A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance: With Special Reference to the Influence of Italy in the Formation and Development of Modern Classicism

Before the Renaissance, European culture viewed poetry with deep suspicion. The medieval church saw imaginative literature as dangerous at best, frivolous at worst. Then something shifted. In the Italian humanist movement, a revolutionary idea took root: that beauty itself justifies artistic creation, that the imagination deserves not suppression but cultivation. Joel Elias Spingarn's landmark study traces this transformation through three distinct national traditions, showing how Renaissance critics from Dante to Tasso, Du Bellay to Boileau, Ascham to Milton developed the philosophical frameworks we now take for granted. He demonstrates how the return to ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics, filtered through Italian humanism, created the very concept of the literary work as worthy of serious intellectual attention. This is the origin story of modern classicism, told with scholarly precision and genuine intellectual passion. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we learned to take literature seriously.