Author Description

"This book will focus on competing claims about quicksilver eloquence, vatic inspiration, and hermeneutic skills among Renaissance poets, and upon choices that they made for their writing, their literary careers, and the professionalization of their craft. Its ground is the intersection of aesthetics and economics in European Renaissance poetry, and its principal actors are Francesco Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pierre de Ronsard and William Shakespeare"--Introduction.