"Drawing on a rich and wide-ranging selection of important works from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, through the plays of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare, Christopher Pye makes a powerful case for the existence of an autonomous early modern aesthetic prior to Kant, through readings that are highly attentive to textual detail and theoretically informed by thinkers from philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis." -- -Philip Lorenz Cornell University "This is scholarship that does not hesitate to strike out against the errors of earlier critics. Pye goes in chosen directions that prove rewarding." -Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance "A learned, ambitious, sharply argued, and consequential book. In a forceful reconsideration of 'the aesthetic' as itself a site of political thought, Pye is throwing down the gauntlet against the prevailing climate of historicist work in early modern literary criticism, which has placed the Renaissance before the arrival of 'the aesthetic' as a category." -- Drew Daniel Johns Hopkins University
