Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England: The Collision of Two Worlds 9781350146280, 9781350146273, 9781350146310, 9781350146303

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DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY IN EARLY RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

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DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY IN EARLY RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

THE COLLISION OF TWO WORLDS Jonathan Hughes

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Jonathan Hughes, 2022 Jonathan Hughes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Domenico do Michelino (1417–1491), Fresco of Dante Explaining the Divine Comedy, Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo), Florence, Italy. © IanDagnall Computing/ Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4628-0 PB: 978-1-3501-4627-3 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4630-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-4629-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante. – John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice1 This book … shall be a new light, a new sun which shall rise where the old sun shall set and which shall give light to those who lie in shadows and in darkness because the old sun no longer sheds its light upon them. – Dante, Convivio2

vi

CONTENTS

Illustrationsviii Acknowledgements and Preface x A Note on the Text xiii Introduction

1

1

Mercury: The arrival of Dante in England 1370–1450

11

2

Jupiter: Ancient Rome

53

3

The Sun (Apollo): The legacy of ancient Greece

91

4

Venus: Nature and science

115

5

The fixed stars: Fortune

141

6

Luna (the Moon) women

169

7 The primum mobile and the Empyrean: Love and the afterlife

209

8

Saturn: Melancholia

267

9

Terram (the Earth): Conclusion and the afterlife of The Divine Comedy

305

Notes339 Bibliography397 Index417

ILLUSTRATIONS

1

Dante in the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. A fresco by Raffaello in the apostolic palace of the Vatican 1509–10

2

Beatrice shows Dante the way home as they fly from the Moon to Mercury. Botticelli’s illustration to Paradiso V (Kuperstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

xiv

3

Home: Dante’s Empyrean by Gustave Dore

10

4

Dante in Oxford: Proctor: Your Name and College? Illustration from Poet’s Corner by Max Beerholm, 1904

51

5

The sheepfold. The baptistry of San Giovanni Florence

89

6

Giovanni di Paolo’s c. 1450 depiction of the Argo showing the long shadow of Greek mythology

113

7

The Mosaic of Satan on the ceiling of San Giovanni Baptistry, Florence by Coppo di Marcovaldo 1225, which influenced Dante’s depiction of Hell

140

8

Lydgate contemplating the wheel of Fortune. A woodcut from a 1513 edition of his Fall of Princes

168

9

Sandro Botticelli illustration to Paradiso v. The transition from the Moon to Mercury where Beatrice declares her love for Dante, c. 1480. (Kuperstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

208

10 The exterior of the Rose window in the Basilica of San Zeno, Verona, showing the wheel of Fortune

265

11 The interior of the Rose window of San Zeno Verona showing the manifestation of God’s providential love from the Empyrean in the form of light flowing through the window into the chancel

266

12 Albrecht Durer Melencolia 1 Engraving 1514

303

13 Gustave Dore drawing of 1869: Over London by Rail from London a Pilgrimage

338

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Figure 1  Dante in the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. A fresco by Raffaello in the apostolic palace of the Vatican 1509–10. © Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PREFACE



I saw the beautiful things the heavens carry, through a round opening. And then we came forth to look again at the stars.

– Dante, Inferno3

This book is in some ways a long overdue fulfilment of the original dreams and ambitions I entertained when I came to Oxford in Michaelmas in 1978, encouraged by the supervisor of my Master’s thesis at Auckland University, Professor Valerie Flint, to embark on a doctoral thesis with her ‘civilized friend’, Dr Jeremy Catto. On my arrival (with an interdisciplinary background in history and English literature) I was initially intimidated and discouraged by the dedication of many postgraduate students to the archives, their chosen or allocated manuscripts, and their focussed professionalism, vitiated by the weekly rituals of gathering around a crowded common room television for beer and match of the day. These insecurities and misgivings were dispelled when I first entered my supervisor Jeremy’s Oriel College study where, amid the shelves of the expected tomes of Southern, McFarlane, Jacob, Cheney, et al., a large portrait of Marcel Proust was displayed on the wall, and on a coffee table, amid the winking glasses of gin and tonic, a copy of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, indicative of an interdisciplinary approach to history and omnivorous reading that is in sharp contrast to the professionalism that seems prevalent in academic universities today. My initial encounter with Dante started when, after a few months working under Jeremy’s supervision, I attended his 1979 Balliol College lecture on Dante’s Florence in which, with typical impish humour, he compared Dante to Proust in their malicious love of gossip; a week or so later he remarked in an undergraduate lecture that the English Renaissance began with the arrival of Latin translations of Plato’s Republic. Sadly it has taken me this long to respond to these observations, and it may be that the allure of Dante’s main teleological narrative has encouraged me to impose a retrospective linear gloss on the past (one of the pitfalls and blessings of reading this poem) to suggest this project has been long predetermined, but the poem also encourages reflections on alternative possible lives. At the age of five in 1957 my little sister and I were uprooted from my rural Cheshire childhood when my parents decided to emigrate to the other side of the world and I saw the strange southern stars through the porthole of our ship’s cabin in the Pacific Ocean, the realm of trackless open sea with nothing to hold onto that Dante warned his followers about, and where he located Purgatory some 1,000 miles south of the Marquesas Islands,

Acknowledgements and Preface

antipodal to Jerusalem. We disembarked in New South Wales, Australia, spending months in transit in a hostel in Stockton on the River Hunter near Newcastle housing immigrants (mainly Roman Catholic Italians) who were waiting, like the pilgrims at the port of Ostia boarding ships to Purgatory, to start a new life. My mother fell under the influence of the visiting Catholic priest and I found myself reluctantly attending the St Joseph’s convent run by the sisters of mercy, and some of the nuns made me acutely aware of the ever-present threat of dying unabsolved in my sleep and going to Hell. I seemed to be given a foretaste of Inferno when on Saturdays my father, who worked in the blast furnaces, took me on walks around the Newcastle Steel works. However a new life soon beckoned when the sisters presented me with a medal of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, and we moved to the sparkling purgatorial shores of Nelson Bay where the benign bush-clad Tomarea Mountain presided over, on one side a blue bay where porpoises and dolphins frolicked, and on the other the murmuring blue waves of the Tasman Sea. I remember on my first day in my new school looking up at the Australian flag on the classroom wall displaying the four stars of the Southern Cross, visible to the pilgrims on the shores of Purgatory. Alas three years later we emigrated back to England to arrive in the freezing cold of Cocytus in Christmas to spend nearly two years in the bolgia-like terraces and lanes of Rock Ferry and Birkenhead on the River Mersey until, at the age of nine, I was separated from an extended family of grandparents and cousins and new friends to embark on a final emigration to New Zealand. The insecurities that accompanied such changes, under the impetus of a father who was my guide through different worlds, meant that home became something to hold onto and yet it would always seem so far away. The centrality that Ruskin so envied in Dante’s world, his love of Florence and the Baptistry of San Giovanni, has therefore a beguiling appeal, yet Florence turned on Dante, and he located at the very centre of the earth Inferno’s pit of betrayal. Betrayals come in the form of time, fortune and death. Nothing remains the same, neither people or places nor home. However, reading Dante has taught me to gaze up, to focus and to rely upon that which does not change: the stars. The people I would like to think of reading this book, those who encouraged me during my postgraduate years at Oxford and subsequently: Valerie Flint, Jeremy Catto, Professor James Campbell, Dr Maurice Keen, Professor Barrie Dobson and others, all formidably learned, wide ranging in their intellectual interests, products of the 1950s, ‘that best and worst of times’ are no longer with us. Writing during a quarantined exile on the north Cornish coat on the edge of the Atlantic would have been nigh impossible without the support of Exeter University in the form of an honorary Research Fellowship that has enabled me to access online resources, and for this I am very grateful to Professor James Clark of the University of Exeter, who has also provided much encouragement and stimulating conversation. I would also like to thank Professor Peregrine Horden of Royal Holloway London and All Souls Oxford for reading this work and providing helpful and supportive suggestions. I would in part like to dedicate this book to my sister Deborah and my parents, to my mother who would have gamely tried to read it, and to my proud father, whose competitive nature would perhaps have prevented him from turning the pages. Over the space of ten years he would sit on the veranda while I held xi

Acknowledgements and Preface

our pet prize ram as my mother clipped its fleece. In subsequent years they would sit on this same veranda in the summer sun talking about their ‘black sheep boy’ on the other side of the world under grey winter skies. The veranda now will be warping, the seats faded and rotten and the lawn overgrown with weeds where I hope to leave perhaps a few ‘golden curls’ as atonement. After such nostalgia and looking back into the past, it is appropriate to recognize that life goes on and to dedicate this book to my children: Venetia, Timothy and Alexander.

xii

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Passages of Dante will be quoted fully to illuminate the conflicting world views of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and the period I characterize as the English Renaissance. Because this book is aimed at a large readership beyond students of Italian literature to include readers of Middle English literature and members of the general public interested in English history and cultural life, quotations will be provided in Modern English translations. Short quotations from The Divine Comedy will be translated by myself from Durling’s prose translation of The Divine Comedy in a dual language edition of three volumes (Oxford: OUP, 1996, 2003 and 2011). Longer quotations will be from Durling’s prose translation in the same editions which is set in lines, for although Binyon’s terza rima translation of 1941 was fulsomely praised by Ezra Pound, the prevalence of vowels in Italian compared to English makes it difficult to convey both rhyme and meaning when translating Dante's verse; and therefore Durling’s prose translation is better for understanding the literal meaning and the context of Chaucer’s borrowings. Dante’s Tuscan dialect became the national vernacular and there is no appreciable difference between his language and modern Italian. The same cannot be said of the vernacular of Chaucer and Lydgate, and to ensure continuity with these quotations from Dante I will render Middle English quotations from the Riverside Chaucer and the works of Lydgate, William Worcester, Thomas Norton and Richard Roos and other Middle English writers into modern English. Quotations from Dante’s lyric poems, Vita Nuova and the poems of Guido Cavalcanti will be translations from the dual language editions: Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Patrick Foster and Kenelm Boyde (Oxford: OUP, 1967); Vita Nuova, ed. Dino S. Cervini (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); and Cavalcanti The Complete Poems, ed. Marc A. Cirigliano (Italian Press, 1992). Quotations from Dante’s Convivio and Boccaccio’s Decameron and Trattatello in laude di Dante will be translations from the original Italian editions of Convivio (Aonia Ralegh, 2020); Decameron (Biblioteca Universale Rizzali, 2013); and Trattatello in laude di Dante (Garzanti Libri, 2007), but students can consult English translations of Convivio in Il Convivio (the Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing (New York, 1990); Boccaccio’s Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Penguin, 1972); and Boccaccio’s The Life of Dante, trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York: Garland, 1990).

