In recent years, scholars have taken an increased interest in the way writers such as Shakespeare construed the medieval past. While writers at the time frequently turn to medieval sources for themes, images or vocabulary, they did not necessarily do so in terms that suggested a clear separation of “classical” and “medieval.” Instead, “ancient” or “antique” were among the terms frequently used to describe the texts – by Chaucer or Gower, for example – that they drew on. This paper specifically examines notions of English as an ancient language, discussed by writers in the later sixteenth century, and argues that such ideas are characteristically anachronic, requiring a less binaristic understanding of “renaissance” and “middle ages”. For example Chaucer was hailed (by e.g. Spenser) as a role model of contemporary English language together with a host of classical influences from Virgil and onward; thus, for all their rehearsing of Latin influences, and despite the deliberate use of “medieval” motifs and words in plays such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, writers tended to see the medieval past less in terms of periodization than in terms of a continuum that blends various pasts in their own present. In other words, the paper implies, periods such as "middle ages" need a nuanced attention to reinventions of them not only during the present, but from the perspective of all later attempts at distinction between then and now.