What role did an increasingly comprehensive and critical reading of the rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian play in the development of Renaissance ideas about literary criticism? Of obvious initial interest is the insistence in the mature Cicero and in Quintilian that the trainee orator should, in the first place, read the poets, historians, and ‘writers, or learned contributors to all good arts’, and, in the second place (for the sake of practice), praise, interpret, and correct them, pointing out their failings and the aspects that required a critical response. The influence of such prescriptions must be observed by the reader in other chapters of the present volume: here the interface between Renaissance students and the rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian alone can be sketched in, with some central attention to those passages in the new curriculum texts that can be expected to have assisted with a refinement and an enlargement of the contemporary view of the rhetorical functioning of language, and a sharper focus upon what distinguished rhetorical prose from poetry.

Of the major curriculum rhetorical texts inherited by the early fifteenth century from medieval usage, the most important were Cicero's De inventione and the approximately contemporary Rhetorica ad Herennium. The former makes few references to language and even fewer to poetry, whilst the latter provides little specific analysis and instruction in prose style, despite being a ‘complete’ rhetorical ars. The ‘mature’ rhetorical works of Cicero, by contrast, and the much more comprehensive rhetorical textbook of the early imperial rhetor, M. Fabius Quintilianus, the Institutio oratoria, entered the teaching curriculum fully only in the fifteenth century.