ABSTRACT

The aim of this Companion volume is to provide scholars and advanced graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research work on Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies. Written by a team of international scholars and experts in the field, the chapters are grouped into two large areas of influence and intertextuality, corresponding to the dual way in which early modern England looked upon the Italian world from the English perspective – Part 1: "Italian literature and culture" and Part 2: "Appropriations and ideologies". In the first part, prominent Italian authors, artists, and thinkers are examined as a direct source of inspiration, imitation, and divergence. The variegated English response to the cultural, ideological, and political implications of pervasive Italian intertextuality, in interrelated aspects of artistic and generic production, is dealt with in the second part. Constructed on the basis of a largely interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers an in-depth and wide-ranging treatment of the multifaceted ways in which Italy’s material world and its iconologies are represented, appropriated, and exploited in the literary and cultural domain of early modern England. For this reason, contributors were asked to write essays that not only reflect current thinking but also point to directions for future research and scholarship, while a purposefully conceived bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a detailed index round off the volume.

chapter |51 pages

Introduction

Past, present, and future in Anglo-Italian renaissance studies
ByMichele Marrapodi

part Part 1|214 pages

Italian literature and culture

chapter 1|20 pages

Dante's Vita Nuova and Petrarchismo

A critical review of contemporary scholarship
ByMarco Andreacchio

chapter 2|26 pages

Boccaccio's Decameron and theatricality

ByJanet Levarie Smarr

chapter 3|18 pages

Commedia erudita

Birth and transfiguration
ByLouise George Clubb

chapter 4|10 pages

Machiavelli's comedies of ‘virtù’

ByDuncan Salkeld

chapter 5|15 pages

Senecan tragedy in the English Renaissance

ByMario Domenichelli

chapter 6|16 pages

Masters of civility

Castiglione's Courtier, della Casa's Galateo, and Guazzo's Civil Conversation in early modern England
ByCathy Shrank

chapter 7|17 pages

‘Did Ariosto write it?’

The Orlando Furioso in Elizabethan poetry
BySelene Scarsi

chapter 8|15 pages

The Italian comici and commedia dell'arte

ByRichard Andrews

chapter 9|25 pages

Giordano Bruno in England

From London to Rome
ByGilberto Sacerdoti

chapter 10|14 pages

Italian pastoral tragicomedy and English early modern drama

ByRobert Henke

chapter 11|19 pages

The pastoral poem and novel

ByJane Tylus

chapter 12|17 pages

‘Oh that we had such an English Tasso’

Tasso in English poetry and drama to 1700
ByJason Lawrence

part Part 2|188 pages

Appropriations and ideologies

chapter 13|19 pages

Petrarch in England

ByJohn Roe

chapter 15|13 pages

Shakespeare and the arts of painting and music

ByDuncan Salkeld

chapter 16|17 pages

‘Absolute Castilio’?

The reputation and reception of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier in Elizabethan England
ByMary Partridge

chapter 17|13 pages

Machiavelli's Principe and the new ethics of power

ByAlessandra Petrina

chapter 18|16 pages

‘Boying their greatness’

Transnational effects of the Italian divas on the Shakespearean stage
ByRosalind Kerr

chapter 19|18 pages

Commedia dell'Arte in early modern English drama

ByEric Nicholson

chapter 20|13 pages

The scholarship of Italian and English renaissance festivals

ByJ. R. Mulryne

chapter 21|15 pages

John Florio and the circulation of Italian culture

ByMichael Wyatt

chapter 22|14 pages

Heretics, translators, intelligencers

Italian reformers in Tudor England
ByDiego Pirillo

chapter 23|16 pages

Italy, printing industry, and the cultural market in Elizabethan England

ByMario Domenichelli

chapter 24|16 pages

Anglo-Venetian networks

Paolo Sarpi in early modern England
ByChiara Petrolini, Diego Pirillo

chapter |5 pages

Afterword

Location and narration
ByKeir Elam