Rome continued to attract deep interest for its classical vestiges. The most cultivated among pilgrims and travellers also came to Rome to see what remained of the old monuments scattered within and without the 20 km of its city walls that enclosed a territory of 1,400 hectares and a population between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. The variety of geographical origins, perspectives and approaches to Rome as a destination of travel, whether real pilgrimages and journeys or imaginary and intellectual journeys, produced a rich array of texts of different genres: itineraries amidst churches and ancient monuments of Rome, catalogues that described the city, its features, marvels (mirabilia), sites, buildings and history, pilgrims’ and travellers’ accounts in the form of journals of their trips to Rome, including routes and impressions of the city; simple itineraries; letters addressed to friends; various kinds of literary (poetic or narrative) representations of the pilgrimage or journey to Rome.

The beginning of Italy’s contributions to late medieval travel literature was contemporary to a broader cultural awakening taking place throughout the peninsula that would initially peak between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. Thus, after having been absent for several centuries from the annals of pilgrimage literature, the first Italian pilgrimage book, the Florentine Dominican Ricoldo da Montecroce’s Liber Peregrinacionis or Itinerarium represented an original and innovative contribution to travel literature. Italian contributions during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries will continue to be distinctive and often of a broader European and/or world literary impact across multiple genres. These include Marco Polo’s Description of the World, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s Libro d’Oltramare, contributions of Italian humanists such as Petrarch and Boccccio to travel literature, and the Italian literature of the discovery and exploration that culminated in the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi.

I consider the position of Aeneid translations in the career patterns of a spectrum of poets and scholars in a range of languages, with attention to those who tackle other high-prestige texts, such as the Homeric epics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I ask whether the Virgil translation was the chef d’œuvre or an apprenticeship, whether the sequence of translating had any impact on the translator’s other output, and what difference this makes to our reading of the Aeneid translations. After highlighting some of the issues via Harington, whose Ariosto translation influenced his Aeneid translation, I analyse the synergy between Dante and Virgil in Villena’s Castilian translations. Most of the chapter deals with Virgil translators who also translated Homer, including Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Lombardo and Fagles, with longer discussions of Ogilby, Dryden and Morris. I close with an examination of Day-Lewis who translated the Georgics first, then the Aeneid and finally the Eclogues.

Shelley famously asserted that translation is as vain as casting a violet into a crucible to understand its colour and odour. Despite this seeming dismissal of the practice, translation forms an integral component of Shelley’s vocation as a poet and thinker. Throughout his writing career, he translated from French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish and also rendered some of his own poetry into Italian. His translation practice encompasses a wide range of genres: from Greek hymns and Latin georgics to Italian terza rima and ottava rima, to Spanish silvas and redondillas, to drama and philosophical prose. This chapter opens with a discussion of Shelley’s views on translation and the symbiotic relationship between translation and original composition in his own creative process. It then considers the connections between translation and language learning in the Shelley household before concluding with a survey of Shelley’s translations by language.

This chapter considers Auerbach’s lifelong grappling with Dante’s poetry. For Auerbach, Dante is the first voice of European poetry neither because he offers a unified and integrated aesthetic, nor because he imagines Europe as a stable edifice, but because he creates an art that always surpasses its own borders. Dante consequently for Auerbach becomes a figure for the movement from medieval to modern generally, a moment when the “fulfillment” promised in medieval figural interpretation turns into a historical figure and makes it possible to imagine a future otherwise.

Station Island is a key text in coming to an understanding of the changing nature of Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism. For this reason, it is the subject of Chapter Four, alongside Heaney’s translation Sweeney Astray, published in the same year. Heavily informed by his reading of Dante, it comes at the mid-point of Heaney’s own life and is the most forthright engagement with the political and religious pieties of his childhood upbringing. I attend to a close reading of the twelve-sequence poem ‘Station Island’, the title poem of the collection, and read it in the context of its draft forms and what Heaney says elsewhere about the poem. I conclude by arguing that rather than resolving Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism, Station Island appears to reinforce it. However, as an act of spiritual catharsis, it clears the way for the more visionary and airy poems of subsequent collections. His translation of the Sweeney poem allows Heaney to ventriloquise, from a safe vantage point, his own poetic sense in the person of King Sweeney, who acts as a bridge between the two collections.

