ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century, in northern Europe at least, witnesses a major shift in the status of the reader: reading becomes, in various senses, a much more prominent activity. The theory and practice of secular rhetoric more evidently emphasize the act of communication. The debate over the imitation of consecrated authors, the classics, Scripture, a few moderns such as Petrarch, necessarily implies contrasted views of what reading is and does. The production of new texts in the late Renaissance according to the principles of Erasmian imitation or quotation rhetoric might, then, be said to give the reader an entirely new role. Reading thus becomes a kind of rewriting, because what is read is itself perceptibly a reading in something like the modern sense, that is to say, a provisional exercise. This possibility is most explicitly envisaged by the Essais of Montaigne (published from 1580 onwards). Montaigne preserves the notion of an original, intended meaning and attacks glossing as a deviation.
