Deciding on a title for this book was not easy, Stefano Villani reports, perhaps because he brings together two lines of investigation, either of which might have been treated in a book of its own. One of these would tell the story of various attempts to commend to Roman Catholics in Italy a more excellent way—a form of Christianity neither papal nor in the European sense protestant, such as had been established in England. That story, to which Villani's main title alludes, is in his phrase the story of a failure. Nothing like the Church of England was ever realized in Italian territory.
The other story Villani tells is indicated in his subtitle. This more specialized narrative concerns the chief identity-marker of what came to be known as Anglicanism: the statutory collection of liturgical rites the Book of Common Prayer comprises. The definitive version of the Prayer Book, issued in 1662, was translated into Italian and published in 1685. Unlike officially sponsored translations that had been provided for congregations where Welsh and French were spoken, Il libro delle prechiere publiche was not meant to be used in corporate worship. Nor were its promoters much concerned with “making Italy Anglican.” The primary purposes of this translation, at the time, were apologetic, polemical, and controversialist. Its spelling and orthography would later be revised, but with only a few small verbal changes it remained for the next 200 years the only Italian Prayer Book available in print. In the eighteenth century it was used by English travelers as a way of learning Italian, and occasionally it did fulfill its inherent function as a liturgical script in services conducted for Italian immigrants.
This second, largely bibliographical narrative is presented in the last two of the three parts of Villani's book. The first part discusses what little can be reconstructed with respect to two earlier translations that were never printed. One of the two is known only by report; the other exists in a single manuscript. Neither of them is connected with the 1685 translation. Both, however, play a part in Villani's sometimes conjectural account of seventeenth-century political and religious intrigues to which England, Venice, and the papacy were party. If an independent Venetian church that rejected the Council of Trent were to be established—an unlikely but not utterly impossible project—its worship would be conducted in the vernacular, perhaps along the lines of England's Book of Common Prayer. Such was the context in which the earliest Italian translation was (reportedly) made. Villani speculates that remnants of it may be preserved in a curious, hybrid manuscript written some thirty or forty years later.
Villani's erudition is prodigious, though not intrusive; auxiliary material and corroborative detail are packed into notes that nearly equal the main text in bulk. As a native speaker of Italian, he can comment reliably on translation as such. One mildly contentious case in point is the nomenclature for the cleric who presides at Prayer Book services. The 1662 English text uses two words more or less interchangeably: priest, which by reason of its sacrificial connotations clashes with Reformation theology, and minister, which does not. In Italian the available choices are prete, presbitero, sacerdote, and ministro, as well as anziano and one or two other, more uncommon terms. All of these have been employed; whether and how frequently any one of them appears in a particular recension of the Italian Prayer Book seems to reflect its editor's theological views, “high” or “low,” regarding the status and powers of the Christian clergy.
As for the aesthetic aspect of the Italian text, Villani offers few judgments of his own. Instead, by way of example, he assembles in an appendix ten Italian renderings of the same passage, including the one in a nineteenth-century translation of the American Book of Common Prayer. The text is the General Confession, recited daily at the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer. None of these samples is exactly the same as any other. Whether the alterations from one to the next make for improvement is left to competent readers to decide.
Since Making Italy Anglican is largely a book about translation, the fact that it is itself a translation should be mentioned. Villani wrote it in Italian. This may explain a few quirks in diction, as well as some inaccuracies that seem to be the result of translating back into English Villani's Italian renderings of Prayer Book language. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion appear as “articles of faith”; the prayer for “the whole state of Christ's church militant” becomes a prayer for “the Church of Christ in its militancy.” More serious are two references to the “Ascension Service.” The Book of Common Prayer does indeed provide services for Ascension Day, forty days after Easter, and has always done so; but that is not what Villani means. The service in question is not about Christ's ascent into heaven but about the ascent of the sovereign to the English throne—the Accession Service, that is, which was first annexed to the Prayer Book by order of James II in the same year that the Italian translation was published.
These blemishes are regrettable but minor. By and large, Villani's translator, Frank Gordon, has done him proud, providing an idiomatic English account of episodes that deserve to be better known.
