Abstract What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires that one think about various kinds of place—material, textual, geographical—and the practices particular to those places. It also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume place criticism in Britain, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and the New World; in letters, sermons, pictures, poems, plays, treatises, manuals, discourses, defences, and manuscript miscellanies; in philosophy, theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and poetics; in workshops, theatres, studios, galleries, private houses, city halls, salons, and bedchambers. They explore the hybrid genres, disciplines, modes of thought, lexicons, identities, and practices that emerge when criticism connects or moves between different places. They examine the operations of imagination, empathy, and analogy by which artists might imagine themselves in their characters’ places, or poets and painters, readers, viewers, or audience members might critically and creatively swap places. They interrogate, in various ways, the relationship between the places of learned humanist excavation, the passing of individual judgement, and the gaining of social experience. Often taking polemic as its subject matter, The Places of Early Modern Criticism also argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.