The volume traces the evolution of literary criticism and taste from ancient Greece through medieval Europe, surveying early Homeric and Sophistic comment, Plato and Aristotle’s doctrines of poetics and rhetoric, and the work of Hellenistic scholars, grammarians, and commentators. It examines scholastic and rhetorical traditions, the school exercises and progymnasmata, and the ways critics addressed diction, form, and textual authority. Organized as a systematic historical overview with close readings, translations, and reference material, it maps the principal theories, methods, and institutional practices that shaped European critical thought.