Combining historical and theoretical sophistication with close readings of major Renaissance texts, this book argues that late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth- century writers were far more vulnerable to the secular and ecclesiastical authorities on whom they depended for their livelihoods than were writers of an earlier era. The book also explores the creative strategies that the vulnerable authors developed to protect themselves from those authorities. Particularly striking is the fact that writers increasingly turned in the course of their careers to alternate sources of legitimation and protection in the form of various peripheral communities such as the convent, the artisanal society, the acting company, the theater-going public, and circles surrounding but not synonymous with the Renaissance court. In fact, this book shows that these protective communities ultimately enabled writers to produce a disturbing and distinctive literature in an era when authorship conceived in terms of literary property or individual genius was as of yet nonexistent.