The small but influential community of Italians in England during the fifteenth century initially consisted of ecclesiastics, humanists, merchants, bankers, and artists. However, in the wake of the English Reformation, Italian Protestants joined other continental religious refugees in finding Tudor England to be a hospitable and productive haven. Michael Wyatt examines the agency of this shifting community of immigrant Italians in the transmission of Italy's cultural patrimony and its impact on the nascent English nation, as well as the exemplary career of John Florio, the Italo-Englishman...

Laura Levine examines the ways in which Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson addressed a generation's anxieties about gender and the stage.