Figure 2  Beatrice shows Dante the way home as they fly from the Moon to Mercury. Botticelli’s illustration to Paradiso V (Kuperstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

xiv

INTRODUCTION

From afar I recognized the trembling of the ocean.   We were going along the lonely plain like one returning to the lost path and, until he reaches it, feels he walks in vain.

– Dante, Purgatorio1

This decision to write about Dante and late Medieval England resolves a long-standing contradiction. Despite writing in the past on Medieval English mystics and kings, Chaucer, and fourteenth- and fifteenth century intellectual life, I have always felt a deeper connection with modern literature, with writers such as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. But it was a writer from the Roman Catholic tradition, James Joyce, who opened up Dante’s world. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen, a timid schoolboy, smarting under the perceived injustices of the penal system of Clongowes School, takes his grievances with a trembling heart to the headmaster. At the end of term, the rector and the prefect of studies, who had administered the corporeal punishment on Stephen, engage in a light-hearted conversation with Stephen’s father and all three men are amused at the young lad’s pluck. This incident provides a window into Dante’s universe where a loving father looks down on the stumbling progress of his children. The key to understanding this love is the light that shines in the eyes. In the opening Telemachus chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses Buck Mulligan is conversing with Stephan Dedalus in the Martello Tower: He looked into Stephen’s face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.2 Where did this come from, this mysterious light of sympathy, sensitivity and affection in the banter of two cynical students? This question has taken me to Dante, his pursuit of this light in the pupils of the eyes of Beatrice, that leads him back to a reconciliation with the deepest memories of his childhood and forwards to the Empyrean and reunion with his childhood love in the afterlife: And the heaven made beautiful by so many lights takes the image from the profound mind … Because of the happy nature from which it

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

derives the mixed power shines through the body like gladness through the pupil of a living eye.3 In Dante’s thought this light shares a common, generic nature with its divine source in the mind of God the artist and, as it is filtered through the heavens and the planets into the souls of human beings, it takes on a multiplicity of forms, but the light observed in a person’s eyes is nevertheless seen to be of divine origin, and for Dante the light of pure intellect within a book, ‘a star full of light’, could exert the same influence on a reader as the light of the heavens and the planets.4 There is a haunting quality to so many passages of The Divine Comedy: the anxious father of Guido Cavalcanti looking among the tombs of the atheists for his son; the pale image in the moon of the nun Piccarda, abducted from her convent and accepting of God’s providence; the lovers Francesco and Paolo, tossed in the tempests of Hell and alighting like a pair of doves before the pilgrim who, in his search for a home and a father, eagerly questions his ancestor in Heaven about his native Florence, lost to exile and time. These things stay lodged in the mind and they raise this question: Dante may be the one writer of the Middle Ages who provides a bridge to modern literature and sensibility, but what was the impact of The Divine Comedy in the years after 1370 when this poem was becoming an international talking point, with public lectures in Italian cities and commentaries focusing on its literary qualities and biographical background in a country that would develop an unrivalled literary tradition of its own in a language that would, from its beginnings with Geoffrey Chaucer, replace Dante’s Latin as the language of Europe and would eventually become almost universal in the remnants of its vast empire? This book attempts to answer this question by focusing on a period (1370–1450) of profound intellectual change that I characterize as the early English Renaissance. This will involve a re-evaluation of the vernacular writers associated with Humfrey Duke of Gloucester, heir apparent to the English throne, and especially John Lydgate, who may not approach the heights of the easily recognized genius of Dante and Chaucer but who was more thoroughly involved in the public concerns of the regime than any other English poet of the Middle Ages,5 and for whom the aesthetic values and judgements of contemporary English literary critics and historians’ concepts of humanism will have little relevance in a study that will be concerned with what people were writing, saying and doing within a social, intellectual and religious context, however buried their thoughts may have been in pages of rhetoric and amplification. In alchemical terms these are the hidden gems within the dross of earth, or to quote the fifteenth-century warrior Sir John Fastolf ’s words to his confessor, Friar John Brackley: ‘Show me not the meat and show me the man.’6 Because this book will focus on direct reactions to Dante on the part of monks, merchants and clergy of the late fourteenth century and Middle English writers associated with Humfrey Duke of Gloucester, who comprised an intellectual elite, it will not just be directed at students of Dante but will be concerned with the interrelationship between cultured individuals in England and The Divine Comedy, which provides a lens to focus on English intellectual life. In some cases there will be a direct response and engagement, and at other times Dante will be in the background, but 2

Introduction

what emerges is a dialogue with the ‘divine poem’ in which there is some congruence in terms of enthusiasm for the vernacular as a vehicle for a national literature; a shared admiration for ancient Roman political, ethical values and the ideal of empire; a belief in a shared common ancestry from Troy; a shared suspicion of ancient Greece as the agent of Troy’s destruction; an assimilation of Greek mythology in cultural and intellectual life; a fascination with and curiosity about the natural world and its changes; nostalgia for the past; a fear of the turning of Fortune’s wheel; and a love and admiration for the beauty and symmetry of art. However, more significant in terms of the title of this book, the collision of the two worlds of Dante and the early English Renaissance, are the many points of difference. Dante’s influence on English intellectual life was, it will be argued, most profound in the period between 1370 and 1450, and it was during these years that there was a reaction to The Divine Comedy that constitutes a literal collision between two worlds: Dante’s world of faith, the age of St Francis and Giotto, of the elevation of the rituals of courtly love, and while it is important to avoid Hegelian generalizations about different ages, it is clear that by 1370 such profound changes in political, religious and scientific outlook were occurring that meant English intellectuals reacted to Dante’s poem with complex and contradictory feelings of admiration, while they robustly challenged many of his preconceptions. The key to this collision is Dante’s faith, his conviction that there is an afterlife, a concept to which he applied his considerable powers of imagination in order to reconstruct in compelling detail this otherworld and which was subjected to increasingly sceptical scrutiny from the late fourteenth century in England. From this divergence of views on the afterlife stem other differences in outlook on the natural world, fate and Fortune, women and love, which shows that the widespread admiration for Dante’s literary genius was also accompanied by a critical and combative attitude to The Divine Comedy in this period on the part of Boccaccio, Chaucer and the writers emulating them who shared Humfrey Duke of Gloucester’s patronage, and this can shed light on the intellectual developments in the early English Renaissance. Dante’s world was enclosed by the heavenly spheres, the stars and the primum mobile beyond and overlooked by the Empyrean, the sphere of fire, the all-seeing incomprehensible God whose love, in the form of light, flooded the universe. It was a conventual finite cosmos, where the crossing of borders and the questioning of God’s providential wisdom and judgements were eschewed. Such a world was regarded by Dante as a work of art, where everything is ordered like an intricate clock, and history and human affairs are played out under the watchful gaze of providence. The forces of nature, time and Fortune, all operate for the fulfilment of the divine will and the unfolding of collective and individual destinies. Dante’s pilgrim must learn on his journey to conform his free will to the divine will if he is to enjoy the resurrection of his body and a return to his homeland in Heaven. It is a journey in which he faces many cross currents, alternative paths of possibilities and potentials, alternative lives, and the nostalgic attraction of old relationships. In this journey women have a key role to play as loyal, stable and inspirational forces, and the love of the creator can be seen both in the gaze of a woman’s eyes and in the natural world around her in the warmth of the sunlight. 3

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

The English writers who admired Dante nevertheless subjected these compelling beliefs to the scrutiny of the harsh light of reason. Boundaries would be crossed in alchemical experimentation and philosophical enquiry. The Latin translations of Plato would subject metaphysical speculations on the nature of the spirit to logical, abstract reasoning, in which any notion of an actual physical heaven was rejected in favour of concepts of the immaterial forms; vernacular meditations on the natural world would locate the immaterial and the perpetual within the earth or the natural world, to be released through abstract thought or the alchemical distillation of the quintessence. The concept of a divine, providential justice would be replaced with a vision of history as a chaotic tragedy in which human behaviour was dominated by the forces of nature, lust and change. Dante’s idealization of women would be replaced by psychological analysis of female behaviour and at times a cynical concentration on their identification with the natural forces of procreation and even with the occult. The writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William Worcester and Charles of Orleans all exhibit a melancholy quality, for they lack Dante’s expectant faith, and they subjected the Italian poet’s notion of a universe governed by the light of divine love, and his belief in the prospect of a return to a loving home in heaven, to sceptical doubts and expressions of an awareness of the possibility that this world is all there is.

The reception of The Divine Comedy in England 1450–1900 The fertile reaction to The Divine Comedy ends around 1450: after this date there was, apart from a few exceptions, little attempt to engage with the poem and its assumptions in its entirety until the nineteenth century. There would never again be such a powerful collision of conflicting ideas, and Dante fades into the background of English intellectual life. The date of 19 October 1453 may have been crucial, the moment when the English imperial presence in France finally ended with the expulsion of Talbot’s forces from Gascony after the Battle of Castillon. The Lancastrian dream of an imperial destiny, modelled on the empire of Julius Caesar and Augustus, had constituted an ideological link with Dante’s vision in The Divine Comedy and Monarchia of the imperial destiny of the Roman empire, but with their expulsion from France, the English retreated into a preoccupation with insular, national identity under the Crown, something Dante reviled, and Dante’s imperialism was no longer deemed relevant and perhaps regarded with anathema. It is significant that the only firm evidence of ownership of The Divine Comedy in this period comes from someone with strong connections to Spain and the papacy: Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) owned the printed edition of the Castilian translation of the Inferno by Pedro Fernandez de Villegas.7 The Divine Comedy was virtually ignored in England until later in the Tudor period, despite the fact that there was a proliferation of printed editions of the poem from 1472 to 1600 in Foligno, Mantua and Venice, and by 1520 there were eleven printed editions in Venice. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign there were twenty-nine editions of The Divine Comedy from the Italian presses, but nothing from the English presses, from William Caxton, who 4

