Antonio Buonvisi and Florens Wilson : a European friendship

Abstract

The Luccan banker Antonio Buonvisi is widely known as one of Thomas More’s most intimate friends and his name is dotted through the official records of Henry VIII’s reign, yet we have little information about the man. His acquaintance with the Scottish humanist Florens Wilson, both in London and Lyons, does bring him into a sharper focus as well as providing, in Wilson’s Latin verses in his honour, a literary memorial to go with the remarkable letter that More sent him from the Tower. While he has been described as the patron of London’s ‘ultra-Catholics’, the evidence suggests that – in the 1530s at least – he retained some sympathy with those drawn to an Erasmian reform of the Church.