This is the second of three parts of the sixth volume in a seven-volume collection - published between 1864 and 1890 - comprising Venetian and other northern Italian state papers relating to England. Translator and editor Rawdon Lubbock Brown (1806 83) lived for many years in Venice, had unrivalled access to the Venetian archives and travelled widely to find documents in other Italian libraries and archives. He had previously published two volumes of Sebastian Giustinian's dispatches to Venice from Henry VIII's court (also reissued in this series). This second part of the sixth volume...

Having married and settled in Florence in the 1840s, the poet and translator Theodosia Trollope (1816 65) found herself well placed to chronicle the events which contributed to the unification of Italy. While another Englishwoman in Italy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, would become better known for her verse, Trollope nevertheless firmly established herself in the liberal and literary circles of Florentine society, allowing her to witness at first hand, and explore in prose, the effects that the Risorgimento was having on those living through it. Vividly capturing the unfolding situation in...

This two-volume work by the historian Julia Pardoe (1804 62) was published in 1849. (Her bestselling account of life in Turkey and her biography of Marie de Medici are both also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.) Pardoe began writing poetry and novels, but later turned to non-fiction, especially travel narratives and historical biography. In this work, she attempts to remove the accretions of myth which have clung to Francis I and to his court. Noting the tendency of French historians to glorify the monarchs of the distant past, she observes: 'it is only by reference to the more...