Introduction

nevertheless printed multiform editions of John Lydgate’s Temple of Glass and The Life of Our Lady; or Richard Pynson, who reprinted editions of Lydgate’s larger poems, The Troy Book and The Fall of Princes, in 1554 and 1558. While Lydgate remained popular until the end of the sixteenth century, Dante was little more than a name, never explicitly mentioned by English writers such as Skelton and Starkey, and there is no evidence that Dante had much influence on the great English poets of the sixteenth century, Sir Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser, who preferred Petrarch. This failure to engage with the work in its totality may partly be a consequence of the language difficulties: Shakespeare was able to read Boccaccio’s Decameron (Ten Day Event), which had been translated into English in 1529, but as he had no Italian and, according to Ben Jonson ‘small Latin’, he had no first-hand knowledge of Dante. The loss in 1458 of Calais, England’s last remaining foothold on the continent, ratified its growing isolation from Europe and Dante’s increasingly strange and foreign status. However, a more important factor was the nation’s move towards Protestantism, which invalidated many of the central tenants of Dante’s work: his devotion to the Virgin Mary; the important role played in his anticipated salvation by the leaders of the Benedictine and Cistercian monastic movements, the Franciscans and Dominicans, mendicant orders and saints such as Lucia, and above all by his literal depiction of salvation in terms of a penitential ascent up the mountain of Purgatory and the physical ascent to the heavens. For this reason only aspects of his work, such as his criticisms of the papacy, his admiration for the Roman emperors, and his charges of clerical and monastic corruption, would be used, out of context, to justify the Protestant cause. Dante’s celebration of Augustus and his faith in the revitalizing of the Roman Empire at the expense of the papacy provided fuel for the cause of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and ecclesiastical reformers such as John Bale (1495–1563) and John Foxe (1516–1587) cited Dante’s name in the cause of the reform of the church.8 Foxe, who was in the Lutheran stronghold of Basel when the first edition of the Monarchia came to the presses in 1570, ensured with the subsequent printing of his highly influential Acts and Monuments, that Dante was identified as an anti papal and even Lollard figure. The first to object to this Protestant version of a Roman Catholic medieval poet was the Jesuit priest, Robert Parsons in 1603, and by the time of the Act of Union in 1707 a need to cohere the newly United Kingdom against foreign threats sharpened anti-Catholic discourse and Dante’s identification with foreign popery, and in the subsequent age of the Enlightenment he was associated with Catholic superstition and obscurantist eccentricity by writers such as Voltaire and Horace Walpole.9 Perhaps because of this perceived eccentricity, his poem became a collectable item in the eighteenth century for English aristocrats such as Thomas Coke, Mountstuart Elphinstone and Charles James Fox, a member of the Dilletanti Society, founded in London in 1733 as an offshoot of the Grand Tour.10 The Divine Comedy really re-entered English cultural life in the nineteenth century with the completion in 1812 of Henry Carey’s English translation, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge championed in a lecture to the London Philosophical Society in 1818. This translation gave writers such as Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Shelly and George Eliot the security and confidence to study the poem in the original Italian and to translate 5

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

individual passages, especially from Inferno. Separate cantos were taken from this canticle to justify the causes of Nationalism, Liberal Whig policies, and to illustrate Gothic and Romantic trends. Cantos dealing with the forbidden love between Francesco and Paolo and the suffering of Count Ugolino and his children appealed to Romantic writers interested in exploring the emotional extremes of human experience. These passages became the subject of verse translations, engravings, paintings and even operas. However, detailed studies of the entire Divine Comedy were also undertaken in this period. Shelley characterized the Divine Comedy and its author as a fire long buried but now ready to burst into flame’, each spark of his words a burning atom of inextinguishable thought: ‘and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor’.11 Shelley was a linguist who engaged with the Italian of Dante in the manner of Chaucer and Milton. He is unique in his successful attempt to master Dante’s terza rima in his Triumph of Life, and unlike many of his contemporaries, he paid close attention to Purgatorio and Paradiso. Dante’s influence was strongest in Prometheus (1820) and Episychidron (1821) dedicated to a Venetian girl with whom Shelley was Platonically in love. In both poems Shelley shared Dante’s appreciation of the power of a love that was not diminished by being shared, but increased like the sum total of light from the sun reflected from many mirrors, a light that was shared by all and which penetrated all creatures and even the granite earth.12 In 1824, William Blake was commissioned to illustrate the entire Divine Comedy. In his watercolour illustrations to Inferno he attempted to expose the materialism of industrialized London: the atheist Farinata rises from his tomb, and the red mosques of Dis in the background become the red haze of belching factory chimneys, and Capaneus, the blaspheming king who besieged Thebes and defiantly opposed Zeus, who was condemned by Dante to lie on sand to be pelted with lava, is rained upon by industrial fires; he remains oblivious to his torments, like the factory workers detached from spiritual existence. Blake found solace from this materialistic Hell in his depictions, still incomplete at the time of his death, of the Earthly Paradise in Purgatorio and the Paradiso of Dante. He presents Beatrice as the inspiration for an ideal of spiritualized love, and his mystic rose represents Dante’s vision of heaven as light intellectual, replete with love. In his illustrations to Paradiso and his prophetic work, Jerusalem, Blake outlined his belief that an industrialized and materialistic Albion had banished Jerusalem by falling into disunity and selfhood. Full humanity could only be achieved, he maintained, in a reunion of the emanation. An individual’s emanation inevitably separates from him as he divides into warring factions and opposing sexes, such as Dante and Beatrice or Albion and Jerusalem, and the fall into exile, but the emanation remains: the visionary creative capacity for the reunion of the masculine and feminine emanations that precipitates the vision of eternity. Through a union with Christ, Dante, Albion and mankind can find ultimate unity and perfection.13 Blake’s hopes for a heavenly Jerusalem in Albion were echoed in Ugo Foscolo’s ambitions for a united Italy through the study of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Foscolo, an Italian revolutionary and poet, studied the poem during his eleven-year exile in London until his death in 1827, and he wrote two essays for the Edinburgh Review in 1818 and a discourse on the Commedia in 1825. He was less interested in Dante’s life than in 6

Introduction

appreciating the power of the poem from a close study of the language of the poet which could restore the work to its original doctrinal elements and historical milieu. Through an allegorical and philological reading, Ugolo articulated, in contrast to what he perceived to be Petrarch’s morbid introspection and pursuit of chimeras, an active decisive spirit led by Beatrice on a spiritual quest in exile that enabled Dante, through language, to join together a divided Italy from the ashes of a razed Troy to its resurrection in ancient Rome, which would be ultimately fulfilled in 1862 on the 600th anniversary of the poet’s death with the Risorgimento and the emergence of the united nation that Dante hoped for, albeit not under the auspices of an emperor.14 Another politically motivated student of the text in the original Italian was William Gladstone, who made eleven trips to Italy and extensively annotated The Divine Comedy. His notes reveal the application of a disciplined mind to the text and problems of translation and he was critical of Ruskin’s dilations and inflations of Dante’s language.15 Gladstone shared Dante’s idealization of women and was drawn to his imperialistic outlook and anti-papal outbursts. His annotations betray his commitment to a theocratic form of Anglicanism and reform of a church that was Catholic but not controlled by the papacy. He even attempted to conscript Dante into the service of Oxford, the bastion of the High Church movement, when he attempted to prove in an article that the Tuscan poet had studied at the university during his early years of exile.16 The High Victorian poet, Tennyson, saw in Dante’s restless explorer, Ulysses, the embodiment of the ideals of Victorian imperialism, but he also served as a symbol for an age of doubt and loss of faith in the wake of Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution.17 The influence of The Divine Comedy was felt beyond the fields of poetry and politics in the development of the English novel. The structure of the poem, a teleological master-plot moving purposefully and relentlessly towards an eagerly anticipated end, a union with God, yet undercut with alternative centrifugal narratives with no moral judgements, depicting different paths and destinies, such as those of Francesca and Paolo who remain together in Hell, or the lute maker, Belaqua, happily biding his time on the lower slopes of Purgatory, made it an obvious inspiration for nineteenth century novelists.18 George Eliot, who stood transfixed before Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Francesa and Paolo at the Pall Mall Gallery in London in 1854,19 closely read and took notes from the three canticles between 1361 and 1362.20 The sins of her characters were defined in the moral landscape of Dante’s poem: the confined spaces of the drawing rooms of Felix Holt the Radical (1866) echo the bolges of Inferno, and Eliot was particularly inspired by the compassion shown by Dante towards sinners, such as the guilty lovers Francesca and Paolo, and the demonstration of the essential humanity of all the condemned and the ties of love that bind them together. Themes such as despair, inertia and betrayal in her novels demonstrate the working of a contrapasso where characters’ fates are determined by past conduct in which they share common bonds of pity.21 The nineteenth century also witnessed the birth of modern Dante scholarship; the two pioneers in Britain were an Edinburgh medical graduate, Henry Clark Barlow and the principal of St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, Edward Moore. Barlow, after leaving Edinburgh in 1837, devoted his life to the study of Dante, collating manuscripts and cataloguing the codici of The Divine Comedy in the libraries of Europe (England had the largest number 7

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

after Italy). He wrote dissertations on individual cantos with detailed textual notes, and in 1864 he published his Critical Historical and Philosophical Contributions to the Study of the Divina Commedia.22 Edward Moore founded the Oxford Dante Society in 1876, and in 1894 he brought out the single-volume edition of the works of Dante, the Oxford Dante.23 Between 1886 and 1903 he provided the first attempt to deal scientifically and methodically with the problems presented by the text of The Divine Comedy in Studies in Dante in Three Series.24 The cultural life of nineteenth century England was considerably enriched by the translations, study and borrowings from The Divine Comedy, but too much had happened since the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in terms of changes in religious belief, and political and scientific developments, for there to be any real conflict and debate about life and the afterlife. Dante was revered, and he inspired writers to reflect on their own times, but Foscolo pointed out that there was a gulf of five hundred years separating Dante and the writers of the nineteenth century, during which interval the Reformation, Counter Reformation and Enlightenment had occurred. He described Dante’s poem as a dense, impenetrable and mysterious wood, most of which was in darkness, rather than Shelley’s ‘fountain overflowing with delight’ that enabled a new generation of readers of The Divine Comedy to discover new relations intrinsic to their needs. Shelley’s atheism determined that he did not see Inferno validating God’s justice and wisdom but instead as a revolutionary statement by a poet who heretically distributed rewards and punishments, and for whom religion was an incidental discourse. For Dante God was the source of love, and for Shelley it was man, ‘the measure of all things’. Capaneus, placed in Inferno for defying Zeus, was for Shelley a type of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to illuminate mankind. Blake, who shared Dante’s personal involvement in a journey of salvation, and Shelley’s visual appreciation of the light of Heaven, ‘the white radiance of eternity’, nevertheless saw Inferno as the creation of Satan and contrapasso as nothing more than revenge. Eliot’s perspective was more secular: if the heavens determined the personalities of Dante’s characters it was for Eliot the sum of past experiences and reflections on this experience that determined the personalities and fates of her protagonists, who, like Dante’s sinners, all enjoyed free will. As Foscolo understood, there was no real collision of worlds here, no debate about reality, because writers of the nineteenth century did not stand on the same foundations of faith as Dante. The Paradiso as a system of metaphors for the process by which a living man on earth comes to understand the make-up of the cosmos and the state of the soul after death was, with the exception of Shelley and Blake, largely ignored. Nineteenth century writers may have recognized the existence of Inferno in their world but they did not really engage with Dante’s system of belief in the penitential schooling of the will in Purgatory (with the exception of George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, who in his Past and Present in 1843 saw Purgatorio as a manual of self-help); nor did they engage with Dante’s fundamental premise that life can be a pilgrimage inspired by the loving light of the creator towards the heavenly home in the Empyrean. This issue of Dante’s views on salvation and the afterlife would however be fundamental in the collision between the world of faith in The Divine Comedy and the growth of doubt and scepticism in the early 8

