Although not often linked to the issue of literary criticism, patronage, as the dominant social relationship in Renaissance Europe, inevitably affected the processes of literary judgement. Before and amid the emergence of a market economy of literary relations, most writers depended upon the support and/or the goodwill of the rich and powerful. ‘Since both poets and critics were closely connected with the ruling aristocracies, either by birth or by the system of patronage’, remarks Vernon Hall in one of the few works to consider the social dimensions of literary criticism, ‘their definition [of poetry] was in aristocratic terms’. The Renaissance, Hall argues, founds its literary categories on the grounds of social rather than aesthetic discrimination. Almost every work of literature produced in the Renaissance bore some mark of the hierarchical organization of the society in which it was produced. Through an elaborate system of reward, patrons sustained certain genres, styles, and authors; at the same time, they actively discouraged others by means of sanctions that ranged from simple stinginess to active censorship and corporal punishment. Because they emphasize the ways that political forces impinge on the very aesthetic values that purport to transcend the grimy world of politics, recent developments in criticism – particularly American new historicism and British cultural materialism – have prepared us to attend anew to the relationship between structures of political power and the practices of literary criticism in the Renaissance.

A central problem in Renaissance literary criticism – the establishment of the vernacular as a legitimate medium for literary utterance – is itself in part a function of the effect of courtly power on aesthetic choice.