CITOLINI, Alessandro.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

La tipocosmia. First edition of this ambitious linguistic encyclopedia, an attempt to recreate the world in lexicographical terms, championing the vernacular against Latin. John Florio, the translator of Montaigne and connection of Shakespeare, used Citolini without acknowledgement for the Italian grammar included in Firste Fruites (London 1578), but mentions the present work in his English-Italian dictionary A Worlde of Wordes (London, 1598).Born in Serravalle in the Friuli, in 1565 Citolini travelled to Geneva and Strasbourg before settling as an exile in London. He was introduced in London through Sir John Cheke, tutor to Edward VI, who had been in Strasbourg during Queen Mary's reign, and performed official work for William Cecil at conferences in Europe. "Citolini's philological progressivism coupled with his heterodox religious identity rendered him a pariah in Italy, but both the apparent rejection of his linguistic ideas there and their adoption through John Florio's Italian advocacy in England mark a further pregnant state in the interplay between 'heresy' and the ascendancy of vernacular languages" (Wyatt, p. 209).Citolini felt ill-used in England and, in a letter sent to Queen Elizabeth on 14 August 1573, characterized his reception as "a strongbox full of warm promises, a great chest full of great hopes and a large purse full of nothing". In 1583 Giordano Bruno in his Cena de le Ceneri remembers "a poor M. Alessandro Citolini whose arm had been broken" by a violen

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