Introduction

English Renaissance. Such a collision could only occur in the period between 1370 and 1450, when writers sharing the same fundamental premises as Dante nevertheless raised questions about his views on antiquity, nature, fortune, women, love and the afterlife. The Divine Comedy is a door that swings both ways to reveal: on the one side a world of faith and on the other the sea changes in early Renaissance outlook. Such an approach to Dante and English writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century may seem simplistic within the realms of modern professional literary criticism, but it provides a compelling narrative. These questions would have a lasting impact on writers who attempted to follow his footsteps (especially in twentieth century) who will be discussed in the final chapter. They may have attempted to emulate what Dante did with Virgil by composing epics that reflected their own times, but they would be unable to follow Dante’s pilgrim beyond the earth because the failure of their efforts would be determined by the same issues raised in the early Renaissance reaction to Dante: these concerned the gravitational pull of the laws of science and nature.25 This study has not been undertaken without misgivings. Despite the otherworldly dimensions of his journey, Dante conceived his pilgrimage partly in literary terms. The dark wood (selva obscura)26 in which he is lost in search of spiritual understanding to dispel the mists of obscurity is full of dangers and excitement and in part represents his encounter with the scriptures. Saint Augustine in his Confessions and De doctrina christiana may have expressed his feelings of fear and excitement when he began to unravel the hidden allegories and prophecies in the Bible: ‘It is one thing, from a wooded mountain top, to see the land of peace and quiet, another to reach it, when one’s way is beset by the lion and the dragon,’27 but Dante, as a layman, was faced with over 1,000 years of professional Biblical exegesis, and one commentator prominent in Paradiso, Bonaventure, wrote in 1257 in his Breviloquium (Brief Reading) of the dread beginners in theology experienced when confronted with the impenetrable forest of the dark woods of scripture;28 and in his Monarchia Dante cited De doctrina christiana to warn readers of the dangers in wandering from the main road to possibly encounter a lion.29 Beatrice delivered the following prophecy to Dante: ‘Here shall you be short time a dweller in the wood’;30 he was a forester attempting to master the dark wood of scripture in which he was lost. Despite his fears he proceeds for the sake of ‘the good that I find within it’;31 but he has to learn to avoid a proud, youthful reading of these texts, symbolized by the wind that breaks the branches and puts to flight the wild beasts.32 The study of The Divine Comedy itself can be a form of pilgrimage through a dark and obscure wood, one in which there must be some awareness of the formidable body of professional interpretive scholarship behind this poem33 (and indeed of the works of such followers as Chaucer) over the last two hundred years. I am aware that in steering between the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the twin disciplines of history and literary criticism, I am in danger of being too linear in my approach and paying too little attention to this body of scholarship, but I hope it will be justified by the journey ahead; for Dante confronts one with two types of love: the attraction towards the alternative routes in life, the sort of love experienced by Francesa and Paolo that flings you far out into space far from yourself, and the love that brings you to the familiar lane leading to home. 9

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

Figure 3  Home: Dante’s Empyrean by Gustave Dore. Getty Images

10

CHAPTER 1

MERCURY: THE ARRIVAL OF DANTE IN ENGLAND 1370–1450

And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England’s mountains green?

– William Blake, Preface to Milton1

Dante’s Inferno achieved immediate widespread popularity, as its author intended, and by 1370 the poet’s reputation in Florence was such that public lectures on The Divine Comedy were taking place and commentaries were being written extolling the poem’s literary merits. Although it was not translated into English until the second decade of the nineteenth century, the poem was beginning to make an impact in England from 1370. Dante was known among the Franciscans and Benedictines, in court circles in Paris, in clerical circles in Avignon, and among merchants and bankers such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, who engaged most directly with the poem in the original Italian. A translation into the Latin vernacular, used by the English clergy, was undertaken at the Council of Constance by Giovanni da Serravalle (Giovanni Bertoldi) (1360–1445) with a commentary, heavily indebted to Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary of 1373, providing details of Dante’s cosmology. This helped to generate enthusiasm for visions of the underworld, especially at St Patrick’s Purgatory. Bertoldi’s translation and commentary of 1416 were acquired by Humfrey duke of Gloucester and made available to writers in his circle such as John Lydgate, for whom Dante, via Boccaccio and Chaucer, was an important background figure, and to Gloucester’s friend John Whethamstede, the abbot of St Albans. Gloucester was probably a key figure in facilitating awareness of The Divine Comedy among English clergy at St Albans and Wells Cathedral, and Whethamstede was instrumental in encouraging, among the upper ranks of the English aristocracy, clerical and lay, an enthusiasm for Italy as a destination of travel and a source of books. Awareness of The Divine Comedy at the universities of Oxford and Paris coincided with a time when theologians were questioning the finiteness of the universe and centrality of the earth’s place within it, thereby challenging the assumptions underlying Dante’s cosmos, and at the same time the political landscape was changing with the emergence of separate nation states.

The composition of The Divine Comedy In the 21st canto of Inferno when the pilgrim and Virgil encounter the bridge in the fifth bolgia, destroyed by the earthquake that occurred at the moment of Christ’s death, Dante describes this event as happening 1,266 years ago, and as Christ was believed

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

to have been crucified in his thirty-fifth year at the age of thirty-four this firmly dates the action of the poem to 1300.2 The immediate inspiration for an epic journey into the otherworld probably stemmed from the Papal Jubilee, announced in a Bull of Boniface VIII on 22 February 1300, decreeing the pardoning of all sins and remission of temporal punishments in Purgatory for those who made daily pilgrimage to the basilicas of St Peter and St Paul over a period of thirty days if resident in Rome or fifteen if they came from outside the city. Dante was among the pilgrims; he probably left Florence on 15 March 1300, after receiving a loan from his brother on 14 March, possibly for expenses for the pilgrimage. He could well have arrived in Rome by 25 March, in time for Maundy Thursday, April 7, when the disciples slept in Gesthemane and when, during a full moon, he began his sleep-induced fictional journey into the dark wood where he spends the night before beginning his descent into Hell on the morning of Good Friday, 8 April (the date that Easter fell in 1300) before reaching the foot of Mount Purgatory at dawn of Easter Monday where he climbs for three days until ascending to Paradise on Thursday noon (his entire journey lasting the holy week of Easter).3 In Inferno, alighting from Geryon’s back in the eighth circle, he describes the crowds of sinners coming towards him and moving away from him by providing what is an eyewitness account of the Easter pilgrims making their way across the bridge at Castel Sant’Angelo towards the basilicas, controlled by barriers separating those arriving and leaving.4 The thousands of pilgrims, arriving from all over Europe, some by sea entering and leaving through the port of Ostia, influenced Dante’s vision of the departure of the dead from Ostia across the Southern Ocean to the island of Purgatory or across the Acheron to Hell. The vast numbers of pilgrims may also have inspired the pilgrim’s observation outside the gates of Hell: ‘I would not have believed death had undone so many.’5 The poem, especially its visionary qualities, probably germinated and took form shortly after Dante’s return from Rome, when something happened at this turning point in his life, which would influence his highly individualistic view of salvation and his hostility to Boniface VIII for whom he would prepare a hole in the eighth circle, the malebolge, for him and other siomoniacs to be upended. Boniface’s arrival in Hell (he would not die until October 1303) was prophesized when Dante, bending down to talk to the waving feet of Nicholas Orsini, pope from 1277 to 1280) is mistaken for Boniface arriving early (like all the dead Nicholas can see into the distant future).6 On 7 April, Holy Thursday, Boniface appeared on the balcony of St John’s Lateran, an event commemorated in a fresco executed by Giotto in 1300, to bless pilgrims arriving for the Jubilee, and he read publicly a second papal bull, announcing the Jubilee of 22 February 1300, excluding from the benefits of the Jubilee certain persons including those trading with Saracens, King Frederick the Great of Sicily, and members of the Roman Colonna family, supporters of the emperor, damned by the pope, and all those who supported the Colonna. The terms of the bull would have excluded Dante by late 1301 as a White Guelph sympathetic to the emperor and as an enemy of Boniface. At this time Dante was on a diplomatic mission to Rome to preserve the independence of Florence’s constitution by convincing Boniface against further involvement in Florentine affairs and his securing military aid from Charles of Valois when he heard of his banishment from the city of Florence 12

