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

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 for and target of textual interpretation--begin to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, these innovative scholars discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers’ personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and 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 an exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon--character, ethos, intention, persona--and the range of genres of 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 book resurrects a vibrant culture of biographical criticism continuous with modern practice and yet radically more attuned to the explanatory powers of probabilism and historical conjecture--the discursive middle grounds eventually displaced by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and story, fact and fable.

Douglas S. Pfeiffer, Associate Professor of English, Stony Brook University

Douglas S. Pfeiffer is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University and a recipient of Jacob K. Javits, Whiting Foundation, and Folger and Huntington Library fellowships and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.