John Florio

John Florio: A Worlde of Wordes

JOHN FLORIO
A Critical Edition with an Introduction by Hermann W. Haller
LUIGI BALLERINI
MASSIMO CIAVOLELLO
Series: Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: University of Toronto Press
Pages: 856
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt2ttnwq
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  • Book Info
    John Florio
    Book Description:

    Award-winning author Hermann W. Haller has prepared the first critical edition of A Worlde of Wordes, which features 46,000 Italian entries - among them dialect forms, erotic terminology, colloquial phrases, and proverbs of the Italian language.

    eISBN: 978-1-4426-6367-1
    Subjects: History

Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
    (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    (pp. v-vi)
  3. Acknowledgments
    (pp. vii-vii)
  4. Introduction
    (pp. ix-xl)

    When John Florio arrived in Elizabethan England in the early 1570s, there was great interest in the Italian language and culture among the educated elite and at the court, while English, as suggested in one of his dialogue books, was not used ‘beyond Dover.’¹ It was a sign of sophistication to be able to speak Italian, and proficiency in Italian was highly prized among the queens and patrons whose favours Florio pursued throughout his life. Florio’s activities as a linguist and cultural mediator thus coincide with a time when Italian enjoyed a prominent international role, especially in the arts and...

  5. Editorial Criteria
    (pp. xli-xliv)
  6. Corrections to the 1598 Printed Version
    (pp. xlv-liv)
  7. Bibliography
    (pp. lv-lxiv)
  8. A Worlde of Wordes
    (pp. 1-2)
  9. Epistle Dedicatorie To the Right Honorable Patrons of Vertue, Patterns of Honor, Roger Earle of Rutland, Henrie Earle of Southampton, Lucie Countesse of Bedford.
    (pp. 3-8)
    JOHN FLORIO

    This dedication (Right Honorable and that worthily) may haply make your Honors muse; well fare that dedication, that may excite your muse. I am no auctorised Herauld to marshall your precedence. Private dutie might perhaps give one the prioritie, where publike respect should prefer another. To choose Tullie or Ausonius Consuls, is to prefer them before all but one; but to choose either the former of the twaine, is to prefer him before all. It is saide of Atreus in a fact most disorderly, that may be saide of any in so ordering his best dutie,

    It makes no matter...

  10. To the Reader
    (pp. 9-20)

    I knowe not how I may againe adventure an Epistle to the reader, so are these times, or readers in these times, most part sick of the sullens, and peevish in their sicknes, and conceited in their peevishnes. So should I feare the fire, that have felt the flame so lately, and flie from the sea, that have yet a vow to pay for escaping my last shipwracke. Then what will the world say for ventring againe? A SUO DANNO, will one say. ET A TORTO SI LAMENTA DEL MARE, CHI DUE VOLTE CI VUOL TORNARE, will another say. Good...

  11. The names of the Bookes and Auctors, that have bin read of purpose, for the accomplishing of this Dictionarie, and out of which it is collected.
    (pp. 21-22)

  12. DICTIONARY