This study reframes irony as a rhetorical practice situated at the intersection of ethics and rhetoric in sixteenth-century French and Italian literature.

While foundational studies by Norman Knox and Dilwyn Knox trace the diachronic or lexical evolution of irony, they do not examine its practical function within literary texts or its ethical and epistemological dimensions. This book responds to this gap by offering a critical account of irony’s rhetorical agency across a corpus including Erasmus, Ariosto, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, and Montaigne. It argues that irony in the Renaissance is not merely a stylistic figure but a mode of inquiry that transforms classical and medieval traditions.

Through close readings, the study explores how irony reconfigures genre, authorship, and moral discourse, showing that its elusiveness demands contextual, practical analysis rather than fixed definition. It argues that Renaissance irony shifts from being a tool subject to ontological investigation (is irony a lie or a truth?) to becoming a gnoseological instrument of inquiry.

The dichotomy between true and false, which underpinned medieval discourse on rhetoric, is overridden as irony shifts from being an object of study to an instrument that investigates the limits and functions of language, as well as the forms of the texts to which language must rigorously conform.