The Padua unit explores anglophone literature’s relation to the Bible in poetic and creative forms, within the construction of national identity, by focusing on a number of significant case studies. We begin from Old English, investigating the way in which translator and glossator generate an interweaving of Christian elements with the heroic features of epic. Christ is a hero bringing victory through suffering in God’s plan of salvation. Christ as Saviour becomes Christ as warrior, at the same time submitting completely to God’s will, in the typically Germanic relationship between chieftain and retainer. This interpretation generated poems highlighting the heroic role of Christ or other biblical figures: Christ and Satan, Judith, Genesis B, The Dream of the Rood. We then move to Middle English with a study of the fourteenth-century illuminated Auchinleck manuscript anthology, a codex including religious texts (prayers, meditations, hagiographies) and celebrations of English identity (Guy of Warwick, Arthur and Merlin), interspersed by translations and rewritings of the Bible. Auchinleck, conceived as a unified volume, includes a glossed Paternoster and the Speculum Guy of Warwick, in which Biblical passages are quoted in Latin and followed by translation and commentary. The Speculum Guy of Warwick proves inherently complex not only due to the variety of the sources of the Latin quotations, but also and above all by the continuous references to the Bible, to patristic works and medieval scholasticism also pervading the Middle English passages. This complex network of intertextual allusions has only partially been uncovered by Morrill’s 1898 edition of the Speculum Gy de Warewyke; therefore, the current project aims at providing further insight into the Biblical quotations disseminated throughout the text. The resulting database of Biblical quotations will be then embedded into an updated scholarly digital edition of the Speculum Guy of Warwick edited by Omar Khalaf and Sibilla Siano. Poetic adaptation or recreation is thus joined by critical commentary, gloss and poetic reflection. A precious contribution in this sense is John Trevisa’s Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk, an extraordinary document using the form of the debate to uphold the practice of translation. Translation is the ideal instrument to vindicate the role of English as the emerging national language: Trevisa pursues this theme discussing translations of the Bible and highlighting the role translation plays in the formation of a national canon. The canon springs from the Biblical text: the nation celebrated the sacred work through poetic appropriation. Finally, we focus on the Penitential Psalms, used for translation/rewriting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. They were re-elaborated in the Middle Ages (e.g., Eleanor Hull) and in the Renaissance (Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Philip and Mary Sidney), in England but also in Scotland (William Fowler). For women translators, the adaptation of all seven psalms or of one only was a means of developing authorial credibility; the Psalms thus become a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement.