Elizabethan Translations from the Italian: The Titles OP such Works Now First Collected and Arranged, With Annotations

Extract

The whole bibliography of Elizabethan translations from the Italian, as far as my researches have gone up to the present time, consists of 404 separate titles. Of these, I have already published 70 numbers in Part I, “Romances in Prose” (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. x, No. 2, June, 1895), and 82 numbers in Part II, “ Poetry, Plays, and Metrical Romances” (Ibid., Vol. xi, No. 4, December, 1896). The “ Miscellanea,” Part III, comprise 252 numbers, so many that I have found it convenient to divide them; The present paper contains 111 titles, classified under the general heads, religion and theology, science and the arts, grammars and dictionaries, and proverbs. It will be followed by a second section dealing with history and politics, voyages and discovery, manners and morals, and Italian and Latin publications in England. I need hardly add that this is merely a working classification. Many of the titles are obvious enough, but as is well known the Elizabethans exercised a lively fancy in the naming of books. To one uninstructed in the Elizabethan love of color and melody in phraseology, A Joyfull Jewell does not at once suggest a treatise on the plague, nor A Divine Herball a sermon, nor the Enimie of Idlenesse a complete letter-writer. I have no doubt but that with a wider acquaintance with the subject I should reclassify to a certain extent.