ABSTRACT
The opening sentences of Tottel’s notice “to the Reader,” we saw, assert that poetry can be written as “praiseworthely” in English as it can in other tongues, and the benchmarks are “the workes of diuers Latines, Italians, and other.” It was not strictly necessary that Tottel’s prospective customers knew the names of these “diuers,” let alone “the workes” themselves; they just needed to have a vague awareness that ancient Rome, Italy of late, and some other foreign lands could boast of poets who had won more worldly renown than England’s. If Tottel himself had in mind particular foreign poets who had written praiseworthily “in small parcelles,” these would firstly have been the obvious ones, the Roman Horace and Tuscan Petrarch, and perhaps secondarily those besides Horace and Petrarch who also were translated or imitated in many of the Miscellany’s verses. These include, in Latin, Theodore Beza (Théodore de Bèze, 1519–1605), who published a collection of mostly amorous poems in 1548, just before his spiritual awakening that inspired him to move to Geneva where he became John Calvin’s disciple; and in Italian, the later Petrarchans Serafino Aquilano (Serafino de’ Ciminelli, 1466–1500) and Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530).
