8i8 Reviews The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. By MICHAELWYATT. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress. 2005. XiV+37I pp. ?50; $90. ISBN 978-o-52 I-84896-I. This book studies the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century encounter between England and Italy as a complex process of 'translation'.Wyatt acknowledges thepivo tal relevance of language in the encounter between the two nations, but he also deftly and very successfully extends the scope of his analysis by including a broad range of 'figural' instances of translation, non-linguistic intercultural forms of exchange involving politics, religion, and the sense of nationhood. The book's construction in twodifferentparts,with the second illustrating the first, isbold, but it works. Part i concentrates on theway inwhich, via encounters with me diating Italians (many ofwhom have remained obscure), English culture reinvented itselfduring the long sixteenth century.Wyatt constructs the Italian image of Eng land and sketches the contacts via the accounts of ambassadors, humanists, artists, and church officials, including Andrea Trevisan (absent from thebook's index), Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Titus Livius, Pietro Carmeliano, Baldassare Castiglione, Polidoro Virgilio, Guido Mazzoni, Pietro Torrigiano, Pietro Griffi, and Andrea della Rena. Wyatt furthertraces how these livelyearly contacts came under pressure during the 1530S asHenry VIII broke with Rome. He shows how theReformation gave rise to satirical portraits of theEnglish and their rulers by the Italians, but he is rightalso to stressmore serious formsof exchange involving, among others, Pietro Aretino. This neatly prepares the reader for thediscussion of the Italians inEngland who shared the Tudor reformation strategy,and for the case of theFlorios and other Italian settlers (though never inhuge numbers), particularly after the accession ofElizabeth I.Here the section on the status of the 'stranger' is especially useful, although the narrative does not lead tonew conclusions about theposition of the Italian aliens in the country, or the representatives of other nations for that matter, who found themselves in a cleft stick between popular xenophobia and aristocratic or humanist interest. The second part of the book concentrates on John Florio, with an emphasis on the language-lesson manuals of the period (towhich Florio added his own) and his dictionary projects.Wyatt shows how Florio's language manuals placed the dialogue in a recognizable social setting, and creatively engaged with current cultural debates and issues involving the transfer of Italian culture into England (the threatre, the issue of poetry and fictionality,the courtesy ideal, the publication of Italian books in England). Along similar lines,Wyatt reads Florio's dictionary projects, which may look primarily linguistic in focus, asmodes of cultural transmission in considerably broader terms.Florio's lexicography can be seen as ameans of defining the vernacu lar and ofwriting thenation in the course of a cross-national dialogue with Italy, its language, its literature. This is awell-researched and heavily annotated study,uncovering many new ma terials frommany different fields.The text is larded with often original examples and, notably, these are presented in an attractive cultural historical frameworkwhose humanist roots invite us to reflecton our own cultures and their (non-)interaction today.Wyatt reconstructs a complex and fascinating encounter, but if any critical note is due, itwould be that he fails sufficiently to engage with colleagues in the field and their views. Still, this study is a rare achievement, also in interlinguistic and interdisciplinary terms,bridging practical gaps thatmight have daunted many another researcher into passivity.Wyatt's is a significant contribution to the fieldof Anglo-Italian relations, and will be essential for thediscussion in thedecades to come. UTRECHT UNIVERSITY TON HOENSELAARS ...