What kinds of assumptions, investments and communities shape our understanding of what we read? Reception studies have emphasised that we all read through our own particular lenses and that, when we read texts from the remote past, we are always also reading ourselves. This theoretical frame shows that studying conversations between early writers and later responses can illuminate new stories about the earlier texts that other responders’ lenses may not have captured, as well as telling us new stories about the responders. But which texts do we aim to rethink through these conversations, and why? Scholars of classical reception often prioritise stories about how poets respond to earlier poets – how Virgil or Walcott responds to Homer, or how Shakespeare responds to Ovid. The essays in this volume take a step back to ask questions about acts of literary observation and analysis. Their primary early text is not a poem nor a play, but a work of criticism, Aristotle's Poetics. Yet the volume's real focus is not quite, as the title might seem to suggest, how sixteenth-century critics responded to a fourth-century bce critic, but a far more layered set of interactions and influences. How did twentieth-century critics interpret sixteenth-century critics’ responses to a fourth-century critic's account of fifth-century plays? And what might we, in the twenty-first century, take away from these palimpsestic conversations?

The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond begins neither with Aristotle nor his Renaissance readers, but with the scholar Bernard Weinberg, whose intellectual shadow looms throughout the book. The first third of the volume reflects explicitly on Weinberg – especially his 1961 A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance – and his legacy. The middle third looks at a series of sixteenth-century approaches to earlier texts, though not consistently to Aristotle or even other Greek authors: chapters explore responses to Aristotle within the Florentine Accademia degli Alterati, Weinberg's account of Renaissance debates over Dante and the Sienese scholar Lombardelli's reflections on Homer and Tasso. The final third looks more broadly at sixteenth-century criticism: Tasso's innovations on epic, early readings of Aristotle's theories of emotion, and the generative possibilities of Renaissance literary theory. Ultimately, the heart of the book lies less in Aristotle or his sixteenth-century critics than in a larger inquiry into the uses of past critical thought in charting new scholarly paths.

Just as sixteenth-century Italians invented new literary questions and forms by identifying with ancient Romans, revisiting the intellectual ferment of Renaissance Italy offers a new vantage point for reimagining what criticism can and should do. A. Ramachandran, in the book's closing chapter, reflects on ways that ‘we may engage in fruitful transhistorical dialogue to make sense of our own concerns, much as the Renaissance humanists themselves did with their classical predecessors’ (p. 231). Yet as she and the other contributors point out, this transhistorical dialogue cannot elide the centuries between Renaissance humanists and our current moment. All paths to Renaissance Aristotle, the book suggests, run through the lingering influence of the mid-twentieth century Neo-Aristotelian Chicago School, especially Weinberg, whose scholarship on the period's criticism established the terms of its later Anglo-American discussions. In the introduction Brazeau identifies three central arguments underpinning the collection: that reconsidering Weinberg's approach can produce a fuller understanding of the Poetics and its reception; that new developments in material culture, book history and history of reading offer valuable tools for this re-evaluation; and that the history of interpreting the Poetics offers a mirror of developments in literary criticism more broadly.

The book's three sections reflect the separate prongs of this argument. Part 1, ‘Mapping the Field and Retracing Boundaries’, probes Weinberg's role in shaping later approaches to Aristotelian reception. In ‘A Scholar-Collector in Mid-Century Chicago: the Books of Bernard Weinberg’ E. Baldassarre, P.F. Gehl and L. Markey produce a material biography of sorts. Through inventorying the books with which Weinberg surrounded himself, both in his own collection and in his work for the Newberry Library and University of Chicago Library, they trace his intellectual origins and development. (A linked appendix appears at the end of the book, detailing Weinberg's early modern books.) In ‘Sound Aristotelians and How They Read’ M. Lazarus situates Weinberg's thought in the context of the Chicago School that formed his primary intellectual community, underscoring the distinctive priorities, insights and blind spots of their critical practices. ‘Weinberg's account of the Poetics’, he suggests, ‘is not quite a work of history or of reception, but something more symptomatic – a synthesis of a particular kind of reading at a particular time meriting, as such, an episode of its own in the long history of criticism’ (p. 42). Joining Lazarus in appraising the Chicago School's methodological approaches and constraints, V. Brljak takes up a fierce manifesto for change in ‘Inventing a Renaissance: Modernity, Allegory, and the History of Literary Theory’. ‘In structuring their accounts of the history of Renaissance literary criticism as Burckhardtian decline-of-allegory narratives’, he pronounces, they ‘have seriously impaired our understanding of the subject, while also rendering their research incompatible with parallel work elsewhere in literary studies and beyond. This is an unproductive state of affairs, it needs to end, and the present study hopes to contribute to this cause’ (p. 65).

