‘In my end is my beginning.’ This book ends deliberately at the moment invoked in the introduction, when Alexander narratives are lampooned via Chaucer's Monk as ‘commune’. It is surely no coincidence that this Chaucerian witticism occurs at the same moment that such narratives start to be found more frequently in English, some decades after the author of Of Arthour and of Merlin is able belligerently to announce ‘on Inglisch ichil tel þerfore’. The link between language and ‘commune’ knowledge is implicit but clear in Chaucer's reference: the Macedonian has become ubiquitous, and in English, which is surely part of Chaucer's Monk's point that ‘every man’, rich or poor, educated or unlettered, is able to hear of the conqueror, and in his own vernacular. This powerful connection between language and cultural identity, made by the first English-language canonical author, may seem to contradict the complexities of Alexander's translatio claimed by this book. Instead of transnational and multilingual perspectives found in both insular and continental texts, we are faced here with the universalizing yet fundamentally local idea of Alexander as vernacular and therefore ‘commune’/common. The democratization of Alexander – his translatio from the traditional languages of learning and intellectual life to those of everyday exchange, his movement from elite circles to mixed audiences, his journey from transnational conqueror to local exemplum – appears to be complete, a movement that leaves little room for other perspectives.

Yet these other perspectives endure. The idea that Alexander has become ‘commune’ in this movement from learned languages to vernaculars and from elite to wider audiences presupposes a causal relationship between the range of a language and its approach to its subject, one of the key assumptions questioned in this book. In other words, it assumes a shift in focus inextricably linked to the remit, geographical, political, and cultural, of a particular language. The evidence highlighted in this study seems to answer sic et non to this assumption, for the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries at least. The analysis of the Roman de toute chevalerie (RTC) and Horn, for example, shows that Anglo-Norman romances do not necessarily engage with insular concerns in their translatio even if they do so in the historical events of their narratives; the characteristics of Anglo-Norman as an insular language do not inevitably define the presentation of the stories it tells.