Sublimity by fiat

Longinus’ On the Sublime is thought to have been ushered onto the English literary scene by Boileau’s Traité du Sublime (1674). The search for antecedents to Boileau has yielded scattered references in Rainolds, Chapman, Junius, Milton, and a few rhetorical textbooks, but not enough to indicate a school of thought or even particular enthusiasm. The reception of Langbaine’s Latin translation of 1636 hardly predicts the vast literary influence the treatise would wield by the end of the century. A more promising readership may, however, be suggested by a string of citations in seventeenth-century sermons. In Longinus’ quotation from Genesis and praise of Moses’s oratory, clergymen found literary and rhetorical roots for their explorations of divine sublimity. Developing alongside Longinus’ reception in Christian rhetorics, these citations offer an alternative route for the early association of On the Sublime with Milton’s Christian epic, and its eventual entry into the literary mainstream.

Popular Rewritings of the Orlando Furioso as Forms of Criticism

Editions, paratextual apparatuses, translations, theoretical treatises, and dialogues influenced the critical debate about Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and rapidly became the main route to its canonization. However, immediately after its publication, the Furioso also catalysed the production of new literary texts, which aimed to offer rewritings of and critical insights into the poem. This chapter focuses on this specific form of creative reception, thus far neglected in scholarly studies of Ariosto. It aims to highlight some of the critical readings and interpretations of the Furioso that such popular pamphlets offered to a wide readership in early modern Italy. It reveals a strong continuity across critical commentaries and rewritings of the poem. Both interpretations and adaptations of the Furioso reveal a commitment to pursuing contemporary cultural debates, for instance about the nature of women, influenced by Ariosto and his words: there is a dialogue between popular rewritings and erudite readings of the poem.

Introduction

The essays in this volume locate early modern criticism in some of its many geographical, institutional, commercial, social, disciplinary, discursive, conceptual, lexical, textual, and visual locations. ‘Criticism’ is taken in both more general and more specific senses, encompassing various modalities of thinking, talking, and writing about literature and visual art. The volume places the term ‘criticism’ in its various early modern contexts, and identifies key ‘critical’ concepts, terms, practices, discourses, and kinds of text or image that played an important role in the development, across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of thinking about literature and visual art. This introductory essay looks at the origins and scope of early modern criticism, at the range of its sites and kinds, and at some particular places and moments that saw distinct and significant developments in critical discourse.

Grammar, Prosody, and the Place of Accent in Elizabethan Criticism

The Elizabethan poets and critics realized that the English verse line was neither merely syllabic (like French verse) nor quantitative (like Greek or Latin verse), but, they argued, governed by the regular disposition of accents. What seems obvious to us was not so to them. Accent did not belong to any metrical system known to sixteenth-century humanists; it pertained to the spoken pronunciation of the individual (Greek or Latin) word, and to the teaching of grammar, where it was known as prosody. The chapter outlines the place of accent in ancient and early modern grammatical theory before discussing George Gascoigne’s revolutionary theory of English metrical accent. It then looks at some subsequent developments in thinking about verse and accent in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and consider grammar as a neglected place of criticism.

Présence d’esprit in Action in Seventeenth-Century France

This chapter contributes to the story of how and where criticism functions in early modern France by analysing descriptions of présence d’esprit or ‘presence of mind’, which emerge in the mid-1650s as a way of signalling quick thinking. Présence d’esprit is clearly associated with the salons, where it is required for participation in literary and linguistic games, and emerges simultaneously at a crucial juncture in Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales (1656–7), where it is used to shine a satirical light on the casuistry of the Jesuits. In both contexts, the attribution of présence d’esprit can be both negatively and positively accented. It crystallizes anxiety about the privileging of spontaneity and instinct over careful curation and the work of scholarship. These ambivalent views, mirroring changing attitudes to ‘la critique’, also demonstrate the complex interweave of poetics, rhetoric, and theology in the early modern period, and the places they share.

‘Crittickize uppon the smallest word’

Even as the last half century has seen a growing canon of early modern women poets, prose writers, and playwrights, we still have no acknowledged tradition of early women critics. This essay argues that women did write critically, in varied places including manuscript miscellanies, paratexts, poems, and letters. Lady Anne Southwell’s two diverse manuscript collections include a defence of poetry and many profoundly critical poems which reveal the range and depth of early modern women’s engagement with traditions of criticism and with questions of theory, style, and gender.

The Corrector as Critic

This chapter proposes that the print shop emerges in the sixteenth century as a key site for the production of literary criticism. Of particular interest is the figure of the printer’s corrector, an expert in error and artisan of precision whose task is to discover and amend faults before a text goes into print. Taking as an exemplary case the French poet, literary critic, and orthographic reformer Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–1582/3)—who maintained close relationships with his printers and was employed as a corrector in the workshop of Jean de Tournes in Lyon—the chapter examines how the practice of correction and the mechanical ethos of printing inform early meta-poetic work in France, including Peletier’s seminal translation of Horace’s Ars poetica and his own Art Poëtiquɇ of 1555.

Dryden’s Debts

This essay considers the ways in which the late seventeenth-century critic John Dryden uses the metaphor of coinage, and the related ideas of commerce and debt, trade and empire, to think about past writers. It argues that the figure of the coin, as something of both intrinsic and contingent value, allows Dryden to isolate the ‘wit’ of works he admires—by Virgil, Shakespeare, and Donne—and translate it, in his own writing, for his own time. The essay argues that this trope is both fundamental to the development of Dryden’s critical voice and a creative stimulus, particularly when he comes to think about the sound of verse in his late career as a translator of the classics.

Places of Form in Early Modern Poetics

‘Form’ is a notoriously capacious, unreliable, and yet necessary commonplace of both modern and early modern critical vocabulary. This essay explores the flexible and imaginatively generative ways in which the concept migrated from discourses of philosophy and logic into literary criticism and practice, drawing on a range of writers of different nationalities from across the early modern period, but focusing especially on English literature of the Elizabethan fin-de-siècle. It argues, in particular, that one of form’s principal places in that exciting cultural moment was the mind of the poet: the mind trained, structured, or ‘informed’ by poetic theory; the mind as a place which moulds and shapes the materials of language and representation into communicative forms; the mind as the source for the forms of utterance we call ‘style’.

Writing in the New World

Over the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish American poetry and poetic theory experience a crucial moment of affirmation. Literary networks strengthen their circle of influence, and several authors, both creole and settlers, are able to promote their careers, further facilitated by the printing press. Books such as Miscelánea austral (Lima, 1602/1603) by Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, Grandeza mexicana (Mexico City, 1604) by Bernardo de Balbuena, and Parnaso antártico (Seville, 1608) by Diego Mexía contain a number of texts which lay the foundations for a new American poetics. They constitute a canon of New World authors who fashion themselves at the centre of a transatlantic exchange, both as followers and innovators of the peninsular literary tradition of the Renaissance. Framed within the rhetorical genre of “defences of poetry” and “defences of women”, these poets put forward an engaging critical representation of their own poetic identity.