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The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Poetics of Translation.

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The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Poetics of Translation By Michael Wyatt New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Michael Wyatt's Italian Encounter with Tudor England opens with the description of England in John Florio's Firste Fruites (London, 1578), a book of Italian-English dialogues. Wyatt asks his reader to imagine what it would have been like for an Italian merchant to arrive in London in the late 1570s, speaking no English. According to Florio, he would have found himself in a country where the air is clear and the women are beautiful, where food is plentiful and good (though everyone prefers beer to wine), but also where la gente vanno vestiti con gran pompa ("the people go well appareled with great pomp") and il denaro regge ogni cosa ("money ruleth all things"). Other Italian accounts note the extraordinary social freedom enjoyed by Englishwomen, and our imaginary visitor might well have been surprised by the early modern English custom of kissing hello. He would also have found a small, but thriving Italian community, including merchants and court musicians. Best of all, Florio claims, the queen looks fondly on Italians and their culture: si diletta di padar con loro elegantissime ("delightes she to speak with them eloquently").

Much has been written on the influence of Italian culture in sixteenth-century England. But Wyatt's book is something new: an engaging, if at times diffuse, examination of the contact between actual Italian people and England in the sixteenth century. Although the English fascination with Italian culture goes back at least as far as Chaucer, most early modern Italians did not reciprocate the interest. (Boccaccio, for one, held to the traditional Roman view that England was remotissimus orbis angulus, the farthest corner of the world). Nonetheless, individual Italians engaged with England in various ways throughout the sixteenth century, and Wyatt makes an eloquent argument for the importance of the cultural connection they embodied.

Wyatt's study is divided into two sections. The first surveys...

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