Stefano Villani reconstructs in this book the biography of George Friederick Nott (1768–1841), Anglican minister and polymath. This research is part of a larger project by Villani on the history of translations of the Book of Common Prayer into Italian (Nott was the author of a version in 1831).

The Nott family had a long tradition of Anglican chaplains, connected with the royal family. First an undergraduate at Oxford and then Fellow of All Souls, Nott initially earned a reputation as a theologian, being invited to give the Bampton Lectures in 1802, where he spoke vigorously against Methodism: Nott used any occasion to showcase his Tory convictions and High Church sentiments. As a result of his grand tour he became fascinated by Italy, where he spent many years. He was a canon of Winchester Cathedral (and supervised its restoration) and a tutor to Princess Charlotte; in Italy Nott was in contact with Vincenzo Monti, Giovan Battista Niccolini, a correspondent of the poet Giacomo Leopardi, and was befriended by Christian von Bunsen. He studied English literature, publishing the poems of the earl of Surrey and of Thomas Wyatt in 1815–16. Among the first members of the Institute of Archaeology in Rome, Nott was also a collector of antiquities, coins (now in the British Museum) and medals, and a bibliophile who built up a library of rare books and manuscripts. Bizarre, erudite and hypochondriac, he was caricatured in some of Trollope's novels, and he was certainly not beloved of Shelley and Byron for his moralising. He published editions of Dante and the nineteenth-century Avventuroso Ciciliano by Bosone of Gubbio.

In Villani's work, Nott becomes an emblematic figure of pre-Victorian England, whose network of relationships and different interests tell of the transition from eighteenth-century erudition to the new romantic sensibility. Villani's research is accurate and clever in the use of historical evidence, but also beautifully written, introducing the reader to the relevance of Nott's life and work. In particular, it is important to underline the importance of his translation into Italian of the Book of Common Prayer, approved by Archbishop Howley and financed by the SPCK, and printed in Leghorn in 1831, despite claims of a London first printing. The eighteenth-century versions of the Book of Common Prayer were often no more than instruments for teaching Italian, but Nott's edition displays the legacy of the Venetian crisis in the early seventeenth century, when it was translated for the first time by William Bedell, the Anglican chaplain and friend to Paolo Sarpi. Notably, this anti-Catholic tradition was revived in the nineteenth century, with the new role of Protestantism in the peninsula, even if the via media of the Book of Common Prayer, in the new nationalist context, was no longer a real alternative for Italians. Although not directly involved in Protestant propaganda, Nott contributed to the life of the Anglican chaplaincies in Italy in a remarkable way.