Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations: The Italian Influence

by

Giovanni Iamartino

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0212

Introduction

Anglo-Italian cultural relations have always been fairly close. Even if one leaves aside Anglo-Saxon times and the missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great to bring Christianity to England, the medieval and later periods witnessed the coming and going of people, goods, works of art, books, and ideas between Britain and Italy: on the English side, from Geoffrey Chaucer traveling to Italy and being influenced by Dante’s and Petrarch’s works to the Inglese Italianato of the Renaissance and the British Grand Tourists of later times, up to the present-day lovers of “Chiantishire”; on the Italian side, bankers, musicians, and artists gravitating towards London, then the anglomania of the eighteenth century, the rage for Byron and the cult of Britain’s political institutions in the following century, as well as the admiration for all things British ever since. In general terms, the crosscurrents of influence and exchange between Italy and Britain, though usually quite strong, were not synchronous: the taking and giving were prevalent in the two countries at different times. Given this context, Anglo-Italian cultural relations have long been the object of academic research, the traditional critical interest for literature, art, and music being widened, especially in recent decades, to include linguistic, historical, and sociocultural issues. Research focuses on such topics as the reception of authors and the editions, translations, or critical assessments of their works, the various stages of Anglo-Italian relations against the backdrop of the nations’ sociocultural and political history, as well as in-depth analyses of the contacts and reciprocal influence between the two languages. Of course, while some studies have a decidedly literary, linguistic, or sociocultural and historical character, others display an overlapping of different research perspectives, which is particularly interesting and revealing in the case of Anglo-Italian relations. The present bibliography only deals with the Italian influence on the British cultural world, since including a bibliographical survey of the impact in the opposite direction would require at least an equally long list of material, and a different organization of it. With a few exceptions, the terminus a quo for the selected items is the 1990s, when Alfonso Sammut’s Bibliography of Anglo-Italian Comparative Literary Criticism, 1800–1990 was published. Little or no reference will be made to works discussing the Italian influence in the field of music and the visual arts (to be dealt with in other Oxford Bibliographies). No mention will be made of research dealing with the British interest in all things Italian in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not so much because the range of relevant areas would probably increase beyond control, but because the most relevant ones—for example, the food-and-drink, fashion, and luxury industries—would be largely unrelated to the traditional, age-old lure of Italy.

General Overviews

Single-author general overviews of the history of Anglo-Italian relations, or one of their main branches or periods, have not been published in recent decades: there are no 21st-century works comparable to Sells 1955, Jack 1972, or Churchill 1980; as a matter of fact, present-day scholars prefer to discuss a more limited timespan or topic (as the following sections will show). Overviews of a sort, spanning a given period or group of authors, are usually provided by means of collections of essays, which display a varying degree of coherence and exhaustiveness. They may deal with either the later Middle Ages (Fulton and Campopiano 2018), the Renaissance (Kirkpatrick 1995, Höfele and von Koppenfels 2005), or the Romanic era (Bandiera and Saglia 2005), with some collections showing a more wide-ranging approach (Pfister and Schaff 1999, Galigani 2007, Pfister and Hertel 2008). Such collections may complement the more focused monograph studies listed in the following sections of this bibliography.

• Bandiera, Laura, and Diego Saglia, eds. British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005.

  The three keywords in the subtitle of this important collection of essays describe its specific focus, i.e., the different forms of British scholarship about Italian literature, history, and culture in the Romantic period, as a necessary counterpart to the then fascination with and myth of Italy. Essays on the British approach to Italy’s heritage (Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and the lyrical tradition) are followed by others on British views of contemporary Italian literature.

• Churchill, Kenneth. Italy and English Literature, 1764–1930. London: Macmillan, 1980.

  DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-04642-3

  Provides a broad and valuable survey of Italy’s literary and cultural impact on England from the heydays of the Grand Tour until after the Fascist regime had been well established on the peninsula. Churchill’s discussion still makes interesting reading, especially in that it traces the changing role and significance of Italy for British writers.

• Fulton, Helen, and Michele Campopiano, eds. Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages. York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2018.

  A collection of essays illustrating the sociopolitical and literary interactions between Britain and Italy in the later Middle Ages. Topics cover areas such as banking, international trade, and Italian merchants in England, political ideas, literary connections, and the impact of Italian humanism on British intellectual life.

• Galigani, Giuseppe, ed. Italomania(s): Italy and the English-Speaking World from Chaucer to Seamus Heaney. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2007.

  Originally a collection of papers read at an international conference held in Florence in June 2005, this book gathers a wide range of critical responses to the literary influence of Italian authors (conspicuous among them Dante, Boccaccio, and Tasso, but also Florio, Della Casa, and others) on a number of writers of the English-speaking world (from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Mary Shelley, the Pre-Raphaelites, up to Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney).

• Höfele, Andreas, and Werner von Koppenfels, eds. Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005.

  A particularly useful resource for the advanced student of cultural contact and exchange in early modern Europe, this book is framed by such methodologically relevant concepts as border-crossing mobility, mediation, circulation, and hybridity; in a way, it challenges the Burckhardtian notion of Renaissance man. The case studies presented in the book focus on different kinds of Renaissance go-betweens: translators and masters of languages (Florio), thinkers (Bruno), scientists (Dee), travelers, and intermediaries.

• Jack, Ronald D. S. The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972.

  A comprehensive overview of Scotland’s literary debt to Italy covering the period from Robert Henryson to Walter Scott. The different chapters are of unequal value, but they do provide interesting information on the impact of humanism on Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, and David Lindsay, as well as useful criticism on such poets as Sir William Alexander and William Drummond.

• Kirkpatrick, Robin. English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

  Surveys the period when Italian literary culture had the strongest impact on English writers: the Three Crowns, Renaissance humanism, epic romance and pastoral poetry, comedy, and the novella are considered in turn, together with English imitations, translations, or adaptations. A learned yet readable book, and a very good introduction to Anglo-Italian relations for students.

• Pfister, Manfred, and Ralf Hertel, eds. Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008.

  A rich collection of essays on Englishness and Italianità and their relations, divided into five sections dealing in turn with literary exchanges (Bruno’s dialogues; Iachimo as an Italian villain in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), art (Inigo Jones; 19th-century sculpture), traveling images (Byron; Barrett Browning; stereotypes of feminine beauty), political negotiations (with a focus on the twentieth century), and contemporary mediations between Britain and Italy (topics include tourism, media, football, music, and food).

• Pfister, Manfred, and Barbara Schaff, eds. Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1999.

  Dealing with Venice as both a place and a literary topos, the seventeen essays in this fascinating collection provide a composite picture of Anglo-Italian relations from a special viewpoint. A fairly large number of writers on and visitors to Venice are discussed; among them, Thomas Coryate, William Shakespeare, Mary Wortley Montague, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, Henry James, Vernon Lee, and Jeannette Winterson.

• Sells, Arthur Lytton. The Italian Influence in English Poetry: From Chaucer to Southwell. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955.

  In some way a pioneering work and a classic in its own right, this book provides an overview of the influence of Italian literature, and also of Italian painting, on English poetry, from Chaucer to Southwell, writer by writer. In 1964 Sells extended his analysis on the following period (The Paradise of Travellers: The Italian Influence on Englishmen in the Seventeenth Century. London: George Allen and Unwin).