Introduction; Part I. Reading and Interpretation: An Emerging Discourse of Poetics: 1. Theories of language; 2. Renaissance exegesis; 3. Evangelism and Erasmus; 4. The assimilation of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century Italy; 5. Horace in the sixteenth century: commentators into critics; 6. Cicero and Quintilian; Part II. Poetics: 7. Humanist classifications of poetry among the arts and sciences; 8. Theories of poetry: Latin writers; 9. Literary imitation in the sixteenth century: writers and readers, Latin and French; 10. Petrarchan poetics; 11. Translatio and translation in the Renaissance: from France to Italy; 12. Invention; 13. Humanist education; 14. Second rhetoric and the grands rhetoriqueurs; 15. The rhetoric of presence: art, literature, and illusion; 16. The paradoxical sisterhood: 'ut pictura poesis'; 17. Conceptions of style; 18. Sir Philip Sidney's An apology for poetry; 19. Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus: the conception of reader response; 20. Italian epic theory; 21. The lyric; 22. Renaissance theatre and the theory of tragedy; 23. Elizabethan theatrical genres and literary theory; 24. Defining comedy in the seventeenth century: moral sense and theatrical sensibility; 25. Dialogue and discussion in the Renaissance; 26. The essay as criticism; 27. The genres of epigram and emblem; 28. Humour and satire in the Renaissance; Part III. Theories of Prose Fiction: 29. Theories of prose fiction in England: 1558-1700; 30. Theories of prose fiction in sixteenth-century France; 31. Seventeenth-century theories of the novel in France: writing and reading the truth; 32. Theories of prose fiction and poetics in Italy: novella and romanzo (1525-96); Part IV. Contexts of Criticism: 33. Criticism and the metropolis: Tudor-Stuart London; 34. Criticism in the city: Lyons and Paris; 35. Culture, imperialism, and humanist criticism in the Italian city-states; 36. German-speaking centres and institutions; 37. Courts and patronage; 38. Rooms of their own: literary salons in seventeenth-century France; 39. Renaissance printing and the book trade; Part V. Voices of Dissent: 40. The Ciceronian controversy; 41. Reorganizing the encyclopedia: Vives and Ramus on Aristotle and the scholastics; 42. The rise of the vernaculars; 43. Ancients and Moderns: France; 44. Women as auctores in early modern Europe; Part VI. Structures of Thought: 45. Renaissance Neoplatonism; 46. Cosmography and poetics; 47. Natural philosophy and the 'new science'; 48. Stoicism and Epicureanism: philosophical revival and literary repercussions; 49. Calvinism and post-Tridentine developments; 50. Port-Royal and Jansenism; Part VII. Neoclassical Issues - Beauty, Judgement, Persuasion, Polemics: 51. Combative criticism: Jonson, Milton, and classical literary criticism in England; 52. The rhetorical ideal in seventeenth-century France; 53. Cartesian aesthetics; 54. Principles of judgement: probability, decorum, taste, and the je ne sais quoi; 55. Longinus and the Sublime; Part VIII. Survey of National Developments: 56. Seventeenth-century English literary criticism: classical values, Engish texts and contents; 57. French criticism in the seventeenth century; 58. Literary critical developments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy; 59. Cultural commentary in seventeenth-century Spain: literary theory and textual practice; 60. The German-speaking countries; 61. The Low Countries; Bibliography; Index.