A Liturgical Use?

This chapter investigates some late attempts to revive the Italian Protestant Church of London made between 1690 and the first years of the eighteenth century by Benjamin Woodroffe, Ferdinando Cafarelli, and Laurentio Casotti. It was possibly at Casotti’s behest that the bookseller and printer Pierre de Varenne, a Huguenot who had taken refuge in England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and had a shop at the sign of “Seneca’s Head, near Somerset House in the Strand,” reissued the unsold sheets of Brown’s edition with a different frontispiece in 1708. Casotti invited “all lovers of the Italian tongue” to his sermons, showing clearly how they were aimed more to an English audience who wanted to practice their Italian than to a congregation of Italian Protestant.