While the word ‘epigram’ entered the French language at the end of the fourteenth century, it remained rare until the sixteenth, and the earliest citations of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary all date from the sixteenth century. Likewise, the term did not become common in German until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The modern epigram does seem in some respects to be truly an invention of the Renaissance. And like the other truly Renaissance genres, the emblem and the essay, it is a genre whose development was directed to some extent by its etymology as it was assembled from a combination of classical models and medieval subliterary gnomic traditions. The word meant ‘inscription’ in the classical languages, and Renaissance epigrams too were often meant to serve as literal or figurative inscriptions for real or putative monuments or works of art.

Naturally, the epigram was not an entirely new form. In Germany the Baroque epigram was in some respects closer to the medieval Spruch than to the classical epigram. In French poetry, short-form verse, ending with a proverb or a famous line of poetry, was common in the later Middle Ages following the example of Eustache Deschamps, and these short forms were even discussed in some detail in the arts of seconde rhétorique. Since late antiquity, gnomic sayings had been stretched into distichs or other combinations of rhyming verse for mnemotechnic considerations, in ways that often turned them into epigrams in all but name. Like the ancient epigrams, these short poems provided tituli, or captions and inscriptions, for mosaics, tapestries, and stained glass windows.