our enemies, not to humiliate them into suicide as, it was said, the ancient satirist Archilochus had done when he invented the iambic. Those who imitated ancient humour are therefore often careful to say that laughter repairs the hard-working body and spirit, that an acid-dipped pen can serve as a doctor's scalpel, that fools and villains need a good rhetorical drubbing, that one may bite back at detractors, or that those who wince at satire are probably guilty of something.

In the European Renaissance the term invention has many senses, several of which inform poetic theory and literary criticism: a ‘discovery’, a ‘finding’, the ‘faculty of discovery’ but also the ‘thing found’; something close to ‘imagination’, ‘wit’, and positively or pejoratively a ‘technique’ or ‘artifice’. Dominating the concept of poetic invention is the meaning of inventio in (mainly Latin) rhetorical theory. The noun inventio corresponds to the verb invenire [to find, to discover, to come upon]. In rhetorical treatises, at the place of invenire we often find reperire [to find, to discover] or excogitare [to think of, to find by reflection]. The most lucid and accessible account of the process of ‘finding’ that informs rhetorical composition is given by Cicero, in his De partitione oratoria (especially 1.3-2.5). The orator derives his ‘power’ [vis] from two sources: first, his res (the ‘things’ of the speech: subject-matter, including both ideas and facts); second, his verba (the words chosen to convey subject-matter). The finding of subject-matter precedes the finding of words, and although inventio is sometimes loosely applied to both kinds of finding, generally inventio concerns only subject-matter, not words, which are the province of elocutio [eloquence]. In composing a speech the orator has in mind an aim, an intention (quaestio: either unlimited, in the sense of a general enquiry, or specific, a causa). In order to achieve this aim, the orator must find subject-matter that will both convince his audience (literally, produce faith, confidence, or belief, fides, in those he wishes to persuade) and move the audience's emotions.

Italian men of letters in the mid-sixteenth century were the first to promulgate the idea that Aristotle's Poetics was a central and traditional text of ancient poetic theory. One of the ways they did so was by conflating and harmonizing Aristotle's treatise with Horace's Ars poetica, the one text which had enjoyed a relatively uninterrupted fortune in Western Europe as a digest of ancient poetic art. Vincenzo Maggi (Madius), one of the very first Cinquecento commentators on the Greek treatise, maintained that Horace's epistle to the Pisos was a stream flowing from the Aristotelian spring of the Poetics. Maggi actually appended a commentary on the Ars poetica to the one he provided on Aristotle's Poetics in order to reveal Horace's ‘obscure and subtle imitation’ of the Greek philosopher's treatise. This fictive genealogy was meant, in turn, to make uniform and therefore more authoritative two ancient views of poetry that were, indeed, quite different.

Aristotle's view of poems in terms of the inherent or internal requirements of their forms was a minority view in the ancient world. Most ancient critics (Horace, among them) measured the effectiveness and value of a poetic work in terms of external standards of truthfulness and of morality, and not by the degree to which it contributed to realizing what Aristotle took to be its particular form and function. Moreover, the rhetorical orientation of these critics made them preoccupied with the conditions imposed by the audience and not, as was Aristotle, with the composition of coherent structures which produced certain emotions because of inherent and objective properties.

Humanist theory classified poetry among the arts and sciences in various and sometimes conflicting ways. A given classification affirms not only the priority of some genres, styles, modes, and topics over others, but also the values of a social class or order that poetry might address. Whether for a limited constitutional or patrician republic (Florence, Venice), for a partisan and privileged nobility (the courts of Naples, Urbino, and Ferrara in Italy, or of the Sidney and Leicester circles in England), for an emergently national monarchy (the kings of France or Spain), or for an urban bourgeoisie (Lyons, Barcelona, London), humanist theory formed a canon that defines what literature is or could be among the other arts. It classified poetry chiefly in relation to rhetoric, political philosophy, and the discourse of history.

Medieval grammarians ranked poetry among the natural and moral sciences, as did the Chartrian academician John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon (c. 1160) which associates poetry with diacrisis, ‘vivid representation, graphic imagery’, so that poetry ‘would seem to image all the arts’. Republican humanists of fifteenth-century Florence, however, associated poetry with rhetoric, serving as a practical means to stimulate the intelligence, inspire learning, and persuade to civic virtue. Cristoforo Landino's dialogue on the good life, Disputationes Camaldulenses (c. 1472), for example, interprets the Aeneid as the hero's journey to a Neoplatonic summum bonum. Even though Landino allegorizes the poem in broad abstractions, he grounds its figures of virtue and vice in a historical specificity unknown to medieval commentators.

