The Places of Early Modern Criticism

by Alexander, Gavin; Gilby, Emma; Marr, Alexander

• ISBN13: 9780198834687
• ISBN10: 0198834683
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-06-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Gavin Alexander, Reader in Renaissance Literature, University of Cambridge,Emma Gilby, Reader in Early Modern French Literature and Thought, University of Cambridge,Alexander Marr, Reader in the History of Early Modern Art, University of Cambridge

Gavin Alexander is Reader in Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. His most recent project is an edition of The Model of Poesy by William Scott (CUP, 2013). Other publications include Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (OUP, 2006) and Renaissance Figures of Speech (CUP, 2007), co-edited with Sylvia Adamson and Katrin Ettenhuber, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on literary and musicological topics. He is currently working on a book on English Renaissance poets and music, and a project on lyric poetry and poetics.


Emma Gilby is Reader in Early Modern French Literature and Thought at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Descartes's Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics (OUP, 2019) and Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (MHRA [Legenda], 2006), as well as various co-edited volumes and articles on the literary and intellectual history of the early modern period. Much of her research has focused on poetic theory and its connections to the rhetoric, philosophy and theology of seventeenth-century France.


Alexander Marr is Reader in the History of Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He recently published, with R. Garrod, J.R. Marcaida, and R. Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). His study of Peter Paul Rubens, Rubens's Spirit: from Ingenuity to Genius is forthcoming from Reaktion Books.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Placing Early Modern Criticism
1. 'The restful place': Criticism in Early Tudor Poetry, Chris Stamatakis
2. The Corrector as Critic: Jacques Peletier Du Mans, Katie Chenoweth
3. Popular Rewritings of the Orlando Furioso as Forms of Criticism, Francesco Lucioli
4. 'Ce rond de sciences [...] nomm? Encyclop?die': The Circle of Learning in Renaissance Poetics, Rowan Cerys Tomlinson
5. Grammar, Prosody, and the Place of Accent in Elizabethan Criticism, Gavin Alexander
6. The Play in the Mind's Eye, Lorna Hutson
7. Places of Form in Early Modern Poetics: Art, Mind, and Voice, Michael Hetherington
8. Writing in the New World: Spanish American Poetics and the Literary Canon, Rodrigo Cacho Casal
9. 'Crittickize uppon the smallest word': Anne Southwell and the Place of Gender in Early Modern Criticism, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
10. The Wondrous Town Hall of Amsterdam: Laudatory Poems on the Impact of Art and Architecture, Stijn Bussels
11. Pr?sence d'esprit in Action in Seventeenth-Century France: Salon Poetry and the Lettres provinciales, Emma Gilby
12. Sublimity by fiat: New Light on the English Longinus, Micha Lazarus
13. Painting as 'Reall Performance' in Rembrandt's Studio, Thijs Weststeijn
14. Dryden's Debts: Criticism, Commerce, and the Value of Wit, Sophie Read
15. Locus genii: Placing Genius in Roger de Piles's Criticism, Alexander Marr