During the 1520s and 1530s Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet and diplomat, composed a number of translations and adaptations of European poetry (including the Penitential Psalms and works by Petrarch) when he was in embassy, or when he was engaged in other forms of international negotiations.This volume presents a comparative analysis of those poems which were directly or indirectly shaped by his ambassadorial experience. By examining the key points of divergence from and adaptation of his Italian, Latin and French sources and analogues, the author identifes the specific ways in which Wyatt reformed those sources in order to comment upon the lability of Tudor diplomacy and the political machinations at home and abroad which informed it - as well as the personal cost to Wyatt himself. The volume also identifies Wyatt's innovations and his debts, so redressing earlier interpretations of Wyatt's work which ignored its translative ontology. Through noting Wyatt's specific alterations and ameliorations, it allows a clearer image of his poetics to develop. Dr William T. Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

• Frontcover 2
• Contents 7
• List of Illustrations 8
• Acknowledgements 9
• Note on Editions Used 11
• Abbreviations 12
• Introduction: The First Reformer? 13
• 1 ‘Sovendra du chaseur’: Wyatt in France, French at the English court 59
• 2 ‘My galy charged’: Wyatt in Italy 102
• 3 ‘So feble is the threde’: Wyatt in Spayne 135
• 4 ‘Inward Sion’: Wyatt in Jerusalem – The Penitential Psalms and Soteriological Diplomacy 164
• Conclusion: ‘In Kent and Christendome’: Wyatt in England 210
• Glossary of Rhetorical and Literary Terms 237
• Bibliography 241
• Index 253