'Anticlassicisms,' as a plural, react to the many possible forms of 'classicisms.' In the sixteenth century, classicist tendencies range from humanist traditions focusing on Horace and the teachings of rhetoric, via Pietro Bembo's canonization of a 'second antiquity' in the works of the fourteenth-century classics, Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the Aristotelianism of the second half of the century. Correspondingly, the various tendencies to destabilize or to subvert or contradict these manifold and historically dynamic 'classicisms' need to be distinguished as so many 'anticlassicisms'. This volume, after discussing the history and possible implications of the label 'anticlassicism' in Renaissance studies, differentiates and analyzes these 'anticlassicisms.' It distinguishes the various forms of opposition to 'classicisms' as to their scope (on a scale between radical poetological dissension to merely sectorial opposition in a given literary genre) and to their alternative models, be they authors (like Dante) or texts. At the same time, the various chapters specify the degree of difference or erosion inherent in anticlassicist tendencies with respect to their 'classicist' counterparts, ranging from implicit 'system disturbances' to open, intended antagonism (as in Bernesque poetry), with a view to establishing an overall picture of this field of phenomena for the first time.

The study adopts a new perspective on miraculous events in medieval French texts - what in Old French was referred to as la merveille. It replaces modern ascriptions with an attempt to perceive and understand the phenomenon in terms of its status within a complex concatenation of text varieties and narrative models. Literature presents itself to us as a self-related and hence autonomous system rooted in a reciprocal interaction between a highly educated audience, the supra-regional nature of literary production, and the swift accommodation, referentiality, and further development of narrative models.