‘AN AGE becomes romantic as it recedes.’ Thus Arthur Johnston, in his study of the burgeoning scholarly interest in medieval romances in eighteenth-century England. That Johnston should make such a statement is in itself a mark of the success of the process he describes. After all, it is by no means obvious (even allowing for the vastly expanded range of meanings that the term encompasses nowadays) that a given period in history, to say nothing of the past generally, should be identified with a single literary genre. By following the ‘progress’ of a sixteenth-century text suffused with chivalric imagery, this chapter argues that the atmosphere and trappings of romances have, in part as a result of the scholarly and literary-critical activities of the authors Johnston writes about, become central to and emblematic of a well-disseminated picture of the medieval past. This process is here analysed in an attempt to provide an account of the origins and nature of the critical positions towards Renaissance chivalry this book has attempted to deconstruct. The way in which representations of historical and literary figures as ‘Quixotic’ are positioned, it has already been suggested, might serve as a barometer of this growing popularisation of the desire to confine chivalry to the realm of the medieval. This formation, I argue here, distorts our perceptions of the nature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century investments in the chivalric, contributing to a historiography that finds itself compelled to insist that there was a glorious heyday of knighthood which was ‘waning’ by the Renaissance.