The transfer of knowledge and martial power, translatio studii et imperii, was a celebrated theme in medieval Europe that was recurrently employed to legitimate regnal authority. According to the myth of translatio, intellectual and martial superiority were entwined and together moving ever-westwards, from Athens, to Rome, and on to Paris. In the late Middle Ages, the myth of translatio fueled the belief among French scholars and aristocrats that the renowned University of Paris symbolized France's cultural superiority over England. Despite the wealth of scholarship on French evocations of the translatio topos, medievalists have not yet given serious consideration to the possibility that late medieval English courtiers and intellectuals were similarly invested in the myth of translatio studii et imperii, the consonance between knowledge and power, and universities as sources of cultural capital. This essay examines a variety of texts composed or copied in fourteenth-century England that explicitly evoke the myth of translatio to claim that English learning at the University of Oxford had surpassed the French scholarship of Paris. Moving outward from literary analysis toward cultural history, I explore how these works functioned as textual agents shaping their age's linguistic and political worlds. Without reducing Anglo-French cultural politics to a single topos, this essay therefore aims to contribute to an understanding of how late medieval English scholars and courtiers comprehended and legitimized their cultural competition with France.

In order to make sense of English evocations of translatio in the late Middle Ages, we must first understand the historiographical implications of this myth as well as the French tradition of translatio to which the English were responding. As Tullio Gregory, Enrico Fenzi, and Lorenzo DiTommaso, among others, have demonstrated, the myth of a succession of earthly empires was an ancient (if not primordial) conception of history that became Christianized in the Book of Daniel. In this foundational Judaeo-Christian text, Daniel explains to King Nebuchadnezzar that his dream of the awesome statue with its head of fine gold, the chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, and its feet partly of iron and partly of clay represents the degeneration of his kingdom.