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It is a commonplace assumption that modernity comes late to England. This argument assumes that humanism and the Reformation create a sudden break for English history. "Recursive Origins" proposes a model of historical transition based in the continual engagement with the presence of the past. Rather than discovering an insular England fundamentally transformed by modernity, it suggests that fifteenth-century writers such as Lydgate, Malory, and Caxton developed a complex skepticism about textual culture inclusive of secular and religious authority, and profoundly influential to their strongest readers, Spenser and Shakespeare. Reading and writing: the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exist in a circuit of cultural production.