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Studies of Renaissance poetry going back at least to C.S. Lewis and Yvor Winters have recognized that the period witnessed a contest of plain and abundant styles. In the 1990s, critics sought to historicize such formalist insights by reading them in relation to a wide range of social and cultural practices. For critics such as Richard Halpern and Mary Thomas Crane, the relation of economic practice to humanist poetics proved a particularly fruitful field of inquiry. In different ways, Halpern's study of a proto-capitalist literature of primitive accumula- tion and Crane's investigation of the pseudo-economic activity of gathering both sought to uncover the historical foundations of the ornate or abundant style.¹

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