In 1589, one year before the publication of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Books 1–3, Puttenham published The Arte of English Poesie. Puttenham begins by offering a short history of human cultural evolution, describing what the original phase of human existence was like, a time ‘before any civil society’ when the people ‘remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad’. He offers a remarkably clear view of culture as a human construction: thus it was poets who were the first to bring ‘the rude and savage people to a more civill and orderly life’, poets ‘were the first that instituted sacrifices of placation’; furthermore ‘all the rest of the observances and ceremonies of religion’ were ‘invented and stablished by them’, and it was by their chaste and austere lives that poets developed the power to ‘receave visions, both waking and sleeping, which made them utter prophecies’. What is no less striking is Puttenham's basic assumption that human culture as a whole is a process of evolution: ‘there was no art in the world till by experience found out’, and as Greek and Latin literature became an art only after ‘studious persons’ created ‘a method of rules & precepts’, then, he asks, ‘Why may not the same be with us aswel as with them’. This reflects a more general Elizabethan trend towards the interpretation of cultural and social history in evolutionary terms.