ROSCOE, WILLIAM. - English historian and polymath, born in Liverpool on 8 March 1753 and died there on 30 June 1831.
After a passing enthusiasm for the French Revolution, R. devoted himself to the study of the civilization of the Italian Renaissance with the assistance of friends, especially the librarians of the Laurenziana and the Riccardiana, and, making use of Fabbroni’s Latin biography, 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 at criticism and learned documentation is dominated above all by passion for the subject, narrated with the emotion of the artist rather than the serenity of the scholar. In 1805 there appeared The history of the life and pontificate of Leo the Thenth, which, because of its judgments, displeased Catholics and Protestants alike (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 aroused a broad movement among the public and scholars, which forms the basis of the cultural and sentimental interest in Italy characteristic of certain aspects of English Romanticism.