In 1578, the author, teacher, translator, and lexicographer John Florio wrote of English that it was ‘a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing’. Florio lived in an age when English was a marginal language on the international stage, and when language-learning was central to the English encounter with the wider world. This book is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of Continental vernaculars. Moving from language lessons in early modern London to the texts, practices, and ideas that underlay vernacular language education in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and offering a new and multilingual understanding of early modern travel practices, it explores how early modern people learnt and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in this period. Multilingualism was a fact of life in early modern Europe: it animated and shaped travel, commerce, culture, diplomacy, education, warfare, and cultural encounter. This book offers a new and methodologically innovative study of a set of practices that were crucial to England’s encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. It argues for the importance of a historicized understanding of linguistic competence, and frames new ways of thinking about language, communication, and identity in a polyglot age.
The Italian London of John North: Cultural Contact and Linguistic Encounter in Early Modern England
