Sir Thomas Wyatt is enjoying a renaissance now, thanks to Susan Brigden's lucid biography (2012), Chris Stamatakis's rigorous and unedited reading of Wyatt's poetry in the manuscript tradition (Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting, 2012), and Jason Powell's textual scholarship for the soon-to-be-released new edition of Wyatt's works. In Wyatt Abroad William Rossiter uses this recent scholarship. Along with his own insights, to interrogate several long-held critical commonplaces in literary criticism of Wyatt's poetry. Significantly, Rossiter corrects the presumption that Wyatt's work marks a clear break from medieval poetics in English by contesting the grounds of such claims—namely the inwardness of Wyatt's lyrics, their incipient Protestantism and Petrarchism, and their sometimes sophisticated humanist practice of imitation.

Rossiter's introduction takes up the latter challenge, especially against the influence of Thomas Greene's account of Renaissance imitation in The Light in Troy (1986). To Greene's account of imitation as poesis, Rossiter adds an emphasis on translation, particularly as inflected by the needs of diplomacy. For Rossiter, translation “is a form of textual diplomacy, whilst … diplomacy is a form of translation,” so that the three terms—imitation, translation, and diplomacy—inevitably imply each other, at least in the line of diplomat-courtier-writers (Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Jean Froissart, Guillaume de Machaut, Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso) among whom Rossiter places Wyatt (7, 42). Imitation by translating both text and commentaries, a technique mostly associated with medieval poetics, more than resembles the ambassador's negotiations with sovereigns on behalf of his king: the requisite skillsets overlap significantly. Rossiter asks whether Wyatt is more late medieval or early modern, but his answer is really that the question is wrong: Wyatt is a diplomat-poet.

After an initial chapter refuting suggestions that French Petrarchist sources influenced Wyatt's poetry, Rossiter considers Wyatt in Italy (chapter 2) and in Spain (chapter 3). “Wyatt in Italy” is probably the strongest. Rossiter contests the idea that Wyatt's translations of Petrarch poems constitute an early form of English “Protestant poetics” in the ways they diverge from their Petrarchan originals. To the contrary, many of Wyatt's divergences from Petrarch can be explained by the fact that they tend to follow the commentaries in a 1525 edition of Petrarch's poems edited by Alessandro Vellutello. Rossiter shows parallels between the order of some translations of Petrarch poems in the Egerton manuscript and their order in Vellutello's edition. He credits Patricia Thomson for the suggestion that Wyatt worked with Vellutello's edition, but his analysis significantly advances the field: we probably will never have better evidence that Wyatt read the Vellutello edition closely. Scholars engaged with the transmission of Italian and Petrarchan poetics to England will be rewarded here.

Chapter 3, “Wyatt in Spayne,” is Rossiter's least ambitious. He aims to refute Kenneth Muir's very old claim that Wyatt transformed from “the fashionable courtier and writer of ballets” into “the hard-working diplomat [and] writer of satires and penitential psalms” as a result of his imprisonment in May 1536 and the sight of the execution of Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers (127). Instead, Rossiter finds in the “Spanish” poems (“So feble is the threde,” “Off Cartage hee,” and “Tagus, fare well”) a conflation of diplomatic and amorous frustrations, all of which turn on the strained relationship between truth and appearance (150); in this, Rossiter only confirms Greene's argument that “moral ambiguities turn out to be semiotic ambiguities” (147). Rossiter's insight that “So feeble is the threde” is best understood in the context of the frustrations and reversals of Wyatt's embassy to the Imperial court is sound, as is his conclusion that the speaker desperately seeks “trust,” as opposed to the “speranza” of the Petrarch canzone being imitated (133). But Rossiter's usual engagement with current scholarship and his attention to revisions in the Egerton manuscript lapse here: Chris Stamatakis's argument that “Tagus, fare well” answers “So feble is the threde” and reenergizes its anxieties is surely relevant to Rossiter's claim. Likewise, revisions like those to “So feble,” where Wyatt considered writing “at evill will … my diepe dispaire fulfilles” (l. 88) would support Rossiter's claims and offer grounds for extending them. The argument concerning “Tagus, fare well” rests on analogy become equivocation: “the desire for the beloved is transposed onto Love himself, who is equated with the Ruler, whose power over the speaker's life … entails that ‘He may be cleped a god’” (142). Likewise, Rossiter inserts desire for a beloved into a poem that mentions no beloved and whose only mention of love—with a lower-case “l”—is love borne for “my kyng.” However, such weaknesses are rare in Wyatt Abroad, and most of chapter 3 is sound, just not groundbreaking.

In the stronger fourth chapter, Rossiter interrogates the notion that the “Protestant poetics” of Wyatt's translation of the penitential psalms are cut whole cloth from his personal religious convictions and are thus “original.” Ably synthesizing extensive scholarship on the influences on Wyatt's penitential psalms, Rossiter focuses on three he finds most important. He argues that the Protestantism of Wyatt's psalms was present in his major sources: Pietro Aretino's I setti salmi (1534); Antonio Brucioli's commentary, I sacri psalmi di David (1534); and Johannes Campensis's Latin paraphrase, Enchiridion Psalmorum (1533). He judiciously acknowledges the influence of John Fisher's Treatyse on the penitential psalms (1509) also. If doctrinally reformist aspects of Wyatt's penitential psalms are decidedly Italianate, Rossiter argues, then the Henrician, English aspect of Wyatt's psalms is that their setting in a “monarchical discourse of fealty and subjection consonant with events at Henry's court” politicizes them (190).

Wyatt Abroad exemplifies what literary interpretation informed by a sound grasp of the textual tradition can do. Its methodological strengths bring to life the history of textuality and the textuality of history. More important, Rossiter marries the best insights offered by studies of social and cultural textuality to continuous attention to the moment and significance of artistic creation. For these achievements, scholars and the critics of the famous division of kingdoms owe Rossiter attention and, indeed, gratitude.