How to Judge a Book by its Author

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This methodological chapter identifies the working vocabulary and chief genres of both textual and visual evidence that contemporaries used to discover and articulate authorial character. The chapter first shows how with the rise of reading for the author key selfhood words —such as ethos persona and character—begin to extend beyond their semantic home in ethics and rhetoric and into literary culture to signify at once the essence of an author’s identity and the performance of a put-on role. The chapter then shows a similar hermeneutic counterpoint at work in the realm of visual character evidence particularly two media that commonly appear in early modern books: the pseudo-fictional author portrait and the writer horoscope. In setting the terms for the case studies that followthese examples together also challenge modern jurisdictional boundaries between the discourses of fact and fiction the verbal and visual arts and most broadly the fields of reception and invention.