ABSTRACT: This article aims at studying the importance given by four 16th century grammarians to their predecessors, whether from Antiquity, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Linacre did not immediately set his work De emendate (1524) in an historical context, but he did not hesitate to quote authors, whether from a previous period or contemporaneous to his work. This is how he discussed their texts and said if he agreed with them. Scaliger (De causis, 1540) constantly condemned the previous heritage (i. e. the 632 errors that he listed in Index errorum). However he hid the identity of the people he criticized behind very general statements. In several parts of Scholae grammaticae (1569), Ramus drew up a list of criticisms when analyzing the genesis of the theory about parts of speech, showing the growing inconsistency of the theory as it expanded. In his Minerva (1587), Sanctius went back over this genesis and was even more critical than Ramus; using Sophist from Plato he attempted to find a distribution of words in 5 main categories and contradicted systematically L. Valla. Even if it is possible to find in these four grammarians the need to establish some chronology, their work consisted more of doxographical treatises than of history per se, each choosing the predecessors he wanted to argue with as in a disputatio.