This collection shows various declinations of the early modern Italian marvellous, whose English translation often became a moralized version of Italy's uniqueness.Through the analysis of various literary genres the volume focuses on the mechanisms of appropriation and rejection of Italian culture through imported topoi and narremes

Beatrice Fuga holds a PhD in English Studies. After completing her Master's degree in English Studies, she obtained a funded PhD at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she currently teaches English literature, grammar and translation. Her research revolves around the reception of Italian novelle in the early modern period, and the role of translation in European cultural and political relationships. She has published articles on the reception of Italian novelle in early modern Europe, the interaction between the novella and English early modern theatre, and the materiality of the book. She also works on the translation of medical texts in early modern England, and on the cultural and medical representation of love melancholy and hysteria.

Alessandra Petrina is Professor of English Literature at the Università di Padova, Italy. Her research focuses primarily on late-medieval and early modern intellectual history, and on Anglo-Italian cultural relations. She has published The Kingis Quair (1997), Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-century England. The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (2004), Machiavelli in the British Isles. Two Early Modern Translations of the Prince (2009), and Petrarch's Triumphi in the British Isles (2020). Her latest book is Shakespeare. Guida ad Otello (2022).

List of Contributors

1. Beatrice Fuga

Introduction: the taming of the mirabile

Section 1: The moralization of tragedy

2. Alice Equestri

George Turberville and the politics of tragedy, power and love in the Tragical Tales (1574)

3. Flavia Palma

'States in woe' and 'wretched wights': George Turberville's Tragical Tales and the Italian novelle

4. Luigi Marfé

Geoffrey Fenton and 'the Italian manner': moralizing Bandello, exoticizing Italy

Section 2: Moralizing custom

5. Francisco Nahoe

Urbino englished: Castiglione in unfamiliar clime

6. Luca Baratta

'Polished and filed according to the right sence of the author': domesticating Leonardo Fioravanti's Del reggimento della peste in Elizabethan England

Section 3: From Orlando to Othello

7. Richard Hillman

Reverberations of Rodomonte in and around Othello

8. Alessandra Petrina

'The immortal part': Othello, Giraldi Cinzio's novella, and the power of words

9. Kiawna Brewster

Charlotte Lennox as translator and critic: feminine subjectivity and Italian identity in Cinzio's Gli ecatommiti and Shakespeare's Othello

Section 4: Moralizing Women

10. Elena Spinelli

Appropriating morality: the tale of Ghismonda and the English Decameron

11. Anne Geoffroy

'What followed it were folly to describe': representing Venice in early modern English Translations of Italian novelle and the poetics of edification

12. Beatrice Fuga

Resounding Fame in Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554) and Geoffrey Fenton's Tragicall Discourses (1567)

Index