ROSCOE, WILLIAM. - English historian and polygraph, born in Liverpool on 8 March 1753 and died there on 30 June 1831.
After a momentary enthusiasm for the French Revolution, R. devoted himself to the study of Italian Renaissance civilization with the help of friends, especially the librarians of the Laurentian and Riccardian libraries, and using the Latin biography by Fabbroni, published in 1796 *The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici called the Magnificent* (which had enormous success and was soon translated into various languages), an attempt to reconstruct Italian humanism and the Renaissance, where the effort of critical and scholarly documentation is overwhelmed by the passion for the subject, narrated with the emotion of the artist more than with the serenity of the scholar. In 1805 appeared *The History of the Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth*, which, on account 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 suggestive picture of Italian civilization in the 15th and 16th centuries and sparked a broad movement among the public and scholars, which underpins the cultural and sentimental interest in Italy characteristic of certain aspects of English Romanticism.