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Managing copiousness for pleasure and profit: W illiam P ainter's P alace of P leasure
Author(s) -
Shinn Abigail
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/rest.12050
Subject(s) - pleasure , novella , painting , popularity , reading (process) , art , literature , aesthetics , history , art history , visual arts , philosophy , law , psychology , political science , linguistics , neuroscience
This article looks in detail at W illiam P ainter's P alace of P leasure (1566 and 1567), a large two‐volume collection of novella translations and histories, which includes translations of tales by B occaccio and B andello. In particular, I analyze some of the textual strategies which ensured the P alace 's enduring popularity, specifically P ainter's careful wielding of copiousness as a tool for both pleasure and profit. This study focuses primarily on the P alace 's paratextual apparatus, from the prefatory rhetoric of the front matter, to the use of architectural metaphors and the organization of textual material via running titles and contents pages. These organizing principles are considered in the light of the reading habits encouraged both by commonplacing and the understanding of reading as having moral effects, in order to identify the P alace as a text which demands that its copious content be actively ‘used’ rather than passively absorbed.