The Force of Character explores the early modern development of one of today’s most pervasive literary habits: reading for the author in the interpretation of texts. Well before the rise of Romantic-era expressivism and the cult of artistic genius, Renaissance humanists discovered the potentials of engaging with ancient texts through the speculative reconstruction of writers’ personalities and artistic motives. The book shows how classical scholars and, following their example, vernacular poets learned to combine the tools of traditional rhetoric and grammar with the formal resources of major literary genres – the letter, the oration, the preface, and the biography – to cultivate authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis and historiography as well as literary invention.