What does the story of Troy tell us about literary cultures in the later Middle Ages? This is a large question which the present essay considers with reference to two apparently different linguistic, cultural and political contexts as exemplified, first, by Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (c. 1165) and Guido de Columnis's Historia destructionis Troie (1287) and, second, by John Lydgate's Troy Book (1412–20). The first context is the transnational Latin and French literary culture of the late thirteenth century that is found in a variety of intersecting forms across Europe (Troie and the Historia); the second is the more local English-language situation specific to England (Troy Book), which may be instructive for Bohemian Troy material despite the latter's cultural and linguistic separation from English since Czech literature, like that of England, is written in a vernacular with a limited rather than a transnational dissemination. Although these two contexts – the ‘learned’, Latinate transnational literary culture and the more demotic, vernacular local or (proto)national one – appear to be so different, there are in fact important connections between them that result from a shared approach to translatio studii, the ‘transfer of learning’, across Troy literature.