Thomas Hoby is today celebrated exclusively as a translator--a reputation, moreover, that rests upon a single work: his brilliant rendering into English of Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano (1528), one of the most influential texts of the Renaissance. However, Hoby's genius as an author extended beyond his special gift for translation. He was also an important early travel writer whose journal (although not printed until this century) represents a significant insight into the growing mid-sixteenth-century English appreciation of Continental, especially Italian, models of culture. The journal also furnishes a reflection of a mind striving for self-knowledge and understanding, laying thereby the foundations of autobiography.

Hoby was the son of William Hoby of Leominster, Herefordshire, by his second wife, Katherine Forden Hoby. Thomas was thus the half brother of Sir Philip Hoby, a courtier, diplomat, and ambassador to the emperor Charles V. Thomas entered Saint John's College, Cambridge, where...