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

now controlled by Black Guelphs sympathetic to the papacy; detained by Boniface in an attempt to prevent him from warning fellow Whites of the impending coup of Black Guelphs supported by Charles of Valois, Dante, abandoning his intention to return to Florence, heard the full details of his sentence when he reached Gargonza near Siena and had no opportunity to say goodbye to his family. He would then have reflected on the proclamation of Holy Thursday of the previous year which he suggested, in the fifth bolgia of Hell, coincided with the date he began his journey and poem,7 during the full moon of the spring equinox, when according to medieval tradition God created the world. He was suffering the worst form of anxiety, the feeling of being lost, wandering away from the path (which Aquinas defined as falling into mortal sin)8 through a wood, a liminal place of spiritual enlightenment and temptation, at odds with Boniface over the state of his soul, and clearly thinking of the words of his mentor, Brunetto Latini, the spokesman for Florentine Guelphism, who on his return from an embassy to King Alfonso X of Spain had been informed of the Guelphs’ banishment from Florence after the defeat at the hands of the Ghibbelines at Montaperti in 1260; he consequently changed his destination to Paris and began his vernacular didactic poem, Il tresoretto, reacting to the news by lamenting how he had been plunged into sorrow and had left the main road to find himself lost in a terrifying wood.9 As Dante’s pilgrim was attempting to find his way up the mountain of Purgatory, he was stopped by a rapacious wolf, representing, in part, the Roman papacy that has usurped temporal power, and he is advised by Virgil to take another path to salvation, one that did not depend on the papacy or the institutional church.10 In the course of his pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise he would not meet a single person saved by priestly absolution, but he would meet unbaptized pagans in Purgatory and Heaven, and many depended on the prayers of the laity, and his own privileged journey through Purgatory to Paradise was made, despite Boniface’s bulls and exclusions, with the help of a pagan, Virgil and a laywoman, Beatrice. The extreme hostility to Boniface generated by this exclusion bull not only influenced the themes of his poem, it sealed his exile, without which The Divine Comedy would not have been completed in its present form. Dante’s alignment with the extreme wing of the White Guelphs, which included support for an alliance between the exiled White Guelphs and the exiled Ghibbelines at Garganza against a Florence occupied by the forces of Charles of Valois and the Corso Donati in league with the papacy, was motivated mainly by his hatred of Boniface and led to the imposition of a death sentence against him in March 1302, by which time he was in exile, on the trumped-up charge of barratry: trafficking in public offices, taking bribes and vengeful action against opponents.11 A version of the first seven cantos, up to the account of the walls of Dis, was perhaps written in Florence before his banishment; Boccaccio certainly thought so and cited as proof a disjunction in the poem at this point when Inferno viii begins: ‘I say, continuing.’12 These cantos were certainly written before 1303–4 when, in Convivio (The Banquet) Dante declared his Ghibbeline conviction that the peace of Europe depended on the divinely instituted authority of the Roman emperors. This is contradicted at the beginning of Inferno by pro-Guelph declarations that the Roman Empire was created as a function of church and papacy and that Aeneas learned in the Empyrean that he was to be father 13

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

of Rome and her empire, established by divine providence to be the holy place where the successor of Great Peter sits. Such a sympathetic account of papal authority is explicable if originally written before Boniface’s bull of 7 April 1300, excluding Dante from the benefits of the Jubilee (perhaps immediately after the publication of the original bull of 22 February). Boccaccio, in his biography of Dante and in his commentary of the first seventeen cantos of Inferno, Esposizione super la Commedia, suggests that the first seven Guelph cantos were left behind in Florence while Dante began his wandering and his oscillations between Guelf and Ghibbeline associations. He narrates how Dante’s wife Gemma Donati, who survived until c. 1343, lived safely in Florence after her husband’s exile in February 1302 with the support of her Donati relatives, Black Guelfs who supported the papacy (Corso Donati was in control of the city), until the passing of Dante’s death sentence in June 1302, when she was forced to flee the city with her children, presumably still under Donati protection. Dante meanwhile returned from Verona, his ‘first refuge’, to Forli or Arezzo in March 1304 when Pope Benedict XI’s attempts at establishing peace in Florence and reconciling the warring factions raised the prospect of the poet’s return to his native city. However the peace process was undermined by Corso Donati, and by the middle of 1384 when the White Guelfs, with the support of Pistoia, Bologna, Arezzo and Piza, had unsuccessfully attacked Florence at La Lastra, Dante had left the coalition for the White Guelf university town of Bologna where Bernadino da Polenta, brother of Francesca da Rimini, was podesta and where philosophical texts were available.13 By 1306 however, events were forcing Dante into the Black Guelf faction and the possibility of reconciliation with the Donati family and a return to Florence. Bologna had fallen to a Black Guelf government hostile to the Whites Guelphs and Ghibbelines, and Dante began a life of wandering exile, study and writing. Through his friendship with the Florentine jurist and poet, Cino da Pistoia, he enjoyed the patronage of the great feudal mountain lord in the Lunigiana, the Black Guelph condottiere Moroello Malaspina, ‘the hot wind drawn by Mars from Val di Magra’,14 whose family was the honoured exception to Dante’s lament of the decline of the honour of the nobility: ‘The fame that honours your house is loud among lords and in the countryside.’15 Moroello was close to the key leaders of the Florentine Blacks. In the same year, 1306, Corso Donati facilitated his third cousin Gemma’s readmission to Florence, and in a search for her share of Dante’s assets she found (according to Boccaccio), among documents hidden at the time of her husband’s escape, a little notebook in a strongbox containing a version of these early seven cantos of Inferno, which she gave to Dino Frescobaldi, a Florentine stil nuovo poet, who forwarded them to Dante in Lunigiana.16 These were then rewritten and included in the poem, but inconsistencies in style and content, such as two entrances to Hell and the White Guelph formulas remained.17 The poem as we know it was begun in 1306 in Lunigiana, in the vernacular Tuscan, and Dante, despite the imperial convictions expressed in Il Convivio (The Banquet), begun in Bologna in 1304 and completed c.1307 and de Vulgari eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence) written in Bologna in 1303/4, made no allusions to these convictions in Inferno, partly because he

14

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

retained hopes of a reconciliation with his Donati in-laws and the Blacks of Florence, and Inferno therefore, which was completed at the end of 1308 or early 1309 in Lucca (which features the pursuit of the pilgrim and Virgil by tar-blackened demons, compared to the barratars and Black Guelphs who chased Dante out of the city), conveys an image of Dante’s pilgrim as a loyal Guelph adhering to the traditional values of Florence. Corso Donati’s death in 1308 meant the abandonment of any hopes of a reconciliation with the Blacks of Florence and the composition of Inferno was followed by a radical change in the author’s perspective, and Dante resumed the imperial Ghibbeline stance he adopted while writing Il Convivio in 1303–4. This would be given fresh impetus in the spring of 1310 with the announcement of Henry of Luxembourg’s plans to come to Italy to claim the imperial crown and to bring peace and reconciliation to the Italian peninsula. Dante, hopes of a return to Florence rekindled, resumed his White Guelph and Ghibbeline connections in Forli. He accompanied Moroello Malaspina to Henry’s coronation as king of Italy in Milan on the Feast of Epiphany in 1311 when he was crowned with the iron crown first used by Charlemagne and Dante wrote to the emperor, with whom he probably obtained an audience, and to Can Grande della Scala the ruler of Verona and the White Guelphs, condemning Florence’s resistance to the ‘new Caesar’s’ policy of reconciliation. By the time Dante returned to the Casentino valley, in Arezzo province, to the Guidi castle at Poppi in April, he was urging Henry to take Florence by force. His contacts with the imperial court at Milan, Genoa and Pisa and ten years of residence in the feudal castles of the nobility in Lunigiana in northern Tuscany and Casentino led him to abandon his municipal values and to advocate, in correspondence to Henry VII and Florence, the restoration of imperial rights in feudal territories swallowed up by the expansion of cities such as Florence and the surrender of the autonomy of the cities to imperial authority. The emperor’s campaign in Italy was dogged by misfortune: an unsuccessful attempt to enter Rome to be crowned in St Peter’s by the pope was merely followed by his being crowned King of the Romans in St John’s Lateran on 29 June 1312; Henry was then forced to abandon an unsuccessful siege of Florence, and the hopes inspired by his alliance with the king of Arragon against Robert of Anjou were dashed by the emperor’s sudden death at Buonconvento near Siena.18 Dante would react to this disaster with renewed idealism and, after attending the funeral at Pisa, he incorporated these ideals, and the vision of establishing a divinely ordained new order of peace and reconciliation under the emperor into Monarchia, which he wrote in 1413, using his access to documents from the imperial chancery. The same Ghibbeline imperial ideals were assimilated into Purgatorio, which was begun between 1308 and 1309, completed in 1314 and published at the end of 1315 or early 1316, while Dante was in the Lunigiana (an early recipient, and dedicatee according to Boccaccio, was Moroello Malaspina), and these same ideals were incorporated into Paradiso, which was completed in the year of his death, which occurred in September 1321. Paradiso would be published around eight months later when, in April 1322, Iacobo Alighieri sent Guido Novello, who had just taken office as podesta of Ravenna, a little guide to The Divine Comedy with a dedicatory sonnet.19

15

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

The popularity of The Divine Comedy in Italy Even before its publication in 1314 Inferno was well known, for the author gave readings from individual cantos to his various patrons (the Malaspinas, the Guidi and Della Scala in the Lunigiana, Casentino, Verona and Genoa. Sometimes these readings backfired: Genoa, where Dante followed the imperial court in 1312, was dominated by the local strongman Bernarbo Doria, the son of the ‘living dead’ Branca Doria, who murdered his father-in-law, an enemy of Dante’s patrons, the Malaspinas. Branca was embedded by Dante in the ice in Tolomea, while his body remained living on earth until 1325.20 It was rumoured that friends and servants of Branca Doria gave the poet a beating for this insult to the family.21 In its completed form Inferno achieved immediate popularity: in 1315 when Dante refused the city of Florence’s offer of a pardon in return for a payment of a fine and an admission of guilt,22 he gave as a reason his fame and prestige as a philosopher, which must have been a reference to the popularity of Inferno,23 which had become well known on the Italian peninsula before the completion of Paradiso in 1321. Between 1328 and 1333 a Carmelite friar, Guido da Pisa, stressed that Dante had written on a wall, that is on open public places, for the benefit of all.24 A professor of classical poetry at Bologna, Giovanni del Virgilio (c. 1276 or 1280–c.1327), acknowledged Dante’s mass appeal but expressed reservations on this matter in the first of his Latin encyclopaedias, regretting that poets’ grave themes were thrown away on the illiterate masses and that none of the poets Dante assigned to Limbo had written in the language of the marketplace. Dante’s son, Pietro Alighieri, a judge in Verona, declaimed a versified summary of the poem in Verona’s central square on a feast day in the late 1340s.25 Dante’s fellow Florentine, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), who was acquainted with Dante’s daughter, Sister Beatrice of the Ravenna convent; his nephew Andrea, the son of the Dante’s sister from whom Boccaccio learned of the poet’s dark complexion; and two of Dante’s close friends copied the poem between the mid-1350s and 1370s, giving one copy to Petrarch. It was Boccaccio, taking the hint from Dante himself, who referred to his poem as a comedy and a ‘sacro poema’ (sacred poem)26 and fused these two concepts to rename the Commedia (the term employed by the first commentators) The Divine Comedy. Boccaccio, who was eight when the poet died, wrote a Trattatello in Laude di Dante (In Praise of Dante’s Life) in 1357, providing an anecdote, transmitted through Giovanni Bertoldi’s Latin commentary, Comentum super Dantis Aldigherii Comoediam, to demonstrate the popularity of Inferno among ordinary people. He recounted how, during the poet’s exile, certain women of Verona spoke of him as one who popped down to Hell whenever he wanted, which accounted for his dark complexion and curly hair, and returned to tell people about his encounters. Dante, on hearing this, would smile a little and pass on.27 By 1320 Dante’s accounts of conversations with the dead earned him the reputation of a necromancer, and Matteo Visconti of Milan expressed an interest in employing him in this capacity, and this is why all the early commentators on the poem stressed that his journey into the otherworld was an allegorical fiction.28 The fame of Dante, and the transmission of Inferno in oral and literary culture (formal and informal domestic readings occurred throughout the fourteenth and 16

