This book began with the sixteenth century's most proficient ‘medievalist’, whose etymological meditation on the ‘war-old’ worolde gave Chapter 1 its epigraph. Spenser's interest not only in the memes (allegory, etymology) but in the style and language of the older world are familiar. In his prefatory epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, the mysterious E. K. apologised for the ‘auncient’, ‘ragged and rusticall’ style of its author's language experiment:

The apology was ostensibly a humble one, but its defence of the barbarity of vernacularity rested on a coy co-opting of classical eloquence: ‘for if my memory fayle not’, E. K. asserted, ‘Tullie in that booke, wherein he endeuoureth to set forth the paterne of a perfect Oratour, sayth that ofttimes an auncient worde maketh the style seeme graue, and as it were reuerend.’ Having the classical rhetorician vouch for rude and rugged English was playfully ironic: E. K. ventriloquised the spokesman of eloquence defending an idiom that defined itself in opposition to it. As Andrew Zurcher comments, ‘E. K.'s pre-emptive strike’ defended ‘Spenser's own archaisms with solid principles of classical rhetoric’, not only ‘justified on the grounds of decorum, but … even … a kind of imitatio.’ The ‘naturall’ rudenesse’ that could ‘enlumine’ (that familiar Chaucerian compliment, see p. 128) the ‘braue & glorious words’ has a ruddy lustre that, although its blazons may not ‘blaze’ with classical brilliance, nonethelesss somehow outshines its ‘brightnesse’. Chaucer takes on Cicero in this orchestrated debate, as Spenser, the humanist-medievalist, pondered how the old world met the new.