Roscoe, William

ROSCOE, WILLIAM. - English historian and polygraph, b. at Liverpool on 8 March 1753 and d. there on 30 June 1831.

After a momentary enthusiasm for the French Revolution, R. devoted himself to the study of the civilization of the Italian Renaissance with the help of friends, especially the librarians of the Laurenziana and the Riccardiana, and, making use of the Latin biography by Fabbroni, he published in 1796 The life of Lorenzo dei Medici called the Magnificent (which enjoyed enormous success and was soon translated into various languages), an attempt to reconstruct Italian humanism and the Renaissance, in which the effort of criticism and erudite documentation is above all [outweighed] by the passion for the subject, narrated with the emotion of the artist rather than with the serenity of the scholar. In 1805 appeared The history of the life and pontificate of Leo the Thenth, which, because of its judgments, displeased both Catholics and Protestants (it was placed on the Index on 26 March 1825). R.'s works gave England a highly evocative picture of Italian civilization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a vast movement among the public and scholars, which underlies the cultural and sentimental interest in Italy, typical of certain aspects of English Romanticism.

Francesco Natale