The article attempts to make postclassical narrative theory productive for an analysis of characters in vernacular novels from the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Viewing medieval characters as well as medieval mental constructs as modern, it focuses on the processes whereby characters are constituted from textual information. Using the Fortunatus (1509) as an example, the article shows that markedly different textual structures of presentation direct the inferences of the audience and (in particular) how recipients respond to characters in different ways.