This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

Chapter 5 offers a probing survey of late reflections on nationhood in the context of the German Empire, focusing on Engelbert of Admont, Dante Alighieri, and Marsiglio of Padua. By 1300, radical changes to the political landscape – especially the curtailing of imperial power and the rise of independent territorial kingdoms – prompted medieval thinkers to rethink and refine the principles of political order, resulting in two broad currents of thought: renewed imperialism and defenses of territorial monarchy. Medieval proponents of empire, despite their different argumentative approaches and strategies, treat a number of similar problems: the source of imperial authority, the end and purpose of world government, and the legitimacy of the empire’s claim to universal rule, that is, over all nations of the world. While Engelbert and Dante aim to reconcile national pluralism and political unity through some variant of legal pluralism, Marsiglio suggests that the various national communities that are part of the empire have to consent to imperial rule, offering explicit normative criteria for multinational politics.

In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

This chapter situates the sixteenth-century drive to define ’Englishness’ through literature within a broader European context, charting the widespread efforts to reify ’national character’ through the production of standardised grammars for vernaculars and assertions of their peculiar grace. After surveying early modern thought on the relationship between language, nation and empire, the chapter discusses the particular strategy adopted by English writers (centrally Puttenham and Sidney) to establish the very peripheral barbarousness of the English tongue as a proof of its distinction, before pointing at the close towards the emerging role of empire in underpinning notions of Englishness.

This concluding chapter turns from inquisitional procedure to the inquisition as an institution. The first part of the chapter examines the tale of the good man and the inquisitor (1.6). The second part argues that when Boccaccio responds to his nameless critics, he puts himself in the role of the good man and treats his critics as inquisitors. In mounting his defense, Boccaccio compares his situation to that of Dante’s; both must contend with the talk of the crowd. Yet instead of transcending common talk, Boccaccio answers it: he parries his critics’ talk, their novelle, with another novella (recounting a tale about a hermit’s son’s sexual awakening). Dante responds to an inquisition against him by ensnaring his judges within a more encompassing inquisitorial trial. Boccaccio turns their monologue into a dialogue, their whispered criticisms into an open rhetorical contest, their secret denunciation into an accusatorial trial.

Surrealism is thought to have taken a very firm stance against the genre of the novel, a view based in much of the work of André Breton, who championed surrealist poetry and inveighed against the bourgeois commercialism of the realist novel. Yet the story is more complicated, and needs to be seen more broadly. This essay begins by contextualizing what André Breton meant in the 1920s by ’the novel’, in a kinship with a larger tradition of writers not formally associated with surrealism, especially Marcel Proust. Starting from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou, this essay tells the secret story of the production and circulation of the intellectual ideas that went into Breton’s fictions, but also of their ramifications through other world writers and filmmakers: from Dante, Nerval, and Proust to filmmakers like the Chilean Raúl Ruiz in Time Regained and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino in La grande bellezza. Through the complex network opened by Breton’s theoretical and literary texts, the novel changes significantly across this history, overlapping with poetry, the essay, autobiography, and with art film today.

Liminal spaces of waiting and expectation are at the centre of this chapter that focuses on Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The chapter draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s study Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and on Daniela Caselli’s Beckett’s Dantes (2005), but it also takes the idea of purgatory to describe a dynamic, permeable space for intertextual dialogue. I argue that the texts of Beckett, Dante and Shakespeare do not appear as stable entities but rather are in flux and resonate with one another. Beckett’s recourse to purgatory is therefore not only the adaptation of a space for the imagination of medieval readers, but also a means of reflecting on the processes in which literary space is constructed. A main part of the chapter is devoted to the reading of ‘Dante and the Lobster‘ in dialogue with Hamlet and King Lear and also with the poetry of Thomas MacGreevy, from which many of its themes derive. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and Hamlet converge on the notion of pause, and the chapter examines the ways in which both works become mutually interanimating in their reflections on dualisms, between human being and animal, Christ and the lobster, beginning and end, hesitation and rashness, fear and the embrace of death.

This Afterword acknowledges the powerful role played by philology, and especially Germanic philology, in determining the shape of nations, especially after World War I. The search for absolute beginning, nationally inflected, can serve foundationalist aims, but the pluralized beginnings of this volume work quite differently. Many poets and writers, especially women of colour, find beginning qualities in medieval texts that help free up their own creativity. The volume’s productive distinction between openings and beginnings is here tested on the early Middle English Orrmulum. The influential model of a unified, integrative model vision of Rome-centred Latinity, proposed by E. R. Curtius, is here counterposed to a multi-centred understanding of European space, with due reference to Arabic, Hebrew, Byzantine Greek, Church Slavonic, Slavic, Armenian, and other traditions. The relationship of language and text to territory is problematized, with the space of Europe constituted not by firm boundaries but by complex vectoring and overlapping; Greek, Czech, and East Slavonic, often isolated, here join a pan-European conversation in which vernaculars engage fruitfully with learned and prestigious languages. The volume unshowily affirms the continuing need for philology, for the institutions that sustain it, and for the consequent necessity of collaboration, sharing what we know.