The Renaissance is presently the focus for all the new critical theories that re-examine literary texts: feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-modernism, and cultural poetics. This is a collection of essays that illustrate all the major traditional methods of historical literary criticism as well as the wide range of new critical perspectives. The volume is both an introduction to and a survey of a rapidly growing field of debate and achievement. A new preface reviews succinctly all the methods - old and new, scholarly and critical - brought into play by the contributors.