Whether or not the ghosts of Weinberg and his colleagues will ultimately fade out, they shift further into the background in Part 2, ‘Case Studies: Critical Quarrels and Readings’, though they continue to shape the discussions. These chapters turn to more direct examinations of sixteenth-century critics themselves. In ‘Shedding Light on the Readings of Aristotle's Poetics developed within the Alterati of Florence (1569–c. 1630): from Manuscript Studies to the Social and Political History of Aesthetics’ D. Blocker situates early readings of Aristotle in a particular social context. In two editions of Pietro Vettori's Latin translation of the Poetics – a 1617 printed edition and a manuscript dated 1573 – she examines comments from members of the Alterati, a Florentine scholarly community. Their paratexts and annotations highlight creative collaboration as a means of working, and present an Aristotle marked by ‘a nuanced and sophisticated form of “hedonism”, one which was in fact highly preoccupied with morality … something one could call an ethics of pleasure’ (p. 120). Blocker's close reading of these commentaries and the social networks they represent leads her to a different model than Weinberg's, as does S. Gilson's engagement with a sixteenth-century response to Dante. In ‘Quarrelling over Dante: Revisiting Weinberg on the First Phase of the Quarrel and on Sperone Speroni's Second Discorso sopra Dante’ Gilson pores over a text Weinberg ignores, which complicates his account of a long-running literary controversy. S. Van der Laan similarly excavates an important aspect of the period's literary criticism left unexamined by the Chicago School. In ‘Poetics in Practice: How Orazio Lombardelli Read his Homer’ she studies one writer's annotations to the Odyssey to show how responses to classical epic drew on contemporary moral and religious concerns as well as developments in criticism, with implications for the emerging new forms of Renaissance epic. Delighting in ‘an expansive idea of the marvellous’ (p. 173), which he finds in Tasso's writing, Lombardelli sees Homer's very different marvels as inspiring the possibility of ‘successful literary imitation as marvellous in its own right’ (p. 174).

What does this new information about Renaissance reading practices add up to, and why does it matter? The chapters in Part 3, ‘New Theoretical Frontiers’, reflect further on the implications of the period's critical practices. In ‘Epic (In)hospitality: the Case of Tasso’ J. Tylus reconsiders Weinberg's distinction between Ariosto and Tasso by exploring Tasso's linguistic style. Engaging with contemporary concerns about the limitations of the Tuscan vernacular, Tasso turns to unfamiliar words both to evoke the foreignness of his emerging language and genre, and to gesture to new possibilities for epic grandeur in the light of Aristotle's emphasis on the power of heightened diction. In ‘Soul to Squeeze: Emotional History and Early Modern Readings of Aristotle's Poetics’ Brazeau similarly depicts Castelvetro as deliberately shaping Aristotle's rules to fit his own literary vision. Castelvetro's overarching emphasis on audiences’ emotional experiences diverges considerably from Aristotle's own focus, but his work's popularity and influence suggest that it resonated with readers. Reflecting on this appeal in the context of more recent approaches to the history of emotions, Brazeau wonders whether the period's lively debates over Aristotelian catharsis were ‘less about the correct interpretation of Aristotle's text and more about contemporary concerns’ with emotional experience (p. 209). Ramachandran closes the collection with its most direct reflections on the lessons of early modern critical practices for twenty-first century thinkers. In ‘Critical Imitatio: Renaissance Literary Theory and its Postmodern Avatars’ she charts connections between this period's determined investigations of the past and our own current scholarly approaches. ‘To preserve the past, to convey it and to remake it into forms of value for their own world’, she reflects: ‘these commitments find immediate resonance with Renaissance critics, whose work hinged on this tripartite technique’ (p. 246).

This vision of kinship between past and present scholars lies at the heart of the book. The classical reception highlighted in the title is only part of its mission, which centres primarily on reconsidering a layered history of scholarship. Its chapters forge connections – sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly – between the methodological approaches practised in the Italian Renaissance and our own developing strategies for renewing our conversations with the past. These approaches centre particularly on material and social practices, including book history, the sociology of reading communities, affect and emotion, and what Ramachandran describes as the period's ‘deep formalism’ (p. 233), encompassing language, genre, rhetoric and textual effects. The shaping intellectual influence of the social worlds described by Blocker, Baldassarre, Gehl, Markey, Lazarus and Brljak resonates with the moving power attributed to texts in the discussions by Van der Laan, Tylus and Brazeau, all of which draw closely on the primacy of textual form that Ramachandran emphasises. The version of the Poetics we encounter here is a satisfyingly pragmatic and flexible one: a tool kit to be used by poets working to build new forms and by readers working to make sense of them.