Does "Europe" have a common historical identity

In this chapter we will first examine what the label Europe has been used to indicate in both modern and historical times. In the course of this we will examine the recent political controversy over the centrality or otherwise of Christianity to European traditions and unity. We will examine data from the Italian and UK press partitions of the IntUne Corpus drawn from four Italian and four British newspapers (see the Introduction to this volume for the composition of the corpus) for traces of awareness of a common European historical identity and attempt to contrast different stances both between the two national presses and among individual newspaper titles.