This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

Like Europe, the Mediterranean is a British imaginary and a geographical reality. The term ’Mediterranean’ signifies the narrative of cultural origin and the history of maritime trade, militarism, and diplomacy. The chapter begins with an account of a neoclassical rotunda in Ickworth House, Suffolk, which exemplifies the interfused, recursive narratives and traditions which constitute Greco-Roman antiquity, before tracing those traditions across the medieval Troy narrative and the Romantic response to the Elgin Marbles. The theme tying the cases together, as a means of traversing the immense distances between the Homeric epics and the ongoing debate over the Parthenon sculptures, is the metonymic relationship between totality and fragmentation, which Keats calls ‘the shadow of a magnitude’. The fragment triggers the imaginative reconstruction of the whole, and, by claim of cultural heritage, informs the ambition to possess the whole. The emphasis on the dialectic of unity/fragmentation confirms the narrative of a shared, antique, Mediterranean monoculture to be riven with competing, contested or colonial histories – as expressed by the cultural patchwork of the Ickworth rotunda.

The Introduction discusses the British usage of the term ’Europe’ and its historically contingent connotations before it outlines the complex historical relationship between the two entities, both of whom were in perennial flux. Global wars, imperialist ambitions, religious affiliations, revolutions political and industrial, travel and technology all played a part in shaping its permutations. The volume’s multi-pronged approach to the topic comprises four parts, covering geographical zones of influence, pan-European movements, cultural transfers, and uncertainties and anxieties. The editors also point to alternative critical approaches to ’Europe’ including philosophical discussions about the idea of Europe and literary essays on the topic.

Before Chaucer became ‘the Father of English Poetry’, the French poet Eustace Deschamps had called him ’Grant translateur’. In fact, Chaucer was the fons et origo of the English poetic tradition precisely because he was the Great Translator, because the history of English literature is also the history of European translation. Beginning with the medieval practice of translatio, whereby source and commentary fused into the new work, this chapter charts the contested views of translation from primary mode of making, to secondary exercise, back to primary production as literary translation reaffirms its centrality to the literary polysystem. It also traces the rise of the professional translator, the evolution of the literary translator, and translation studies as a discipline predicated on the development of translation theory. While Dryden in the seventeenth century could draw crucial distinctions between modes of translation, the development of translation as a formal and theorized practice (exemplified by Schleiermacher in early nineteenth-century Germany) could not be disassociated from the efflorescence of national literatures, pace Goethe, the Romantics, and George Eliot.

The House of Fame dramatizes Chaucer's interaction with trecento conceptions of the role and the function of the poet, as a number of commentators have shown. This chapter will explore the nature of Chaucer's response to these conceptions, or re-conceptions (of classical ideas), but will also suggest the way in which The House of Fame forms a discursive continuum with The Clerk's Prologue and the conclusion to Troilus and Criseyde – that is, how together they constitute an intertextual discourse on poetic claritas and fama. These works present us with Chaucer's conversations, if you will, with two models of humanism – one of which is Dantean, the other Petrarchan. Crucially, this continuum confirms Chaucer's recognition that there is a debate concerning humanism and fame in trecento Italy, which arose out of what Robin Kirkpatrick has termed ‘the wake of the Commedia’. Chaucer acknowledges two models of poetic fame, the one of ‘the grete poete of Ytaille / That highte Dant’, as he is described in the Monk's Tale (lines 2460–1), the other of ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete … whos retorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (Clerk's Prologue, lines 31–3).

One might be forgiven for thinking that Chaucer is being fickle in his poetic affections, seeming to shift allegiance from Dante to Petrarch, but if one looks at what the Monk and the Clerk actually say (not to mention what they actually do and represent as a monk and a clerk per se), then there is an obvious distinction between Chaucer's conception of Petrarch's fama/ claritas and his conception of Dante’s. These formulations of fame constitute two different poetical and political perspectives. Ultimately, Chaucer's conception of poetic renown is informed by both of these figures – and the antique models of fama, gloria and claritas which stand behind them – synthesizing their views into a discourse upon fame which will determine his own posterity.

As I see it, it is best to clarify this conceptual distinction first. Dante, for Chaucer, is ‘the grete poete of Ytaille’, and that genitive is important, as Dante is the poet of vernacular eloquence, the parlar materno as it was spoken by Italians (or Tuscans, at least).