Blackwell Reference Online

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John Florio (1553–1625) had a profound impact on Elizabethan language and literature because of his systematic promotion of foreign-language study, and his liberal attitude towards translation which favoured exuberance of expression over linguistic precision. He used lively dialogues to teach Italian while at the same time instructing his readers in etiquette, gentility, and the social graces. Through his ebullient translations, most notably of Jacques Cartier's Navigations (1580) and Michel de Montaigne's Essayes (1603), he introduced many words that have become part of everyday speech, such as ‘conscientious’, ‘facilitate’, ‘amusing’, ‘regret’, and ‘emotion’ ( Yates 1934 ). The son of an Italian Protestant refugee who fled the Inquisition, Florio was born in London during the reign of Edward VI. His father was in the employ of the Pembroke family and tutor to Lady Jane Grey, ‘the nine-day queen’, about whom he wrote a sympathetic biography. Florio's family prudently went to Antwerp when Queen Mary, a devout Catholic, came to the throne in 1553. While in exile he was sent to a grammar school renowned for its reformed Protestant theology supervised by Pier Paolo Vergerio, one of the most distinguished Italian refugees in the Grisons canton of Switzerland. Florio took advantage of the humanist curriculum at the University of Tübingen where he was registered in 1563, but seems ... log in or subscribe to read full text