ABSTRACT
Critics such as Wendy Wall, Margreta de Grazia, and Jeffrey Masten have been drawing increasing attention to the value of looking at the margins of Renaissance books, and in the process they have questioned how those margins define books and authors, and more self-consciously, how we tend to define those margins. Perhaps the best place to begin a study of paratextual induction is in prefatory material to translations, a class of books which was very important and also very likely to receive metaphoric presentation. The practice of calling attention to textual errors was so common for printers that it could be used to humorous effect. In various ways, prefatory metaphors of sexuality tempt the reader into a closer engagement with the text, whether we are helping to comfort a sexually assaulted text, scorning other more immoral books, or even scorning the present text in a search for the original female virginal ur-text which preceded it.