The Ciceronian controversy in the Renaissance was primarily a battle over Latin because only Latin authors could in a strict sense imitate Cicero. That is why even though the Ciceronians and their critics quarreled over style, the deepest fault-line separating the two sides was not an issue of style, but of language. As Horace observed (Ars poetica 71–2) – and Renaissance theorists universally acknowledged – language constantly changes and it is usus [current usage] that determines the norma loquendi [linguistic standard]. But Latin in the Renaissance was a dead language. It had long lost its community of native speakers and could only be learned at school from books. Consequently, underlying the Renaissance debates over Ciceronianism lay the question of what properly constituted usus for a dead language.

One might argue that Latin was really not a dead language since it had remained in use throughout the Middle Ages. However, medieval Latin, for all its differences with classical Latin, was no more dead or alive than the neoclassical Latin of the humanists. It too was a language without a native-speaking community, learned from books, and generally immune to the evolution experienced by the living, vernacular tongues.

Petrarch, the first great humanist, grasped the difference between the Latin of his own time and that of antiquity. But his ideas on the history of Latin were fuzzy. He idolized Cicero as the supreme embodiment of classical Latin eloquence. Yet his own Latin was still burdened with medievalisms and smacked more of Seneca than of Cicero.

The literary criticism of the first thirty years of the sixteenth century is best pursued in commentaries published in the margins of particular poetic texts and in the rambling miscellanies in which humanist scholars amassed the notes they made on their reading. Only belatedly did coherent theory begin to emerge from pedagogic practice. One of the earliest new works of the century devoted solely to the theoretical discussion of poetry was also destined to be the most successful. Girolamo Vida published his verse De arte poetica at Rome in 1527. The work is divided into three books by and large equivalent to the rhetorical distinctions of invention, disposition, and elocution. Its content derives from the key concepts of Horace, amplified by reference to rhetorical precepts, laced with a measure of Platonic enthusiasm, and expressed wherever possible in exemplary Virgilian language. The young poet is to peruse all nature, searching through a thousand shapes in which to embody thought, but, more often than not, it is the plenteous store of memory that comes to his aid, well stocked from the literary education advertised in Book I of Vida's poem (1.427–37). Vida's concern, and it is a concern which is altogether typical of the humanist literary theorist, is not with the reference poetic fiction makes to the realities of nature, but with the reference it makes to other literary texts. The art of poetry is the art of imitating the words of other poets rather than the art of imitating things, and Vida's model of artistic perfection and of poetic truth is Virgil.

The Renaissance – as the name of a cultural movement and a period – enjoys the still-lasting distinction of self-creation. Not since Athena sprang full-grown from the forehead of Zeus (or Sin from Lucifer's, in Milton's version) has an epoch so self-consciously defined itself, along with and against the preceding one, for all posterity. The humanists' cultural self-flattery was of course expanded and intensified in the later nineteenth century by Jakob Burckhardt, whose particular praises of the artistic, idealistic, and individualistic energies of the period continue to command allegiance and stimulate debate today. Most periods are obliged to make do with what posterity makes of them – no contemporaneous residents ever labelled themselves ‘antique’, or ‘medieval’ – or get designated merely by the decimal tyranny of the calendar (the Mauve Decade; the twelfth century) or by the dynastic accident of a long reign (Victorian England; Carolingian France). Other periods may try to name themselves, as our own seeks to call itself ‘postmodern’, only to produce continual dispute over the contents of the label, and the additional irony that its inventor (Jean-François Lyotard) did not use it as an exclusive ‘period’ designation.

But no such disputation or irony ever seemed to afflict the earlier generation of Italian humanists (from Petrarch through Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati to Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla) who decided that they were the midwives of the ‘rebirth’ of a classical culture incontestably superior to that of their own time and place. In their manifold efforts to make this culture live again, in literature, education, and politics, these writers disputed mainly with each other.

In seventeenth-century France the evolution of rhetoric and the ideal based on it are, at first, strongly influenced by earlier developments in Italian humanism and by Jesuit theories and pedagogy. But it is important to note that interest in the ars bene dicendi comes to a head in a clearly visible way and takes on peculiar force in the fourth decade of the century, with the founding in 1635 of the French Academy. External conditions were favourable for a new cultural initiative: after the religious wars of the sixteenth century, France was entering a period of pacification, of relative prosperity, of movement towards political unity. It was also a period marked by the emergence of educated and active élites – in the magistrature, in the clergy, in certain elements of the aristocracy, especially those associated with the court. A design, national in scope and centred on the king as a strong monarch – not yet le roi soleil, but Louis XIV was on his way – was being promoted by Richelieu and others. As a newly created source of intellectual and literary guidance, the Academy soon defined its mission in a way that not only fitted perfectly into the national programme, but also promoted actively what we are calling here the rhetorical ideal. By the instruments of its fourfold project – which called for the creation of a Dictionary and a Grammar, to be followed by treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics – the Academy sought to make possible a culture based on éloquence.

