Studying texts by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Saint Jerome, George Gascoigne, and Fulke Greville, this volume explores authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis in the scholarship of early Renaissance literature.

How did we first come to believe in a correspondence between writers' lives and their works? When did the person of the author—both as context and target of textual interpretation—come to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the scholarship of early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, they discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers' personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and eventually cross-cultural rise of reading for the author, this book presents four case studies of resolutely experimental texts by and about writers of high ambition in their respective generations: Lorenzo Valla on the forger of the Donation of Constantine, Erasmus on Saint Jerome, the poet George Gascoigne on himself, and Fulke Greville on Sir Philip Sidney. An opening methodological chapter and exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon—character, intention, ethos, persona—and the range of genre evidence that contemporaries used to discern and articulate authorial character and purpose. Constellated throughout with examples from the works of major contemporaries including John Aubrey, John Hayward, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, this volume resurrects a vibrant culture of biographism continuous with modern popular practice and yet radically more nuanced in its strategic reliance on the explanatory power of probabilism and historical conjecture—the discursive middle ground now obscured from view by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and story, fact and fable.

In the course of the Renaissance Italian emerged as a national literary language, which was able to compete with Latin and eventually to supplant it as the normal medium of expression in poetry, prose, and drama. Such a major cultural development was necessarily protracted and complex. Inspite of the achievements of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, many issues remained unresolved which exercised Italian writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How should classical models and ideals of language and style be assimilated into the vernacular? How far should the linguisticfragmentation of the country affect literature? How was the great literature of the Italian past to furnish models for the present? Italian treatment of such problems at a theoretical and practical level was to have a profound and lasting influence on writers in other European languages. This volume consists of sixteen essays by British and Italian scholars on a wide variety of linguistic and stylistic topics in Italian Renaissance writing. It includes studies of general trends, of aspects of major writers (Dante, Petrarch, Alberti, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Tasso), and also oflesser-known figures, some of whom illustrate the diverse possibilities open to writers of the time, whilst others concerned themselves with issues of literary history and evaluation. Working from a number of different angles, the essays cast light on a subject whose importance has been increasingly recognized over the last few decades, but which is still to be thoroughly explored.

Entries include critical commentary, brief biographical information, a portrait when available, a list of principal works, and may also include a further reading section.