LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      Compiling Culture

      I Compyle: I make a boke as an auctour doth.

      —From the table of verbs in a 1530 translation dictionary

      William Thomas’s Historie of Italie is one of the more important surviving documents of the literary and political culture of the Renaissance in Europe.¹ Written by a clerk of England’s Privy Council and published in 1549 by the royal printer, the book offered a pragmatist’s guide to governance through firsthand accounts of Italian social organization. It passed through multiple reissues and remained popular into the 1590s; modern editions of Shakespeare often include excerpts and references that conjure an image of the playwright mining Thomas’s book for characters in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest.² But if you call up the sole copy of the Historie at St. John’s College Library in Cambridge, the text that arrives on your desk will come as some surprise. Instead of one book, you will find three books bound together: a pamphlet entitled Information for pilgrims into the Holy Land (1524), the Historie, and the medieval story collection Gesta Romanorum (1517).³ Also bound in the volume, between printed items, is a manuscript on London churches written by the sixteenth-century physician Myles Blomefylde, who owned this eclectic group of texts and whose handwriting is present throughout the compilation.⁴ For Blomefylde, it seems, The Historie of Italie had little value as a reflection on Italian politics or character. In the margins, he signed his initials to the names of the Venetian tourist sites he had visited (or imagined himself visiting) on a trip to the city. On a blank sheet preceding a section on “The Venetian Astate,” he gave Thomas’s work a new, more appropriate title: Myles Blomefylde in Venice (Fig. 1).