Making Italy Anglican is a history of the ambitious and enduring movement to translate the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer into Italian between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an impressive and original work, which achieves the unusual feat of successfully bridging the divide between the early-modern and modern eras. The title echoes the famous call to ‘make Italians’ during the formation of the Italian nation-state in 1860 but, as Villani explains, it is intended to reflect a longstanding notion that the Anglican religious settlement could inspire not only religious but also social and political change in Italy (p.12). The tale is one of epic failure, although it informs our understanding of the wider history of the relationship between Britain and Italy from the Reformation to the Risorgimento.

The author – whose original manuscript was written in Italian and translated into English – maintains a tight control over an eminently readable narrative; this is remarkable, given the broad chronological scope, and the level of detail provided therein. There are ten chapters in total, divided between three broad sections, and several illustrations along the way. The first section (‘Part I: A Failed Schism’) examines the origin of what became something of a tradition, whereby the first Italian translation of the Anglican prayerbook was produced by the chaplain of the English Embassy to the Republic of Venice, at a time when the Venetian Interdict of 1606 raised the prospect of schism with the Roman Catholic Church. The second section (‘Part II: From the 1685 Brown Edition to the 1820s Polyglot Editions’) explores the evolution of Italian versions of the prayerbook between the first complete translation, which was promoted by a former chaplain to the Levant Company at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the growth in appeal of subsequent editions that appeared during the age of the Grand Tour. The third and most extensive section of the book (‘Part III: From the 1831 Nott Edition to the 1861 Camilleri Revision and Beyond’) places efforts to translate and circulate Italian versions of the prayerbook at the intersection of two important but rarely interwoven threads: the global history of Anglicanism on one hand, and the interaction between the British and the Italian Protestant worlds on the other. There is an appendix containing different examples of the General Confession and the Preface, which have been included to illustrate how subtly translations of the same text could vary. There are also two lists: the first contains translations of the original Book of Common Prayer dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (which Villani admits is far from complete); the second includes translations of the Book of Common Prayer of the United States’ Protestant Episcopal Church from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The discussion charts the history of the many Italian translations of the Anglican prayerbook which appeared across a period of almost 300 years. Due consideration is given to the motives behind their production as well as to their uses, both intended and unintended. Whereas the most common objective behind the various translations of the prayerbook was to encourage engagement with Anglican ideals, the futility of attempts to disseminate them in the staunchly Catholic Italian states of the eighteenth century ensured that Italian versions of the prayerbook assumed a purpose quite unforeseen. During a period when ‘the English Nobility and other Persons of Worth and Wisdom’ sought to improve their command of ‘this sweetest of languages’, Italian translations of the prayerbook found a sizeable market among British readers who wished to improve their language skills by reading a text with which they were already familiar, without recourse to a dictionary (p.83). This unexpected function appears to have been the only significant achievement of the entire movement to translate the Book of Common Prayer into Italian throughout the three centuries covered by the study.

As Italian aspirations towards nationhood grew, and as the British presence in the Italian peninsula increased, the practice of translating the prayerbook assumed a more political dimension. Anglican congregations became firmly established within British mercantile communities throughout Italy; so too did Anglican ministers, often through chaplaincies attached to diplomatic and consular offices. At the same time, a proliferation of religious societies active in Italy ensured an energetic force of activists ready to promote awareness of Anglican ideals throughout the country. Their zeal raised the prospect of marketing the ‘profundity and beauty of Anglican theology and liturgy’ (p.99), not so much to encourage Italian conversions to the Church of England, but rather to inspire some kind of religious reformation that might break the power of the Papacy. The exploitation of Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer for this purpose is consistent with the fairly extensive historiography on the religious motives behind the British interest in the Risorgimento. Nonetheless, all hopes of seeing Italy undergo some form of religious reformation were eventually defeated by the rise of the secular state during Italian unification, and the final translated versions of the prayerbook were aimed more at Italian migrants to London and New York.

Ultimately, Making Italy Anglican is a story of the promotion of the notion that Italians needed to secede from the Church of Rome or to reform it from within. Throughout this movement, Anglicanism was held as an exemplary ‘third way’ between Roman Catholicism and the more extreme forms of Protestantism emanating from other parts of Europe. Villani’s excellent book is a niche study, but one that provides a fascinating account of the potential cultural and political applications of the art of translation; one that explores the nature of the relationship between State and Church as much as that between Britain and Italy. Moreover, it chimes well with our understanding of the imperial and geopolitical ambitions nurtured by the British of influencing the process of modernisation in Italy, while drawing the peninsula and its islands into their sphere of influence within the Mediterranean.