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The Genesis of Tudor Interest in Italian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

George B. Parks
George B. Parks*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing 67, New York
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Extract

It is not generally realized how suddenly Italian culture and manners became popular in Tudor England. After Chaucer's surprising discovery and translation of Italian literature, it was nearly two centuries before another translation from the Italian was published in England. This was the Certayne Psalmes (1549) of Thomas Wyatt, taken from a work by Aretino. In the same decade, royalty took up the new interest. Henry VIII knew little if any Italian. Mary could understand it, probably because it was close to her mother's Spanish, which she spoke, but she did not speak or read Italian. Elizabeth, on the other hand, studied Italian when she was ten years old (1544), as we shall see presently, and she learned to speak it fluently. This progression marks the suddenness of the new obsessive taste for Italian, a taste which endured for a whole century. This essay will trace the genesis of the fashion.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 1962 , pp. 529 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Note 1 in page 529 Calendar of State Papers Venice, vi, ii (London, 1881), 1055.

Note 2 in page 529 Paget Toynbee in [London] Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 1920, p. 187; R. Weiss, “Per la conoscenza di Dante in Inghilterra nel Quattrocento,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, cviii (1936), 357.

Note 3 in page 529 So wrote Lily's son George in his “Elogia” (1548): “in vertendis autem Graecis aliquot Epigrammatibus, cum Thoma Moro adolescens contendit, in cuius gratiam Spiritei Hetrusci equitis libellum haud illepido argumento ad talorum iactum deductas sortes interpretantem, ex Hetrusca lingua in Britannicam, periucunda adhibita sermonis gratia, conuertit.” Cited from Pavli lovii … Descriptiones (Basel, 1561, ed.), p. 90.

Note 4 in page 529 The Boke of the fayre Gentylwoman, that no man shulde put his trust or confydence in: that is to say, Lady Fortune … Robert Wyer, n.d. [after 1538]. Not in STC: copy in Lambeth Palace Library.

Note 5 in page 529 Sig. verso.

Note 6 in page 529 Erasmus, Opus Epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen, ii (Oxford, 1910), 412: “quanquam probe calleat Italice.” I am grateful to Professor R. S. Sylvester for this reference.

Note 7 in page 529 Letters and Papers of Henry the Eighth, iv, i (London, 1870), 37.

Note 8 in page 529 Calendar of State Papers Venice, iii (London, 1869), nos. 527, 567, under date of 1522.

Note 9 in page 530 “Apologia ad Carolum Quintum Caesarem,” in Poli Epislolae, i (Brescia, 1744), 126.

Note 10 in page 530 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, v (London, 1877 ed.), 363.

Note 11 in page 530 Archives of the Venerable English College, Rome: Liber 13, fol. 100, as cited George B. Parks, The English Traveler to Italy, i (Rome and Stanford, 1954), 417.

Note 12 in page 530 Letters and Papers, vi (London, 1882), no. 670; vii (London, 1883), 84, 88; viii (London, 1885), 1121.

Note 13 in page 530 Ibid., vii, 1234.

Note 14 in page 530 Ibid., vii, 1263.

Note 16 in page 530 Ibid., xiv, ii (London, 1895), 712, dated 20 December 1539.

Note 16 in page 530 Pole, “Apologia,” ut cit., i, 135–136.

Note 17 in page 530 Letters and Papers, iv, iii (London, 1876), 6346, printed in full by Henry Ellis, Original Letters, series 3, ii (London, 1846), 177–178.

Note 18 in page 530 Letters and Papers, xiv, i (London, 1894), 285; correcting the date of 1537 assigned by Ellis, Original Letters, series 3, iii (London, 1846), 63.

Note 19 in page 530 Letters and Papers, vi (London, 1882), 1658.

Note 20 in page 530 The letters concerning a loan from Cromwell to the printer are ibid., vii (London, 1883), 422, 423, under date of 1534; xi (London, 1888), 1355, under date of 1536.

Note 21 in page 530 G. R. Elton, “The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell,” 5 Transactions Royal Historical Society, vi (1955), 84–86.

Note 22 in page 531 Sergio Baldi, La poesia di Sir Thomas Wyatt (Florence, 1953), “Appendice.”

Note 23 in page 531 The list is most conveniently available in Stanford E. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot Tudor Humanist (Austin, Texas, 1960), pp. 170–171.

Note 24 in page 531 The case was first made out by H. H. S. Croft in his edition of The Governour in 1880. It was developed by Pearl Hogrefe, “Elyot and the ‘Boke called Cortegiano in Ytalion’,” Modern Philology, xxvii (1930), 301–311; and it has been reviewed by John M. Major, Sir Thomas Elyot: Studies in Early Tudor Humanism (Harvard Univ. diss., 1954), and by Professor Lehmberg, op. cit.

Note 25 in page 531 Lehmberg, p. 109.

