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The French Renaissance often appears as an era of intellectual giants, characterized by a fascination with abundance (copia) and linguistic capacities that surpass and overwhelm modern readers. This dissertation challenges the perceived gulf between modern and sixteenth-century readers by proposing a cognitively grounded perspective on the production of overwhelming reading experiences, specifically centered on the appearance of lists in prose texts. The texts considered range in genre from pedagogy to historiography, theological treatises, travel literature, philosophy, and comedy; they feature some of the most canonical authors of Renaissance humanism, such as Rabelais, Erasmus, Calvin, Léry, and Montaigne. Analyzing select lists in light of cognitive limits such as working memory capacity as well as work in the history of reading and print technology, I argue that the presentation of these lists reflects technologically engaged strategies that mediate readers’ access to texts, either organizing information or exceeding reader limitations in order to invite emotional responses associated with overwhelm. By embracing the notion of reader limitations, we can begin to unravel not only the deliberate myth-making practiced by many sixteenth-century authors, but also underappreciated expressions of their anxieties around everything from religious tensions to print itself.