MY CLAIMS for the density of Spenser's verbal and rhetorical play, and for our responsibility to situate interpretations of his work historically within early modern habits of reading, depend on a prevailing culture of reading that Spenser might have expected would be receptive to his artifice: for better or worse, a writer writes for readers. In this chapter, I turn to extant evidence both of how sixteenth-century readers read, and of how they thought they read, towards the construction of a historically legitimate set of reading practices for our approach to The Faerie Queene. From the rhetorical and pedagogical theorists of antiquity and of Spenser's own century, it is possible to recover a coherent system for literary interpretation, and there is good evidence – in authors' and editors' introductions to their works, in the way poets and prose writers responded intertextually to their models, and in the manuscript annotations, or adversaria, that survive in early modern books – that authors anticipated readerly engagements along the lines that these theorists prescribed. But, too, there are apparent distinctions between theory and practice: not only did individuals depart from convention in the usual idiosyncratic ways, but reading practices varied according to genre, language, and print or manuscript format. By attending to a range of classical and contemporary authorities on pedagogical and hermeneutical practice, and by contextualizing the prescriptions of these authorities in the extant evidence of readers' actual engagements with texts, this chapter will compose a comprehensive portrait of the readers and readings a poet like Spenser might have anticipated for his works in about 1590.