In Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, J. W. Binns asserts that the drama of Shakespeare, the verse of Marlowe, and the prose of Sidney—all of whom wrote in English—do not alone represent the high culture of Renaissance (roughly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) England. Latin, the language of ancient Rome, continued during this period to be the dominant form of expression for English intellectuals, and works of law, theology, and science written in Latin were, according to Binns, among the highest achievements of the Renaissance. However, because many academic specializations do not overlap, many texts central to an interpretation of early modern English culture have gone unexamined. Even the most learned students of Renaissance Latin generally confine themselves to humanistic and literary writings in Latin. According to Binns, these language specialists edit and analyze poems and orations, but leave works of theology and science, law and medicine—the very works that revolutionized Western thought—to "specialists" in those fields, historians of science, for example, who lack philological training. The intellectual historian can find ample guidance when reading the Latin poetry of Milton, but little or none when confronting the more alien and difficult terminology, syntax, and content of the scientist Newton.

Intellectual historians of Renaissance England, by contrast with Latin language specialists, have surveyed in great detail the historical, cosmological, and theological battles of the day, but too often they have done so on the basis of texts written in or translated into English. Binns argues that these scholars treat the English-language writings of Renaissance England as an autonomous and coherent whole, underestimating the influence on English writers of their counterparts on the European Continent. In so doing they ignore the fact that English intellectuals were educated in schools and universities where they spoke and wrote Latin, and inhabited as adults an intellectual world in which what happened abroad and was recorded in Latin was of great importance. Writers traditionally considered characteristically English and modern were steeped in Latin literature and in the esoteric concerns of late Renaissance humanism (the rediscovery and study of ancient Latin and Greek texts), and many Latin works by Continental humanists that were not translated at the time into any modern language became the bases of classic English works of literature and scholarship.

These limitations are understandable. No modern classicist is trained to deal with the range of problems posed by a difficult piece of late Renaissance science; few students of English intellectual history are trained to read the sort of Latin in which such works were written. Yet the result of each side's inability to cross boundaries has been that each presents a distorted reading of the intellectual culture of Renaissance England.