John Florio and the cultural politics of translation

This dissertation examines the translation and appropriation of Italian Renaissance culture within the context of early modern England by focusing first on the community of Italians resident in London throughout the Tudor and early Stuart eras and then on the career of John Florio, a language teacher, lexicographer, and translator. The project revisits earlier English Renaissance scholarship, inverting its predominant paradigm---the significance of Italian influence for English Renaissance culture---through looking at the particular forms that Italians, their language and culture assumed in England over the course of the sixteenth century.;The trajectory of this engagement follows an arc, beginning with the first Italians who came to England in the middle of the fifteenth century in the service of the reigning monarchs. Their successors---among them humanists, ecclesiastics, merchants, and religious refugees---enjoyed an ever-increasing visibility both at court and in wider social circumstances in the Tudor period (particularly under Elizabeth), but with the advent of the Stuart era and its shift in political and cultural priorities, Italy came to represent less a distinctive space within the emerging English 'nation' than a place to be visited, those Italians remaining in England for the most part fully assimilated into its developing culture.;The shifting fortunes of Italy in early modern England are reflected in Florio's life and career. Though a 'virtual' Italian by dint of his English birth and the unlikelihood of his ever having visited Italy, Florio served as the most important conduit of Italian Renaissance language and culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The son of an Italian religious refugee, he worked for over two decades as a language teacher-publishing two dialogue books, the First and Second Fruits, as well as the first Italian-English dictionaries, A World of Words and Queen Anna's New World of Words---before joining the court of James I as secretary and tutor to Queen Anne. Most noted as the first translator of Montaigne into English, this study argues for Florio's even greater significance as both an agent and emblem of the circulation of Italian Renaissance culture within the early modern English context.