Learning Italian

Abstract

The seventeenth-century translation of the Book of Common Prayer was re-edited in 1733 by the Scot Alexander Gordon and in 1796 (with a few slight amendments) by the two Italians Antonio Montucci and Luigi Valetti. The most likely reason for the decision to republish this text was the idea of using this translation of the Book of Common Prayer as a “reading text” for mastering the Italian language. New editions were published in 1820 by the bookseller-publisher Giovanni Battista Rolandi—a political exile who had settled in London—and, starting in 1821, as part of the polyglot editions published by Samuel Bagster. These early nineteenth-century editions of the Book of Common Prayer seem to have chiefly focused on the commercial success of a text with a large target audience of the English bound for Italy on the Grand Tour.