This study presents a reflection on the critical approach of the literature from the history of the mentalities. To understand the works of the XVIth century it is advisable to make an effort of epistemological disorientation, to find as far as possible the processes exégétiques which livened up the authors and the readers of the studied period, to read texts according to their criteria of reading, and their own conception of poetic creation. The study of the historic, philosophic, artistic, and theological context must allow to draw the lines of a mental landscape, and to seize the coherence of their intellectual and imaginary universe. Thus, the modern reader discovers a literature which sets seriously, more than he or she would have thought, the efficiency of the word and the wealth of his or her spiritual echos. The works of the Pleiad for example organize a significant polyphony, from a multiplicity of sources, to offer them the purification and regeneration. The link of the humanist authors with texts must be dreaded in its complexity: he considers a dynamics of transformation of texts in a cultural continuum where the redemption of the world history takes place.