Like many teachers of general-education courses, I have often confidently proclaimed that it was in the Romantic period that European readers first became obsessed with the image of the author. In this important and meticulously researched and argued study, however, Douglas Pfeiffer makes a compelling case that it is in the early modern period that we first see a regular, intense practice of “reading for the author.” Differentiating this study from the renewed and recent emphasis on characters within literary works, Pfeiffer deftly explores the ways in which Renaissance authors (and the ancient authors they studied) became characters of intense interest in their own right.
In the first chapter, “How to Judge a Book by its Author,” Pfeiffer proceeds through a “lexical approach,” exploring the “early modern life of character and related key words [including the Latin persona and the Greek ethos]” (43), noting that our own assumptions about these words often differ from those of early modern readers. In the remaining four chapters, he turns to a careful, penetrating analysis of key humanist and literary texts, beginning in chapter 2 with Lorenzo Valla's famous debunking of the pretensions of the Donation of Constantine. Pfeiffer spends little time on the most famous part of the treatise—the philological argument that uncovers the thoroughly anachronistic nature of the document—and instead examines the context in which this argument is placed. At least as important to Valla's treatise is his careful construction of an authorial persona that proves to be reliable, forthright, and trustworthy, and which thus appears in stark contrast to the poorly constructed persona of Palea (the name given to the forger-composer of the Donatio). Indeed, Pfeiffer argues, the more subjective and speculative parts of the treatise are necessary to set up the philological takedown, as Valla's imaginative portrayal of what Constantine as an author would sound like prepares the reader to see how poorly Palea fares in trying to forge a document in Constantine's name.
In chapter 3, Pfeiffer turns to another major humanist, Erasmus, examining both his biography of Saint Jerome as well as his edition of Jerome's writings. The biography is essential to Erasmus's editorial project, not only because it provides a historical context for the writings, but also because Jerome's character as author determines Erasmus's choices and work as editor. While we most often consider the work of textual scholarship and literary criticism to be separate scholarly endeavors, Pfeiffer shows how the humanist devotion to both a painstaking method of textual analysis and a groundbreaking textual scholarship was tied to a fundamental assumption about the link between an author's writings and the author, “between a writer's character and his words” (193), and thus were part of the same scholarly enterprise.
The final two chapters take up vernacular authors. Chapter 4 concerns George Gascoigne and his attempts to construct an authorial persona for his collection The Posies, while chapter 5 turns to Fulke Greville's A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney. In this final chapter Pfeiffer shows how Greville uses Sidney's works to understand the exemplary poet-courtier's life, and then uses that life in turn to understand the works, and then to use this discussion to define Greville's own authorial character. In a comparatively brief epilogue, Pfeiffer concludes by providing a couple of illustrative examples (brief but suggestive analyses of Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 and Machiavelli's “Letter to Vettori”) of what the early modern practice of “reading for the author” might look like in our own reading of Renaissance texts.
This all too brief summary only scratches the surface of Pfeiffer's rich and essential study. His methods and conclusions are rigorously historical; he uses careful philological analysis as well a close study of the original editions of the texts he treats, which he mines for both the material details of these texts as well as the traces that early modern readers have left on them. At the same time, Pfeiffer reconstructs and presents this history with an eye to the present concerns of readers and scholars, often asking us to reconsider our established notions of what an author is and means, and how and when it came to take on that meaning.
