Participants will explore both the theoretical and the critical utility of the term 'paratext', opening up a wide range of paratexts from imprints to indices, typefaces to tables of contents, and illustrations to advertisements. Contributors will variously explore the material forms of Renaissance paratexts, their internal generic logic, rhetoric and conventions, and the ways in which they shape the reader’s approach to the text (and, indeed, the text’s approach to the reader). Looking also to the more diffuse spaces that Genette terms epitext, the conference will examine the construction and marketing of both book and author, and the ways in which books interact with their environments to create and inspire new meanings.