John Florio and the Circulation of "Stranger" Cultures in Early Stuart Britain

FAIN: FB-56636-12

Michael William Wyatt
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Stanford, CA 94305)

When James VI of Scotland arrived in England in 1603 he found a country already greatly influenced by the presence of continental 'strangers'--foreigners in English legal parlance. As a foreigner himself in England, James brought with him a set of cultural coordinates determined by the French legacy of his mother's family, the Latin humanism of his Scots education, and the theological issues that had divided Europe in the sixteenth century. This project aims to examine the re-configuration of the 'stranger' presence in early Stuart Britain that James's accession to the English crown initiated. John Florio--whose early career in Elizabethan England I have previously studied--will here serve here as an emblem, both positively and negatively, of the new currents operative in Stuart Britain, but other 'strangers' there will also figure in my broader effort to delineate the cultural, political, and religious implications of foreign contributions to the emerging British nation.