A pluralistic and comparative treatment of European literature from about 1485 to about 1660. Emphasizes boundaries such as those between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, and the Renaissance and its bracketing periods. Among the topics are ritual and text, boredom

Reading the Renaissance: An Introduction, The Text, the Reader, and the Self, Ritual and Text in the Renaissance, Reading in the French Renaissance: Textual Communities, Boredom, Privacy, Reading Ultima Verba: Commemoration and Friendship in Montaigne's Writing, Gender and Genre, Gender Ideologies, Women Writers, and the Problem of Patronage in Early Modern Italy and France: Issues and Frameworks, Female Transvestism and Male Self-Fashioning in As You Like It and La vida es sueño, Continuities and Discontinuities, The Ends of Renaissance Comedy, Troilus and Cressida: Voices in the Darkness of Troy, Two Tents on Bosworth Field: Richard III V.iii, iv, v, As They Did in the Golden World: Romantic Rapture and Semantic Rupture in As You Like It, Anticipations, Noble Deeds and the Secret Singularity: Hamlet and Phèdre, Narrative and Theatre: From Manuel Puig to Lope de Vega, Notes, Works Cited, Contributors, Index