Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.

Scholars haveestablished that Rome is at once a place and an idea. This double formula, however, which limits Rome to a specific distant place (distant, that is, from the perspective of Britain) and an idea (that is, an immaterial concept or notion of that distant place), needs to be supplemented by an acknowledgement that the Roman Empire had left in its wake material remains and cultural practices that ensured that Rome could always be close-to-hand, familiar, and domestic—even a thousand or more miles from the Eternal City. Ruins, roads, the Latin language and the thickets of its grammar, cultural and spiritual institutions, liturgical texts and devotional regimens: these phenomena ensured that Rome could be, even as far away as Medieval or Renaissance Britain, experienced as near rather than far, and as a network of material remains and cultural practices rather than as an abstract idea. The book gathers these disparate phenomena under the rubric of the ‘fact’ of Rome (with an eye to the word’s derivation from the Latin factum) in an effort to show that lives lived in Medieval and Renaissance Britain were continually immersed in versions of Rome that oscillated between conspicuousness and invisibility.