The Italian Encounter with Tudor England A Cultural Politics of Translation [Paperback]

A study of the role played by Italians and Italian culture in the early modern period.Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, this original study investigates the role played by Italians and Italian culture in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The small but significant Italian presence in Tudor England is explored through readings of documents and texts written in Italian and Latin, many of them appearing here in English translation for the first time. The second half of the book takes up the career of John Florio, language teacher, lexicographer, translator, and courtier--the most important of the Italians in Tudor England.Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, this original study investigates the role played by Italians and Italian culture in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The small but significant Italian presence in Tudor England is explored through readings of documents and texts written in Italian and Latin, many of them appearing here in English translation for the first time. The second half of the book takes up the career of John Florio, language teacher, lexicographer, translator, and courtier--the most important of the Italians in Tudor England.The small but influential community of Italians in England during 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. Michael Wyatt 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, as well as the exemplary career of John Florio, the Italo-Englishman who was a language teacher, lexicographer, and translator in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.Introduction; Part I. Italians in and on Early Modern Engll#x