How to Do Things with Florio. New Approaches, New Essays

This collection of seven essays offers an invitation to re-read the oeuvre of John Florio—the Anglo-Italian lexicographer, translator, reader in Italian, and cultural mediator whose extraordinary versatility enabled him to navigate with ease the intellectual landscape and the book market of Elizabethan England. Much of the critical literature on John Florio, produced in both the Anglophone world and in Italy over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has consistently advanced a cultural and literary reading of his work. So prolific and significant a figure in the shaping of early modern English language and culture—particularly in its dialogue with Italian cultural and linguistic traditions—John Florio thus seems a timely subject for reappraisal through the lens of new interpretative and methodological paradigms. More ambitiously, this collection explores how contemporary critical frameworks, developed to engage with present-day historical, cultural, and literary phenomena, can illuminate the complex linguistic and cultural practices of the past. Grounded in the belief that much is to be gained from placing such methodologies in conversation with established traditions of historical and cultural criticism, the volume seeks to open new directions for scholarly engagement with the linguistic and cultural production of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.