In 1589 George Puttenham published his famous account of the Tudor makers who emerged at the court of Henry VIII:

Puttenham’s use of the term ‘reformers’ marks a clear correspondence between the political upheaval of Henry’s reign and its literary culture, as part of what has been termed the Henrician cultural revolution. Puttenham implicitly posits a Protestant poetics avant la lettre – with the reformed religion came a reformed poesie. The term ‘reformers’ is noticeably not ‘translators’, even though the emphasis upon ‘the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italiā[n] Poesie’ places translation at the heart of the reformed ‘English meetre and stile’. Indeed, Puttenham made it clear that he considered translation a secondary activity compared to the primary activity of poetry. According to Puttenham, the person who employs ‘any foreine copie or example, as doth the translator … may well be sayd a versifier, but not a Poet’, but he later contradicts himself in part by claiming that ‘a Poet may in some sort be said a follower or imitator … and so in that respect is both a maker and a counterfaiter’, just as Sidney had claimed in his Defence that poetry ‘is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word μίμησις [mimesis], that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth’.