Reconstruction, Conservation, Restoration: Reconciling the Past through Word and Image
'Renaissance literary works are no longer regarded either as a fixed set of texts…that contain their own determinate meanings or as a stable set of reflections of historical facts that lie beyond them…rather they are made up and constantly redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers. These collective social constructions on the one hand define the range of aesthetic possibilities within a given representational mode and, on the other, link that mode to the complex network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute the culture as a whole.'
Stephen Greenblatt, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982)