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.

This chapter examines the liberal approaches to Christian prescriptivism, which have typically fallen under the label of the “essence of Christianity.” The quest for the essence has its origins in the Reformation but becomes a widespread theological concern in the Enlightenment. This first chapter examines liberal, historicist, dialectical, and liberationist versions of this quest. Using Schleiermacher’s rubric, I organize different versions of the essence along the lines of reason (doctrine), experience (culture), and morality (politics).

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

Ralston compares the works of Schleiermacher and al-Ghazali on the relationship of gratitude with divine providence. Ralston illustrates the utter dependency of gratitude with Schleiermacher’s own reflections at the death of his young son, Nathanael.