Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto & Melibea novamente tradocta de lingua castigliana in italiano idioma.
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The late medieval tale by Fernando de Rojas takes a cynical view of courtly love. The story of the young aristocratic lovers is complicated by the interventions of the old prostitute Celestina. This edition is an Italian translation, published in 1519.
The palace of pleasure: beautified, adorned and well furnished, with pleasaunt histories and excellent nouelles, selected out of diuers good and commendable authors
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William Painter, a translator and civil servant, published this first volume of stories in 1566 adapting accounts from Classical and continental authors. His narratives were very popular as sources among English authors with Webster finding the plot for The Duchess of Malfi and Shakepeare using details for his poem on Lucretia.
The second tome of the Palace of pleasure: contayning store of goodlye histories, tragical matters, & other morall argumentes, very requisite for delight and profyte. Chose and selected out of diuers good and commendable authors, and now once agayn correc
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Painter published a second, longer volume of stories in 1567. The two volumes were republished in 1575 and dedicated to the earl of Warwick. The books were widely read but also criticized. The scholar Roger Ascham wrote in The Scholemaster about the moral dangers such translations of Italian ideas presented for the English.