Histories of literature are inclined to treat the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns as a rather parochial dispute among French lettrés of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, echoed in England in the ‘Battle of the Books’. The personal quarrels and rivalries of that period are however better seen as the local idiom in which long-standing cultural issues were articulated; the apparently surprising virulence it engendered is no doubt an indication that a critical moment had been reached, a moment whose significance is clearer from our own historical vantage point.

The designation of a group of ‘ancient’ texts or writers, whether as bearers of authority or as models, is a widespread cultural phenomenon. Although it necessarily implies a reader or writer whose position in a present moment is defined contrastively with these Ancients, the further step of coining designations for the group of ‘new’ writers is an important one. That step was already taken in antiquity: in Alexandria, the moderns were called neoteroi; Latin writers – among them Cicero – used the Greek word or translated it as novi (or neoterici), although it is important to note that these terms were not used to mark out distinct periods of cultural history. The word modernus – ‘one of the last legacies of late Latin to the modern world’, as Curtius puts it – did not appear until the sixth century.

The antithesis was recast in different ways during the Middle Ages: not only the pagan authors of the past, but Christian texts also (the Bible, the Church Fathers) were called veteres; the terms moderni and neoterici came to be applied to theologians such as Aquinas, or in another context to the nominalist grammarians and logicians.

When, in 1345, Petrarch discovered at Verona a manuscript of Cicero's ‘lost’ works, the Epistulae ad Atticum, ad Quintum fratrem and ad Brutum (6–18), his excitement was immeasurable. It was as though the access to this correspondence invited him to enjoy a new level of intimacy with the classical writer, and he expressed his delight in a letter addressed to Cicero himself. The event is an icon of Renaissance humanists' burning desire not only to retrieve the classical past, but also to initiate a dialogue with those whom they admired. The rediscovery of Greek and Latin manuscripts was a preliminary stage in the translatio studiorum, leading to the philologists' quests for the most accurately emended text, and thence to a process of commentary, as each scholar sought to interpret a work anew. The humanists of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy vastly increased the corpus of classical texts available in the West: Petrarch and Poggio between them rediscovered approximately half of the works of Cicero which are now extant; Boccaccio found substantial parts of Tacitus at Monte Cassino; Salutati built up a private library in Florence of some 800 classical works, which he made available to others, and, by inviting the scholar Manuel Chrysoloras from Constantinople to teach Greek, gave added pace to humanists' energetic search for manuscripts from the East. As new texts and new versions of familiar ones became available, translation soon occupied a significant place in the process of transmission, with scholars first rendering Greek texts into Latin, and, subsequently, Latin into the vernacular.

The practice of Elizabethan drama cannot easily be brought into focus for us by the statements of Renaissance literary criticism. Literary criticism in the period was, of course, tied to the humanist project of recuperating a classical literary and cultural order (revered as an aspect of a classical social order that had shown its power by dominating the known world and leaving Latin as the natural medium for all serious discourse). The vernacular drama of Shakespeare and his fellows was, however, a commercial and pragmatic enterprise, dependent not on the precepts of authority but on the willingness of a heterogeneous contemporary audience to take delight in what they were shown. Moreover, the taste of Elizabeth's court (unlike that of the Italian princes) did not contradict in essentials that of the common people who found entertainment in the popular playhouses, and this makes it possible to speak of a homogeneous taste in English drama, to be set against the theorizing of the Continent. There were, of course, aristocrats in tune with the demands of current literary criticism, who sought to return drama to a strictly classical form (as did Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, Lady Elizabeth Cary and the Countess of Pembroke); but the purposes of these people did not point towards performance, since that would be (as Greville remarks) ‘to write for them against whom so many good and great spirits have already written’. And in the universities students not only performed Latin comedies but wrote close imitations of them (modified by innovations Elizabethan theatrical genres and literary theory found in Italian plays and novelle, especially those that enlarged the roles of women).

