Elizabeth’s Italian: Linguistic Standards and Interlingual Interference

Elizabeth’s Italian is positioned naturally against the back-drop of the presence of the Italian language (and culture in general) in Tudor England, a well-documented fact from the studies of Sergio Rossi right up to the more recent ones by Michael Wyatt. This is a presence that we know to be contradictory On one hand, there was the prestige of the language of Petrarch and Boccaccio and the fascination produced by the Italian Renaissance on English intellectuals, as well as the practical function that the Italian language was fulfilling in European society at that time (thanks to the still very important role of the Italian banks and shipping companies in the warehouses and ports of the Near East);1 on the other, we have the counterweight of the diffidence which grew up during the reformation period towards Italian “papism” and a considerable aversion to “machiavellianism” in the political and moral life of the peninsula.2