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Studies of Pietro Aretino's early modern English reception have traditionally focused on the Italian author's erotic writing, or 'pornography'. 1 For example, Ian Moulton states that 'Aretino was the primary figure through which early modern England represented erotic authorship to itself'. 2 Such analyses often centre on London, where John Wolfe, assisted by Giacomo Castelvetro, published Italian language editions of Aretino between 1581 and 1591. 3 It was also here that John Donne, in Ignatius his Conclave (1611), located Aretino 'in the midst of a procession of evil Catholic "innovators"', linking the Italian author with licentious imagery and seditious rhetoric. 4 Within early modern England's metropolis, the story goes, Aretino's name stood for eroticism, foreignness, and Catholicism.Yet, while it is true that Aretino's erotic works fascinated England's urban readers, the anti-Catholic charges point towards another segment of a rather complex literary oeuvre. There was, as Maria Palermo Concolato notes, 'another Aretino', or perhaps several; in Harald Hendrix's words, Elizabethans had a picture of the author which was 'much more complex and certainly more positive'. 5 The usual emphasis on the erotic risks overlooking Aretino's

This essay emphasizes the contemporary, Italian origin of Robert Tofte’s Of Mariage and Wiuing as an important and unacknowledged reason for its English censure. On June 1, 1599, the bishops John Whitgift and Richard Bancroft signed an order to burn nine books, one of which was Tofte’s translation of the Italian Dell’ammogliarsi . This book, “done into English” as Of Mariage and Wiuing , presents two opposing treatises on marriage by Ercole Tasso and his more famous cousin, the late poet Torquato. While Ercole’s declamation features some misogynistic language comparable to that in the other censored books, several factors including typography, content, and genre distinguish Of Mariage and Wiuing as somewhat of an exception. Nevertheless, if Tofte’s translation was somehow less objectionable, its Italian provenance counted against it. John Wolfe’s publication of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous dialogues in the 1580s and the reverberations of “Aretine” elements in the work of Thomas Nashe and John Marston in the 1590s fully prepared the bishops to condemn “an excellent, pleasant, and Philosophicall Controuersie” from Italy, a land commonly characterized in England by deviant religious, social, and sexual behavior.

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