Etymology, Genealogy, and the Immutability of Origins

Abstract

New paths into the vast and intricate forest of ways in which Renaissance texts use or respond to their literary antecedents have emerged from numbers of recent studies such as those of Thomas Greene and David Quint. Here I should like to suggest an extension of that concern with the originary beyond the strictly literary relations of text to subtext or imitation to authorizing model. A sense of the living presence of the source is manifest in the Renaissance treatment of words, things, individuals, and institutions.