The study of early modern literature has expanded exponentially in recent years, opening exciting new directions and ever-evolving areas of interest, including religion, economics, animals, the environment, gender, sexuality, post-colonialism, race, and material history, to name only a few. The Routledge Companion to Renaissance Literature harnesses the energy of this burgeoning field by focusing on the literary text to connect these expanding sub-fields and explore how they ultimately relate. Establishing the literary text as its organising principle, this volume reconnects these various specialisms, enabling what might sometimes seem like sectional interests to speak productively to one another, however divergent their vocabularies and methodologies. Distinctive among other texts, this volume sees the expanded concept of the literary—a general awareness that human experience is largely constructed by language and language itself a human construct—as a product of the Renaissance itself. By showcasing literary critical skills—including philology, close reading, linguistic and formal analysis, intertextuality, the study of form and genre—the volume reads the Renaissance in its own terms, mutually illuminating present and past, and keeping the possibilities for further change and growth ever open.