Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts: The Force of Character

This book explores the Renaissance development of one of today’s most pervasive literary habits: reading for the author in the interpretation of texts. Well before the rise of Romantic-era expressivism and the cult of artistic genius, humanists discovered the potentials of engaging with ancient texts through the speculative reconstruction of writers’ personalities and artistic motives. The book shows how classical scholars and, following their example, vernacular poets learned to combine the tools of traditional rhetoric and grammar with the formal resources of major literary genres–dedicatory epistle, oration, prefatory apologia, vita–to cultivate authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis and historiography as well as literary invention.