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

fifteenth centuries), was becoming cause for comment and debate. In 1373, a proposal to appoint a worthy, wise man, learned in art and poetry, to read the book commonly called El Dante to all who wished to hear had been put before the priors and council of twelve by a number of Florentine citizens, who wished to be instructed about the Book of Dante; this would be for their benefit and the benefit of other citizens and their descendants who aspired to virtue.29 The proposal was accepted in the same year by the Florentine commune, who decided to fund Boccaccio’s lectures on Dante. This was an important civic occasion, held at the Florentine church of Santo Stefano next to the abbey of the Badia Fiorentina, near Dante’s home on 23 October 1373. Between this month and January 1374, Boccaccio gave sixty lectures on El Dante, until illness forced him to abandon the course at Inferno 17, extolling this divinely authorized poetic theology as a spiritual journey into the afterlife that would give meaning and purpose to life. The Inferno was so well known in Florence by this time that the Florentine electorate rejected papal demands on 6 October 1377 with the cry, ‘Death to the rapacious wolf ’.30 In 1405 Filippo Villani, nephew of the chronicler Giovanni, was paid to lecture on Dante.31 Further lectureships were soon established at Bologna, Pisa and Piacenza. By this time eight commentaries on the poem had been written, the first appearing only three years after Dante’s death. Pietro Alighieri published his commentary using classical materials in 1340. Boccaccio’s commentary breaks off at Inferno xvii probably at the same time as his lectures were halted because of illness. The most influential was by Benvenuto da Imola (1330–88), who was in Florence to attend his friend Boccaccio’s lectures. Benvenuto eschewed the symbolic, didactic and allegorical approach of his seven predecessors and founded a tradition of reading The Divine Comedy as literature and a work of art: a critical approach focusing on passages in the poem revealing something about the poet, the artist, and paying attention to his craft, the aesthetic purpose of the poem, which Benvenuto interpreted as a purely inner vision and a dream.32 This interpretive approach had been envisaged by Dante himself in a letter to Can Grande della Scala claiming that a work of literature could merit the attention of a range of exegetical techniques previously reserved for scripture, and he applied these techniques to his commentary on his own vernacular poetry in Il Convivio.33 All of the early commentators glossed The Divine Comedy line by line in ways previously reserved for the Bible, Virgil and Aristotle. Filippo Villani in his commentary claimed the poem and Dante’s interpretation of Virgil was inspired by the Holy Ghost. The literary prestige of The Divine Comedy was such that by 1370 there were over 800 surviving manuscripts containing all or some part of the poem, making it second only to the Bible, in popularity compared to fifty-five of The Canterbury Tales, and in 1500 there were 115 commentaries. By the mid-fifteenth century Dante’s fame was such that a great grandson, Leonardo, a descendant of Pietro Alighieri, came with other young men from Verona, where the family had been living for two generations, to find out about his illustrious ancestor, and Leonardo Bruni gave him information ‘about many things unknown to him and showed him the family home’.34 17

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

English receptivity to The Divine Comedy The arrival of The Divine Comedy in England coincided with the flowering of an English vernacular, devotional, mystical movement, and a tradition of otherworldly visions which plausibly may have influenced Dante. While his creation of Hell was primarily inspired by Virgil’s account of Aeneas’s descent into Hades, some aspects of his entirely original imagining of the island of Purgatory were influenced by visions of British origin. The legendary journey of the Irish saint, Brendon the Navigator (484–577), across the Atlantic to the Isle of the Blessed, where the seafarer is greeted by a white-haired old man (anticipating Dante’s gatekeeper to the island of Purgatory, Cato of Utica) who admits Brendon to the land of the blessed, was recorded in Latin in the eleventh- and twelfthcentury Navigatio Sancti Brendon Abbatim (the voyage of Saint Brendon the Abbot), which is recorded in over 100 manuscripts including a Tuscan translation of the early fourteenth century which was probably read by Dante.35 Another vision of the afterlife in a valley which is an intermediate stage between Heaven and Hell was experienced by Dryhthelm (fl. 700), a Northumbrian monk of Melrose, fell into a coma, and on regaining consciousness a few hours later, he related how he had been given a tour of Hell, where souls were burned; a valley where souls suffered a temporary punishments of severe cold and heat; and a heaven of intense light. He was denied entrance to Paradise, where the light was even brighter. Dryhthelm’s vision was well known because it was recorded by Bede in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum in which form it would have been read by Dante. The most specific envisaging of Purgatory, the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patrici, was written in Latin between 1180 and 1184 by a monk, Henry of Saltry, a Cistercian in Huntingdonshire, telling of an Irish knight, Owein, who journeys through Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise, a journey dated by Henry to the reign of King Stephen of England between 1135 and 1154. The Tractatus survives in over thirty versions in almost every European language with 150 extant manuscripts of Latin text. It was almost certainly known by Dante.36 A more complete version of the two realms of the afterlife of Purgatory and Paradise appears in the dream vision experienced by a Benedictine monk, Edmund of Eynesham who studied in Oxford University. Edmund related in 1196 a dream vision he experienced at the monastery of Eynesham which was recorded by his brother, Adam, concerning a journey into Purgatory and Paradise. The vision enjoyed subsequent popularity and was recorded in the Chronica maiora of Mathew Paris of St Albans, circulated in the Flores historiarum, and which was probably known to Dante and was translated into Middle English in the fifteenth century. Although the twenty-five surviving manuscripts of the chronicle are English, it is possible that Dante became aware of the vision through the Dominican friar Nicholas Trevet, the Oxford theologian and chronicler who made the first of several visits to Italy in the early years of the fourteenth century, perhaps before 1300. Trevet was active in Florence, Padua and Avignon, and he worked in the library of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, the site of the Cappella Strozzi Last Judgment frescoes of Hell and Paradise, which were influenced by Dante’s depiction of the circles of Inferno. Trevet also wrote a commentary on one of Dante’s most important 18

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

sources, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) which was especially popular in Italy and survives in almost 100 manuscripts.37 Many of the essential features of The Divine Comedy exist in crude form in Edward’s vision: the landscape of Purgatory with its extremes of cold and fire, its mists, fogs, lakes of ice and snakes; and the white raiments of the blessed in Paradise with its intense light all anticipate Dante’s depiction of the other world. There are parallels in the timing of both journeys: Edward’s descent into Purgatory begins on Easter Thursday before Good Friday and he enters Paradise on Easter Sunday. He has a compassionate Virgil-like guide in the form of St Nicholas, and he encounters prominent persons in Purgatory including bishops, an archbishop of Canterbury, King Henry II, and acquaintances known to him in Oxford, many transfigured and barely recognizable in their suffering of penances that illustrate the principles of contrapasso: an alcoholic goldsmith is compelled to swallow fiery coins and a prostitute is pierced by various hot prongs. All are eager to tell their stories to the inquisitive pilgrim and stress their dependence on the good will and intercessions of the living.38 Visions of Heaven also played a part in the English mystical tradition of the fourteenth century. Richard Rolle of Hampole (1300–49), in a series of Latin and vernacular meditations on his relationship with God, claimed to have had intimations of the bliss of Paradise manifested in sensations of warmth, sweet smells and the sounds of heavenly melodies. After 1381 the nuns of Hampole, where Rolle served as a spiritual adviser, even performed an office of the hermit’s life that used liturgical chants of his experience of calor, canor and dulcedor.39 In Lectio iv they celebrated the way he followed the example of the apostle Paul and attained his rapture to the third heaven (or Empyrean) where ‘he heard secrets which are not lawful for a man to utter which avows the greatness of the revelations made to him by God’.40 However, a potentially hostile environment awaited The Divine Comedy in England. By the end of the fourteenth century the English church, under the leadership of John Thoresby, archbishop of York, and Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, was asserting a firm pastoral control over the translation and circulation of devotional literature. Attempts were made by clergy serving Arundel to moderate Rolle’s individualistic, ecstatic teachings, and under the Lancastrian kingship the claims of lay religious visionaries were scrutinized. The laywoman Margery Kempe, who claimed ecstatic visions of Heaven, was subjected to a long, patient examination between 1413 and 1414 by Thomas Arundel in his Lambeth Palace garden. Dante was a layman who claimed his poem was the fruit of a lucid, waking dream, belonging to those categories of early morning dreams that he believed to be the most true and prophetic. He refers to his being full of sleep when he loses his way in the wood41 and in the Empyrean he is told by Peter that the time is fleeting that holds him asleep,42 but this was not a vast vivid dream, for the intervals between contain a narrative of a historical experienced journey, punctuated by other lucid waking dreams and dreams within dreams and culminating in a real vision. Aware and acknowledging at the beginning and the end of his poem that he should be writing within the conventions of dream vision, he has dared to go beyond the allowable otherworld poetic conventions.43 These dreams, which he describes as a profound state of metamorphosis, assisted his crossing over the liminal border between 19

