"Perfit Readiness": Elizabeth Learning and Using Italian

Recent research has uncovered a number of letters in Italian written or dictated by Queen Elizabeth and directed to foreign potentates. At the same time, the recent complete edition of her works has shown her talent as a translator from and into many languages. Many contemporary documents bear witness to Queen Elizabeth I’s linguistic talent; yet, any praise of her proficiency in Italian has been considered somewhat suspect, given the fashion of this language in sixteenth-century England and the indisputable fact that any assessment of the intellectual abilities of a monarch cannot but be biased. However, the attention paid, in Elizabeth’s own time, to her knowledge of ancient and modern languages, Italian among them, exceeds the boundaries of conventional praise to a monarch: other monarchs (even the erudite James VI/I) never reaped such compliments from so diverse a set of witnesses. As this talk will show, the praise was well-founded. I will take into consideration both the testimony of people who were close to Elizabeth as a princess and a queen, and the evidence offered by what we know of her education and of the library she had at her disposal, her well as her use of Italian phrases and idioms in conversation and correspondence.