Pretexts of Authority describes the Renaissance rhetoric of authorship and authority by examining the textual locus where this rhetoric appears in its most concentrated and complex form - the preface.

In the process, it shows how the notion of authorship changed in a shift of systems of authorization during the Renaissance, a shift that coincides with the roots of the modern public sphere and with the change from religion to science and the public good as the intellectual court of appeal for legitimizing authorship.

The author focuses on prefatory materials to kinds of texts that most fully exemplify the problem of self-authorization during the Renaissance. First, he examines Protestant prefaces, notably Luther's preface to his collected works and Milton's antiprelatical tracts.

These works stand at the center of a rhetorical crisis; having abrogated the authority of the Catholic church through an appeal to the conscience of the individual, reformers found it necessary to forge a persona that could authorize their discourse without implying an authorizing will independent of God's. At the same time, these texts must attempt to close off means of authorization to potentially proliferating imitators.

1. The second group of prefaces the author examines is to scientific works, notably those of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, who faced problems analogous to those of the Protestant reformers in their attempts to set aside Aristotelian authority without seeming to establish a personal authority that interrupts the transparent, impersonal discourse of scientific inquiry.

The book argues that in both sets of texts the rhetorical quandary can be resolved only through recourse to the nascent notion of common sense, which allows an author to garner authority from an assumed bond with the audience. Authors no longer need to posit a privileged and suspect relation with the "master texts of Scripture" and the "Book of Nature," but can instead assume the mutual intelligibility of their text.

This assumption is seen as the cause of the decline of the full-blown prefatory practice of the Renaissance.