ABSTRACT
Bruno’s presence in England in the mid-1580s has been extensively studied, most recently and comprehensively by Saverio Ricci in his intellectual biography of the Nolano; in the proceedings of the conference organized in 1994 at the Warburg Institute by Nicholas Mann and Michele Ciliberto; in Hilary Gatti’s The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge and Nuccio Ordine’s La cabala del asino; the important scholarship of Frances Yates; and, of course, the foundational curatorial work of Giovanni Aquilecchia, Giovanni Gentile, and Vincenzo Spampanato.1 This scholarly filone has examined both Bruno’s controversial and contested activities in England, most importantly the vernacular literary/philosophical/scientific work that he produced in an explosion of writing and publishing during his few years there. All of these scholars have noted Bruno’s relationship to the Italo-Anglo language merchant John Florio, and several of them have mapped out in detail the personal and linguistic character of their friendship. The subject of this chapter draws on the preceding tradition of Bruno scholarship in order to examine the impact Florio’s encounter with Bruno had on the subsequent elaboration of the two editions of his Italian-English dictionary, A World of Words (1598) and Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611).
