ABSTRACT
After three decades in which historicist scholars have successfully reconnected Renaissance literature to its historical contexts, and formalist and rhetorical scholars have used improved historical resources to move closer to an understanding of how literary texts accomplish their cultural work, we think the time is right to question how Renaissance texts were read, how they were put to use in their own time, and how they may have been and continue to be used in subsequent times, up to and including our own. Following Kenneth Burke, we now ask: what sorts of “equipment for living” do Renaissance texts represent?1
