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Two houses both alike in dignity: Reginald Pole and Edmund Harvell*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Robert Barrington
Robert Barrington
Affiliation:
Department of History and Civilization, Istituto Universitario Europeo, Florence
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Abstract

In the period 1520–50 there was a large English community in the Veneto. This has traditionally been associated with the household of Reginald Pole, who is believed to have dispensed learning and patronage to those who went to the University of Padua in search of a continental education. However, an examination of both primary and secondary sources for the life of Pole suggests that he was only one of a number of reference points for young English scholars and travellers. Of equal, and perhaps greater, importance was the household of Edmund Harvell, a merchant who became English ambassador to the Republic. His household was philo-protestant in tone, and linked to Venetian dissenters and literary circles. These two central figures presented English scholars with the chance to experience the varying strands of Venetian political and religious philosophy at a time of great intellectual vitality. Men such as Richard Morison and Thomas Starkey returned home to write books about English government and society. When their work is set against the Venetian milieu of Harvell and Pole, we can gain a greater understanding of those Venetian influences which underpinned English political thought in the Tudor period and beyond.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 895 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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