As we have seen, language learning in later sixteenth-century England was engaged in a complex web of transactions that associated it with larger issues of cultural exchange – the theater, the fraught status of poetry, proverbial wisdom, courtesy, and the book trade – extending its significance beyond the boundaries within which it has conventionally been confined by Renaissance scholarship. During the years in which Florio was engaged in the language teaching that led to the publication of Firste and Second Frutes, he was also involved in a much more ambitious project, one at the heart of his vocation as a language merchant, whose scope reached far beyond the parameters of the language lesson at the same time that it provided a critical tool for the assimilation of language learning. A Worlde of Wordes appeared in print initially in 1598, and then again in an expanded second edition in 1611, rechristened as Queen Anna's New World of Words. These dictionaries served not only as indices to the lexical range of the Italian and English languages as they had developed by the end of the “long” sixteenth century, but they also enabled readings of the contemporary cultures that these languages represented.