Self-Representation and Authorship

This chapter broaches the question of Badius’s self-presentation. Badius as a writer was a producer of ‘secondary’ works – commentaries, ‘epitomes’, supplements, compilations, dedicatory epistles. The language of authorial presence and appropriation associated with Renaissance writers like Erasmus is in direct contrast with the language of Badius’s paratext, which tends always in the opposite direction of self-abnegation and disavowal of ownership. His self-presentation is here read in the context of changing concepts of authorship during the period in which he was active, and is framed in terms of the rhetorical construction of ethos in his dedications and prefaces, his engagements with northern Christian humanism, and the demands of patronage.