Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- Part 1 ‘A parlar d'Inghilterra’: Italians in and on Early Modern England
- 1 The two roses
- 2 Reformations
- 3 La Regina Helisabetta
- Part 2 John Florio and the Cultural Politics of Translation
- Appendix I
- Appendix II
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge studies in renaissance literature and culture
3 - La Regina Helisabetta
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- Part 1 ‘A parlar d'Inghilterra’: Italians in and on Early Modern England
- 1 The two roses
- 2 Reformations
- 3 La Regina Helisabetta
- Part 2 John Florio and the Cultural Politics of Translation
- Appendix I
- Appendix II
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge studies in renaissance literature and culture
Summary
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.
Jonathan Reynolds, Discourses on ArtThe accession of Elizabeth to the English throne initiated what was to be the longest and relatively most stable period in Tudor history. And yet the Elizabethan era was consistently marked by paradox: at no time before had elite English culture been so preoccupied with the world beyond its island limits and never in its recent history had the country been so isolated from the rest of the world; the great colonizing power that England was to become in the later sixteenth century was ruled by a sovereign who seldom traveled more than a hundred miles from London but who nevertheless had an easy command of Italian, French, Latin, and Greek; and despite the queen's formidable intellectual gifts, the culture that she encouraged was characterized by a distinctly anti-intellectual tenor, many of the most distinguished minds of the epoch over which she presided marked more for their distance from court than by their proximity to it. The position of the Italian in England in the Elizabethan period is indelibly marked by the same incongruities, for while one of the queen's closest personal associates was an Italian immigrant, many of the most significant Italian voices in these years registered only slightly, if at all, in the royal ear.
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- Information
- The Italian Encounter with Tudor EnglandA Cultural Politics of Translation, pp. 117 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005