Abstract/Summary

This essay is a survey of Renaissance satire from the early sixteenth into the seventeenth centuries. It argues that satire provided poets with the opportunity to experiment with fashioning voices and rhetorical affects and to imagine subject matter worthy of a satirist's recriminations. The essay illustrates how verse libels shaped the way that satires were written and read, explores the communal impulses of satire, and the role of women both as objects and authors of satire.