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