Narrative fiction in Italy was already strongly rooted in the heritage of Boccaccio and his successors by the time Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua appeared in 1525, having earned a conspicuous place within the prevailing literary tastes and social codes of the day. In Book II of Castiglione's The courtier, Federico Fregoso describes the practice of ‘long and continuous discourse’ [‘ragionar lungo e continuato’] by certain men who ‘so gracefully and entertainingly narrate [‘con tanto bona grazia e così piacevolmente narrano’] …, that with gestures and words they put it before our eyes and almost bring us to touch it with our hand’. Fregoso's homage to the gift of narration is striking not only for its social ratification of a broad literary trend, but for the way it frames this gift within qualities of presentation that give a subtle nod to the concept of enargeia and the rhetoric of presence discussed by François Rigolot elsewhere in the present volume. Strongly reminiscent of Leon Battista Alberti's remarks on istoria in the Della pittura (c. 1435), Fregoso's statement sanctions the practice of narration as a social event vested with its own aesthetic and rhetorical justification. The reach of this activity extends even into such paraliterary forms as letters and treatises (political, theoretical/descriptive, moral/philosophical) where fictional narratives are frequently embedded as diversions in a larger ‘scientific’ project (for example, the letters of Pietro Aretino and Giambattista Marino, Aretino's Ragionamenti and Carte parlanti, and Alessandro Piccolomini's La Raffaella).

To deal briefly and justly with tragedy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century in Europe is not easy. In wit and fecundity of critical debate, variety and brilliance of practice, and unusual abundance of both, these years are exceptional in the record of any artistic production. One might think tragedy so rare an occurrence – fifth-century Athens, Renaissance Europe, Enlightenment Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia – as to be a narrow endeavour, easy to epitomize. Renaissance tragedy, however, was so fundamental to the establishment of vernaculars, the development of literature, the making of national theatres, to political, religious, educational, and epistemological debate, indeed, to the ‘passage to modernity’, as to make its study central to any understanding of modern Western culture. In tragedy, humanists found a tie with a striking grandeur of the ancients. To imitate it seemed a way to grasp their most solemn thoughts and inhabit their deepest emotions. It was an art form old but unfamiliar; it offered a kind of acid test for claims of renewal. Those who suggested tragedy to be familiar and local provoked vehement debate.

Explaining tragedy to the reader of his French translation of Electra in 1537, the French scholar and diplomat, Lazare de Baïf, called it ‘a morality composed of great calamities, murders, and adversities inflicted on noble and excellent personages’. In 1548 Thomas Sebillet averred that ‘French morality in a way substitutes for Greek and Latin tragedy, especially in that it treats serious and princely deeds. And if the French had agreed that morality were always to end in grief and unhappiness, morality would be tragedy.’

In its broad outline and intellectual context, the history of literary theory and criticism in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is not radically different from that of other parts of Europe. The fundamental presuppositions concerning the nature and function of serious literature, the division into genres, and, as Renaissance ideas strike root, the role of ancient models, are found here as elsewhere. The historical progression, too, shows a familiar pattern, as a high-prestige humanist culture spills over into vernacular writing, the willingness to imitate sources in other languages is followed by the emancipation of vernacular literature, and eventually the classical models make room for a post-Renaissance neoclassicism.

By and large, the number of writings on poetic or dramatic theory in the Low Countries during the Renaissance remained remarkably small (as was also the case with respect to art theory), and practical criticism was virtually absent until the 1670s. Nevertheless, the theorizing that took place shows a number of distinctive features. In mapping these it will be convenient to distinguish four successive periods. The first, from approximately 1470 to 1550, sees the dominance of the poetics of the so-called Chambers of Rhetoric. The second, from about 1550 to 1600, is marked by the absorption of new genres and ideas deriving from France and from the humanist republic of letters. The third, which runs from c. 1600 until c. 1670, shows the flowering of a self-conscious vernacular culture and the gradual waning of humanism as an innovative force.

The vitality of intellectual life in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is reflected in the contribution made by German scholars and writers to humanism and, more particularly, to Renaissance poetics. Even before the new invention of printing became established, access to high-quality Latin texts ranging from antiquity to the early Renaissance had been made easier by the anthology compiled by Albrecht von Eyb and entitled Margarita poetica (Strasburg, 1459; first printed Nuremberg, 1472). This influential compendium reinforced the conviction that careful reading of texts with a view to imitation was an essential element of education and intellectual improvement, an approach which was to be sustained throughout the long period under discussion here. De arte versificandi (1511) by Ulrich von Hutten advocated similar principles, this time in the context of a manual of poetry based on the accepted assumption that the study of good models is an essential part of the poet's training. As a humanist, Hutten also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging knowledge on the poet's part, a requirement already put forward in even more ambitious terms by Germany's greatest humanist writer, Conrad Celtis, in his Ars versificandi et carminum (c. 1486), a manual which offers sound guidance by an expert practitioner of neo-Latin verse who was convinced that between them ars, usus, and imitatio provided the basic essentials for creative success. Thus the close relationship between reading, study, and creativity became firmly established as an essential feature of literary theory and practice in Germany for a long time to come.