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

life and death: when he encountered Lucifer he maintained: ‘I did not die, I did not remain alive.’44 Although he is unable to capture in verse the flash of an eyelid during the visionary sleep that generated this poem, this narrative of a journey into Hell, Purgatory and Paradise45 is a strategy, a fiction in the service of a vision that the poet believed to be true: ‘truth that has the face of falsehood’. Dante’s claim that his poem was not fictional, that the events he recorded actually happened, took him into the realms of heresy because instead of applying the conventional allegory of the poets, used in such works as The Romance of the Rose, which had no claims to historical authenticity, he was, as was made explicit in his preamble on Paradiso, addressed to his patron, Cangrade della Scala, applying to his poem the four-fold method of scriptural exegesis (the allegory of the theologians) reserved for the historical events of the Bible, so that characters such as Beatrice, Virgil and Statius were not personifications of reason or faith, as maintained by the anxious early commentators, but living personalities who could serve as typological pre- and post-figurations of Biblical figures.46 Dante believed himself to be the divinely inspired ‘scribe of God’, a prophet who could be compared to St Paul and St John, the author of the Book of Revelations,47 and when he experienced the vision of the griffon on top of Mount Purgatory, he compared himself to the three apostles on Mount Tabor witnessing the transfiguration of Jesus Christ.48 Although he adopted the persona of a pilgrim, a spectator in the dramas of otherworld, the poet, the author of this dream vision is commanded by St Peter to denounce the clergy and he duly consigned popes to damnation, even prophesied the future arrival of Boniface VIII, sent Branca Doria into the black pitch before his death, even before the arrival of the man he murdered, Michael Zanche, because betrayal in the eyes of the narrator merited instant damnation and denial of the possibility of repentance to sinners. At the same time he placed pagans such as the Roman emperor, Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan prince in Paradise, the pagan poet Statius and the philosopher Cato of Utica, who committed suicide rather than yield to Julius Caesar, in Purgatory where, in defiance of the Papacy, Dante located excommunicates who were required to spend thirty times the number of years they spent in contumacy, and he even placed a Muslim, Saladin, in the Limbo of Inferno, displaying the sort of intellectual presumption that would be condemned by Peter Damian and Thomas Aquinas in the heaven of the sun. If Dante’s main authoritarian overarching plot of conversion and progress towards salvation raises questions over a dark attitude towards the future, in which a living man, an acquaintance of the poet, is denied free will and the possibility of repentance and robbed of his remaining time on earth, his delight in paradox also undermines this narrative with statements concerning the good things he found in Hell: But to treat of the good that I found there, I will tell of other things that I saw,49 one of which was his encounter with his tutor Brunetto Latini in the circle of sodomites, to whom he continued to profess his love and admiration. Even Dante’s rhetorical 20

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

attempts to convey the wonders of Heaven by protesting his experience were ineffable, while devoting 4,728 lines to describing Paradise raises doubts over whether he can be considered a mystic or merely a clever layman. 50 Dante moreover had a far larger audience than the writers in the English mystical tradition, and this raises the question: why, in a country exercising strict pastoral control over religious enthusiasm and visions, and where ownership of a vernacular translation of the Bible was punishable by burning, was The Divine Comedy allowed to enter this country without any apparent controversy? Dante’s conviction that vernacular poetry could be used to expound theological views and to function as a medium for the communication of revelations of Divine Wisdom certainly aroused unease among his admirers. Geoffrey Chaucer may have followed his example by writing in the vernacular, but he consistently avoided the issue of using an unstable language to express any form of religious or philosophical truths, preferring instead to set himself up as a bad reader of The Divine Comedy who did not understand its larger meaning. He achieved this by using multiple personas and unreliable narrators, ordinary people incapable of understanding or expressing themselves on such issues as the meaning and origin of dreams. The cacophonous hubbub of different voices in the House of Fame, all expressing different prejudices, concludes with the appearance of a man of authority, plausibly Dante himself, the theologus poeta, who was the recipient of unprecedented grace:51 At last I saw a man Who I did not know But he seemed to be A man of great authority.52 The nearest Chaucer would ever get to a Dantean expression about free will and predestination would be in a farmyard allegory delivered by a cockerel (an ironic version of Dante’s eagle) and an inversion of Dante’s vision of Paradise.53 It is not therefore surprising that The Divine Comedy was not translated into the English vernacular in fourteenth and fifteenth century England, although it was made available in a Latin translation for the lower ranks of the English clergy. The fact that it was not translated into English may in part explain why it escaped ecclesiastical censure, but a more significant explanation is the reputation of the author as a poet rather than a theologian or a mystic (although this may have disappointed Dante himself), and this is how the early commentators addressed the more controversial aspects of Dante’s text. Bertoldi, in his commentary, somewhat inaccurately stressed the orthodoxy of Dante’s theology. Benvenuto, who admired Dante’s controversial alter ego, Ulysses, protected the author against accusations of heresy by distinguishing the poet from the theologian, the literal from the allegorical, consigning Dante’s otherworldly prophetic claims to the realm of a fiction imagined by the poet and by suggesting that the poem be read as an allegory and that his characters were not historical.54 To the charge that Dante was involved in astrology and perhaps necromancy, given his sympathetic response to the soothsayers in Hell, Benvenuto attempted to stress that his prophetic gifts were merely 21

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

those of an author. It is true that Dante’s most influential admirer, Geoffrey Chaucer, did not take his descriptions of Hell and Heaven literally and preferred to satirize them, reserving his admiration and imitation for his poetic genius. The smooth entry of The Divine Comedy into English cultural life in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century is perhaps testimony to a sophisticated aesthetic and secular approach to literature.

Channels of transmission of The Divine Comedy into England There is little evidence of Dante’s The Divine Comedy in English library catalogues of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but as only four of the 646 volumes of the library of the Austin Friars of York survive, not too much can be read into that. Given the English conquest of large sections of Normandy, Anjou and Maine in the second half of the fourteenth century and the first two decades of the fifteenth century; the wholesale transferral of the French royal library of Charles VI in the Louvre to England under John, duke of Bedford and Sir John Fastolf; and the translation of French versions of Roman classics into English, it would seem natural to use France as a starting point to study the influence of The Divine Comedy on English cultural and intellectual life. In 1330, nine years after Dante’s death, a Cistercian monk, Guillaume de Deguileville, wrote Le Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine (The Pilgrimage of Human Life) a vernacular verse account of the pilgrimage of a soul from the Last Judgment through Purgatory to salvation, and twenty-five years later he revised it as The Pilgrimage of the Soul. This text certainly attracted the attention of the English in Paris. John duke of Bedford, the regent in France, commissioned a prose translation of the first version of the Pilgrimage, which would be printed by Caxton, and Bedford’s deputy, Thomas Montacute, the second husband of Alice Chaucer, commissioned John Lydgate (who was in Paris from 1425/6 to 1428 as member of Bedford’s administrative staff) to translate the second version, Le Pelerinage de l’Ame, into English verse as the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man.55 This allegorical account of the struggle between the forces of good and evil, indebted to Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) Boethius and St Paul, was no attempt to emulate Dante (there is no sense of any progress towards understanding a transcendental meaning to life, and there was a contempt for the literal, the world); nevertheless there are striking affinities in terms of the use of vernacular to give, in a triform structure, accounts of a pilgrimage to the other world; a pilgrim’s meeting with the various sins and encounters with the sea of Satan and Fortune’s wheel; and in the treatment of the theme of a soul’s searching for its homeland by journeying across the sea, like a pilot in a small boat, beyond time and mortality, before being taken into the air by a feathered youth. There are also parallels in the use of similar imagery to convey the conflict between the soul and body in terms of the turning of mill wheels in alternate directions,56 and the soul striving to shine, like the sun behind clouds or like a small lantern.57 The author’s strident satire of corrupt clergy would influence Chaucer, and the popularity of The Pilgrimage of the Soul, which survives in eighty-two manuscripts, and the interest it aroused in English court circles, suggests a fertile environment for the reception of Dante’s more ambitions epic. 22

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

The first French writer to cite Dante directly was Philippe de Mezieres, an ambassador to Richard II’s court in 1395. Another French writer with a connection to the English court who closely read Dante and emulated him in her writing was Christine de Pisan. One of her patrons was the 3rd earl of Salisbury, John de Montacute (the father of Thomas Montacute who married Chaucer’s granddaughter). John Montacute may have accompanied Richard II to France for the king’s marriage to the princess Isabella, and he was in Paris on an embassy in 1398. Christine spoke of him as ‘gracieux chevalier’ and sent her thirteen-year-old son, Jean de Castel, to be educated in England with Salisbury’s own son; she would probably have followed them but for Salisbury’s execution in 1400, after which Henry IV unsuccessfully tried to induce her to settle in England.58 Her L’Epitre de Othea a Hector (The Book of the Epistle of Othea to Hector) written in 1400, features the lady of wisdom (to whom Dante, imagining her as a gentle lady of compassion, dedicated his Convivio).59 Christine followed the Italian poet’s example in equally balancing in the vernacular Greek mythology from Ovid with Christian morality (her account of King Minos was accompanied with illustrations, following Dante, in depicting Minos as the justicer of Hell),60 and it was dedicated to Henry IV of England and Louis of Orleans, father of Charles of Orleans, and translated into English in the mid-fifteenth century. Christine, who saw parallels between Charlemagne’s move from Rome to Paris and the translation under Charles V of Latin classics into French, was born in 1364 in Venice, the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano (Thomas of Pizza). Thomas took his daughter to Paris in 1368 when he accepted a post as physician, astrologer, and alchemist at the court of Charles V and supervised the education of his daughter. She continued to be fluent in Italian and probably acquired The Divine Comedy from her father’s library, although she also had access to the large library of Charles V. In one of her dream visions, Le Livre du Chemin de Long Estude (the Book of the Long Path of Study), the first serious reaction to The Divine Comedy in French literature, she is guided by the Cumerian Sybil, with whom she shares a connection as a fellow Italian, in the same way that Virgil and Dante shared a common North Italian heritage. Like Dante, Christine saw herself as an exile, and she was inspired by him to write about her longing for peace under a universal emperor. In a letter she wrote to Pierre Col, canon of Notre Dame in 1402, she expresses her pride in the Italian ancestry she shared with Dante, and the possibility that the content of The Divine Comedy could be transmitted orally to non-Italian speakers: ‘But if you want to hear Hell and Heaven better described and theology discussed in more appropriate and subtle terms more profitably, more poetically and more effectively, then read the book of Dante, or have it translated for yourself since it is superbly composed in Italian’ (until the invention of printing it is likely that The Divine Comedy was read out loud and possibly in translation). Christine goes on to emphasize that it is ‘a hundred times’ better written than the most popular poem in France, The Romance of the Rose. Actual copies of The Divine Comedy probably first reached English shores through members of the Franciscan order, who made use of the poem in their sermons (Dante reserved special praise for St Francis and dressed the angels in Purgatory in Franciscan robes). Rogerius de Platea (or de Heraclea) (1304–83), prior of the Franciscan order, 23

