A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance

A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance is a lucid, learned account of how European humanists recovered, interpreted, and transformed classical principles of poetry and art. Moving chiefly through Italian, French, and English criticism, Spingarn traces the authority of Aristotle and Horace, the rise of rules concerning imitation, decorum, and genre, and the gradual shaping of modern critical consciousness. Its style is concise, argumentative, and historically ordered, placing Renaissance theory within the broader revival of antiquity. Joel Elias Spingarn, an American scholar and critic trained in the humanistic traditions he describes, brought to the subject both philological discipline and a reforming critical temperament. As a professor at Columbia and later an influential public intellectual, he was deeply concerned with the relation between literature, culture, and freedom of judgment. His sensitivity to the history of criticism helps explain his interest in a period when literary authority was being newly codified. This book is recommended to readers seeking more than a survey of Renaissance literature: it is an introduction to the intellectual machinery by which literature was evaluated, defended, and disciplined. Students of criticism, poetics, comparative literature, and Renaissance studies will find it a compact but enduring guide.