| This dissertation explores the historical development of prefatory rhetoric in the Renaissance. Through an analysis of a series of exemplary texts, I argue that the preface is transformed during the course of the Renaissance from the locus of authorial marginality to a threshold through which the author can find his way to a position of authority. The conversion of margin to limen is effected largely through an assault on the modesty topos and the hierarchy of textual authority based on Scripture, a hierarchy that provides the basis for this central topos of conventional prefatory rhetoric. After an introductory chapter, I approach the terminus a quo of this transformation by contrasting, on the one hand, texts of Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre that still work within the conventions of authorial marginality, and, on the other, Lucianic fictions by More, Rabelais and Cervantes that begin to work against those conventions. I then devote two chapters to figures who directly confront the constrictions of the modesty topos and the social/textual hierarchy it represents: Luther, Milton, Bacon and Descartes. The latter two figures exemplify a developing trend in the seventeenth century towards the dispersal of authority into a generalized "common sense," mutually accessible to author and audience. In my conclusion I look at the shift in prefatory strategies that accompanies this new alignment of author and audience, a shift characterized by parodic versions of earlier conventions and by the rise of the "critical" preface. |