Note 26 in page 531 Ibid., p. 178.

Note 27 in page 531 Louis Sorieri, Boccaccio's Story of Tito e Gisippo in European Literature (New York, 1937), p. 158.

Note 28 in page 531 Lehmberg, p. 83.

Note 29 in page 532 The laboryouse journey & serche of Johan Leylande (London, 1549): address to the reader (STC, 15445).

Note 30 in page 532 Naenia Viati (London, 1542), reprinted by John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium … Catalogus (Basel, 1557 ed.), p. 104.

Note 31 in page 532 Encomia (London, 1589), pp. 71–72.

Note 32 in page 532 See n. 17 above.

Note 33 in page 532 Letters and Papers, xi (London, 1888), no. 1100: the letter given in full in Henry Ellis, Original Letters, series 2, ii (London, 1827), 66–68.

Note 34 in page 532 Edwin Casady, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (New York, 1938), p. 224.

Note 35 in page 532 Sergio Baldi, “The Secretary of the Duke of Norfolk and the First Italian Grammar in England,” in Wiener Beiträge zur englischen Philologie, lxv (Brunner Festschrift, 1957), 13.

Note 36 in page 532 I follow F. M. Padelford, The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (2d ed., Seattle, 1928).

Note 37 in page 532 W. Gordon Zeeveld, “Richard Morison. Official Apologist for Henry VIII,” PMLA, lv (1940), 416, 418, 422; also his Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 187–188. I restate with some corrections his identifications of Moryson's sources.

1) Apomaxis Calumniarum (written 1536, published 1538), sig. X iiv: passage on the fraudulent past growth of papal power is not from the Discorsi but from the Istorie Fiorentine, Book I, chs. iii, iv.

2) A Remedy for Sedition (1536), sig. B 1: the Dante line, “Viva la mia morte, muoia la mia vita” is quoted from Machiavelli, Discorsi, Book I, ch. liii, where it is assigned to De Monarchia. Machiavelli was mistaken, for the line is in Convivio, i.ii.54.

3) The same, sig. E iiv: the passage on Pagolantonio Soderini is from the Discorsi, Book i, ch. liv.

4) An Invective Ayenste … treason (1539), sigs. a iiii to a v: the anecdotes of incompetent conspiracy are not from the Istorie but from the Discorsi, Book iii, ch. vi.

Note 38 in page 533 An Exhortation to styrre all Englysshmen (1539), sigs. C viv to viiiv.

Note 39 in page 533 Letters and Papers, xv (London, 1896), 1029 (51), the date probably 1540.

Note 40 in page 533 Calendar of State Papers Foreign 1547–1553 (London, 1861), no. 550: 13 July 1552.

Note 41 in page 533 F. L. Baumer, in Politica, ii (1936), 188–205.

Note 42 in page 533 The information on Morley has all been collected by Herbert G. Wright, Early English Text Society, Original Series 214 (London, 1943), with an edition of Morley's translation of part of the De Casibus; the prefaces to the translations are printed in an appendix.

Note 43 in page 533 Wright, p. 189.

Note 44 in page 534 Additional MS. 25,469 (British Museum).

Note 45 in page 534 The 1566 catalogue is printed in John Strype, Life of … Sir Thomas Smith (London, 1820), Appendix vi, 274–281.

Note 46 in page 534 MS. Cotton Otho C.x.231: printed by Thomas Hearne, “Sylloge,” in his edition of Vita Henrici Quinti (Oxford, 1716), p. 164.

Note 47 in page 534 “Gallice Italiceque aeque ac Anglice loquitur”: The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles, i, i (London, 1865), 191; the date is 4 April 1550.

Note 48 in page 534 Ruth Hughey, ed., The Arundel Harington Manuscript (Columbus, Ohio, 1960), i, 360–363.

Note 49 in page 534 Scriptorum Illustrium … Catalogus (Basel, 1557), pars posterior, 109. John Clerc is decisively distinguished from Bishop John Clerk and from John Clerk, B.D., of Magdalen College, Oxford, by Sergio Baldi in the article cited above in note 35. The British Museum catalogue still lists him erroneously as John Clerke.

Note 50 in page 534 Letters and Papers, xiv, ii (London, 1895), no. 1489: ut cit. Baldi.

Note 51 in page 534 Lamant mal traicte de samye (Arnalt and Lucenda), by Diego Hernandez de San Pedro: published 1543 (STC, 546).

Note 52 in page 535 It was listed as seen by Thomas Tanner, Biographia britannico-hibernica (London, 1748), i, 185.

Note 53 in page 535 The original Beneficio di Gesu Cristo crocifisso, first published in Venice in 1542, is now ascribed to the Augustinian monk Benedetto da Mantua. Courtenay's translation was edited from the Cambridge manuscript in 1856. Another translation was published in London in 1573 (STC, 19114 et seq.).