John Florio

  • TRANSLATOR
  • LEXICOGRAPHER
  • LINGUIST
  • POET

John Florio (1552–1625), was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I. He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in England. He contributed 1,149 words to the English language, placing third after Chaucer (with 2,012 words) and Shakespeare (with 1,969 words). He was the first translator of Montaigne into English, the first translator of Boccaccio into English and he wrote the first comprehensive Italian–English dictionary.

ABOUT FLORIO

The representative humanist

of the Elizabethan age.

Translator, teacher, secretary, lexicographer and encyclopedist, stylist, interpreter, book collector, philologist, and philosopher: John Florio was one of the most prodigious and learned scholars of the Renaissance. He was patronized by the Earl of Leicester and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, perhaps also patron of Shakespeare; he was an official “Groom of the Privy Chamber” reader in Italian to Prince Henry and tutor to Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Queen Anne of Denmark; he numbered Sir Edward Dyer, Fulke Greville, John Lyly, and Stephen Gosson among his pupils; his works were prefaced with commendatory poems by such men as Samuel Daniel, John Thorius, and Matthew Gwinne; he was the friend of Ben Jonson, Nicholas Breton, Richard Hakluyt, Theodore Diodati, Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and Giordano Bruno.

READ THE NOVEL

Resolute John Florio At The French Embassy

A failed young writer, Mayson Jon, stumbles upon a retired schoolteacher with a secret: a lost manuscript that could rewrite history. Therefore, he’s catapulted from the quiet countryside of North Fly Jay to 1583 London, where John Florio and Giordano Bruno navigate political intrigue and foreign spies in the shadows of the French embassy. But, as Florio and Bruno form a bond over a dangerous creative ambition, their actions threaten to unravel history—and Mayson’s future along with it.

WORKS

John Florio's works

What death more sweet than die for love?

John Florio

/ First Fruits, 1578
WORKS

John Florio's life