This comparative volume advances an argument about the sustained contribu-tion of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts.Firstly, those named most often by others as “migrants” do not represent a sudden, unprecedented crisis, as pundits and politicians continue to claim, with successive waves of migration. Instead, people arriving in the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, landing on the Italian islands of Sicily and Lampedusa, held up on the French coast of the Channel – and drowning in increasing numbers – are the latest generations of migrantes, migranti, migrants to participate in European life. They stand in a long line, heirs of the perennial presence of those who started their lives “elsewhere,” who were forced to move or chose to do so, all of them learning to live in several languages.This volume breaks with the notion of a current-day migration emergency to show, secondly, that what we pragmatically call “Europe” has never been bounded by the seas that surround it (Abulafia, 2019). Peoples have regularly been crossing the Mediterranean in the south, travelling through the continent, traversing the Channel in the north. This circulation of men, women, and children, the movement of inventive ideas they bring with them is far from exceptional – it is the lifeblood of culture. Contributors to the volume counter the perception of crisis by conceiving of a cultural history of the European continent as one time-honored site of significant movements of peoples.