The Italian Encounter with Tudor England
A Cultural Politics of Translation

A study of the role played by Italians and Italian culture in the early modern period.

Michael Wyatt (Author)

9780521848961, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2005

392 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.74 kg

Review of the hardback: 'England is from this vantage point a fulcrum of extraordinary interest, to which Michael Wyatt's wonderful book … introduces us.' Italians d'Inghilterra

The small but influential community of Italians that took shape in England in the fifteenth century initially consisted of ecclesiastics, humanists, merchants, bankers and artists. However, in the wake of the English Reformation, Italian Protestants joined other continental religious refugees in finding Tudor England to be a hospitable and productive haven, and they brought with them a cultural perspective informed by the ascendency among European elites of their vernacular language. This study maintains that questions of language are at the centre of the circulation of ideas in the early modern period. Wyatt first examines the agency of this shifting community of immigrant Italians in the transmission of Italy's cultural patrimony and its impact on the nascent English nation; Part Two turns to the exemplary career of John Florio, the Italo-Englishman who worked as a language teacher, lexicographer and translator in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Introduction
Part I. Italians in and on Early Modern England: 1. The two roses
2. Reformations
3. La Regina Helisabetta
Part II. John Florio and the Cultural Politics of Translation: 4. Language lessons
5. Worlds of words
Appendix I
Appendix II
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]