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

who received his baccalaureate from the University of Naples, quoted Dante’s The Divine Comedy (which may have reached Naples by 1320s) in his Lenten sermons, using the poet as an authoritative figure to validate theology. Roger travelled to England to join the Franciscan community at Cambridge; attached to the Franciscan chronicler Thomas of Eccleston’s list of seventy-three Franciscan masters was a Frater Rogerius de Cicilia, probably present in Cambridge in 1351–3.61 A papal decree in 1367, awarding a magisterium to Filius Rogerius of Heraclea of the Friars Minor, states that this Sicilian friar studied and lectured on the Sentences, as provided in a Papal Bull of 1336. It is likely that these lectures would be accompanied by the same illustrations from Dante that Fr Roger had employed in his cycle sermons.62 In these sermons Fr Roger praised Dante’s role as a visionary poet and compared him to St Paul.63 Another Italian Franciscan to bring Dante into England was Paolo Veneto of the Verona convent who studied in Padua. On 31 August 1390 he was assigned to Oxford by the prior provincial, and in December 1393 he received an acquittance from friar Thomas Winterton, the English prior provincial, for money he had paid to other Italian friars of the order. Veneto had an international reputation as a philosopher and was the author of an Expositio Dantis Alighieris.64 Another source for the reception of Dante texts and their dissemination among leading Florentine authors, Boccaccio and Petrarch, and ultimately among English writers such as Chaucer, was the papal city of Avignon, which Dante may have visited in 1310. A 1407 catalogue of the library of the last Avignon pope, Benedict XIII (d. 1423), reveals a copy of Dante, presumably The Divine Comedy, and Bertoldi’s 1416 Latin translation and commentary of The Divine Comedy was among the list of books to be bought for Benedict XIII’s library. Dante had been hostile towards the Avignon popes in their ‘Babylonian captivity’ in his The Divine Comedy and Monarchia, and they confronted his attacks. In 1329 John XXII’s legate in Romagna, Betrand du Pouget, condemned and burnt a copy of Monarchia, and by the mid-fourteenth century this text had become the source of heated debate at Avignon, as Petrarch and Boccaccio entered into the disputation against the Papacy. In 1354 Boccaccio made the first of two visits to the papal city as a diplomatic envoy for Florence to assure the papacy of his city’s loyalty, at a time when the Holy Roman Emperor’s involvement in Italy was looking imminent. At this time, 1351–60, Boccaccio was working on his Life of Dante, which became the main source of information on the Papacy’s campaign against Dante and his Monarchia. Boccaccio lamented Cardinal Bertrand de Poujet’s condemnation of the Monarchia: ‘and there being no one to oppose him he got hold of the book (Monarchia), and treating it as a heretical document, publicly burnt it, as he would have done to the bones of its author to his everlasting shame and destruction of his memory, if he was not prevented from doing so by a Florentine knight’.65 It was while Boccaccio was writing Dante’s biography and rereading The Divine Comedy that he may have introduced his friend, Francesco Petrarch, who was born in Ischia near Florence, to Dante’s poem. Petrarch’s father, Petracco di Parenzo, was a friend of Dante’s, a fellow Florentine White Guelph who had been exiled with Dante in 1302, and Petracco and his young son, Franceso, met the poet in Genoa, where Henry of Luxembourg had established his imperial court, 24

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

in the winter of 1311–12, while they were waiting to board a ship to Avignon, where Francesco would spend most of his adult life.66 Boccaccio and Petrarch met in Padua in 1351, and Petrarch, who believed good poetry had to be written in Latin, confessed, in a letter he sent to Boccaccio in 1359, that he had never owned the Commedia (a work more overtly political than anything he had ever written).67 Boccaccio introduced Petrarch to Dante’s celebration of imperial Rome and the hostile papal reaction. Petrarch responded in Milan in 1357, describing the papal legate as a bandit and the greatest enemy ever faced by Rome.68 Under Boccaccio’s influence Petrarch emerged as a critic of the pretensions of Babylonian Avignon and the tower building Nimrod, Clement VI. While he was in Avignon Petrarch wrote in support of Cola di Rienzo, the author of In monarchiam Dantis commentarium which addressed the Papacy’s temporal wealth and introduced Dante to a wider audience as the author of the Commedia.69 Petrarch, employing language from the Monarchia, celebrated Rome’s right to rule the world.70 Another channel for the early arrival of Dante in England was provided by the Benedictines. Adam Easton (1330–1397), perhaps the first English reader to mention Dante by name, entered the Benedictine priory in Norwich in 1348 and spent most of his career at the Papal Curia, initially in Avignon. While he was at Avignon, to serve his ambitions in the Curia, he wrote a treatise in 1377 that secured his appointment as cardinal in 1381, the Defensorium ecclesiastice potestatis, which supported papal authority against the claims of the emperor by engaging with several adversaries, including Wyclif and Dante. Easton quoted from book three of Monarchia, which maintained the authority of the emperor was not dependent on the church and that Samuel, the ancestor of papal authority, was merely a messenger or legate of God.71 Easton’s use of the Monarchia suggests a reading of Dante at Norwich priory, and it certainly reflects the role of Avignon as a recipient of Dante texts, including a Southern Italian manuscript of the Inferno from the library of the Franciscan, Matteo Porta, archbishop of Palermo, which contained texts of Ovid and Virgil that were Dante’s sources. These works, along with those of Statius, were also in the Avignon library, visited by Petrarch and Bocaccio.72 Benedictine interest in Dante, and his views on empire and papacy, continued with John Whethamstede, who entered the abbey of St Albans in 1405–6 and became prior of the students of the Benedictine house of Gloucester College, Oxford, in 1414, before becoming abbot of St Albans in 1420–40 and 1451–65. Whethamstede founded libraries in Gloucester College, Oxford, and St Albans Abbey, and in 1432–3 he travelled to Italy to attend the council of Pavia, the Visconti university town which held four copies of The Divine Comedy and a commentary,73 and subsequently, in 1431, to the Council of Siena, to defend his monasteries’ interests with the Curia. In the course of his journeys he had the opportunity to encounter Italian intellectuals and to lament the quality of his own Latin. These visits probably contributed to his work on a classical dictionary, the Granarium de virorum illustrium (The Granary of Famous Men).74 In a commonplace book, written largely in his own hand, there are two articles on pope and nation and surviving fragments from another of his encyclopaedic works, Manipularium, doctorum (Sheaf of Scholars) containing entries on the papacy addressing the issue of the title and authority of the popes and the papacy’s temporal power and possessions. In a summary 25

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

of the views of those who maintained that the pope, by virtue of his apostolic authority, could not receive temporal power (a condemnation of the Donation of Constantine), Whethamstede attributed this view to the Waldensians, when it actually came from the third book of Dante’s Monarchia, and he cited Dante as one of the authorities who considered the pope was entitled to hold possessions.75 Whethamstede was more accurate in attributing to Dante the view that there is a separation of temporal and spiritual power, consistent with the argument of book three of Monarchia. It is possible that Whethamstede obtained a limited and confused view of what Monarchia was about (there are only twenty surviving manuscripts and no evidence that it was either in the library of St Albans or in Humfrey Duke of Gloucester’s collection), and he may have known Easton’s attack on Dante. But, given his connections with Easton and his frequent citing of the Monarchia in his encyclopaedic works, it is possible that he had direct access to the Monarchia and altered some details of the argument to support the papacy, an indication of Dante’s increasing moral authority among the English clergy.76 By the end of the fourteenth century it is likely that members of the upper ranks of the English secular clergy with Italian connections were being exposed to the contents of The Divine Comedy through the international medium of Latin. Thomas Arundel, deprived of his archbishopric as a result of Richard II’s assertion of the royal prerogative, stayed in Florence in 1397–8 with his friend, the humanist lawyer, and Florentine chancellor, Coluccio Salutati. The visit occurred during an emotionally charged time when Dante’s poem was of particular relevance to both men. The fame of Arundel’s host as a passionate reader of The Divine Comedy and an expert Dante scholar was such that it was commented on by Leonardo Bruni in his Dialogi, and Benvenuto da Imola submitted his commentary to the chancellor for his approval.77 In a letter to Nicolo da Tudavento, Salutati eulogized Dante as a Florentine poet whose linguistic merits in the vernacular put him on the same level as the ancients. The Divine Comedy had come to play a crucial role in Coluccio’s emotional and spiritual welfare; lost in a dark wood, he is an early example on someone who turned to Dante in his hour of need and he would be the dominant intellectual and spiritual influence for the rest of his life.78 Salutati was grieving over the death of his wife, Piera, whom he had nursed for fourteen days after she had suddenly fallen ill, until her death in February 1396. Salutati wrote to Pellagrino Zambeccari quoting, in his own Latin translation, Beatrice’s descent to Limbo to commission Virgil to lead Dante from error to her side. He was also engaged in translating passages from the poem that he incorporated into a work he completed by 1397, de fato et fortuna (On Fate and Fortune), that rationalized his fate. In these extracts from Inferno and Purgatorio he stresses the importance of exercising the divine gift of free will by engaging in a ‘battle with the heavens’, accepting the equal distribution of the light of God’s love throughout the heavens, and most importantly, for his current circumstances, acknowledging the divinely ordained role of the angelic Fortune in the affairs of men.79 He must have found Picarda’s words, ‘In his will is our peace’, especially comforting. Arundel may not have been suffering the same degree of emotional pain as his host, but The Divine Comedy was also relevant to his troubles. He was in exile, staying in the 26

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

home town that had exiled Dante, eating another man’s salt bread, confessing to his host his worries about the fate of his library, and in his preoccupation with the political turmoil of his country he would have found consolation in Salutati’s interpretations of the poem. In de fato et fortuna, and in the other text he was working on at this time, de Tyranno (The Tyrant), Salutati’s religious imagination soared at the encounter with the spiritual sights and divine music of Dante’s poem, and this stimulated his view of a universe that was multi-layered and obedient in every part to the awesome will of God. All of Salutati’s works in this period may have comforted Arundel by encouraging him to accept the providential turning of Fortune’s wheel. Coluccio endorsed Dante’s concept of history as the unfolding of a divine plan, which he applied to defending Dante’s celebration of Julius Caesar’s implementation of the divine will in the triumph of the empire and his consigning the republicans Brutus and Cassius to the pit of Hell for killing Caesar.80 De Tyranno justifies tyrannicide, the deposing of a ruler who has a legitimate title and abuses his power, and argues that Caesar was justified in seizing power and was no tyrant but a father of Rome; his Judas-like betrayal and murder marked the political dividing line between pagan and Christian history.81 These ideas would be important for Arundel when he joined forces with fellow exile, Henry of Derby, who had been in northern Italy in 1392–3, when they invaded England in 1399, landing at Ravenspur on 4 July 1399 with the intention of deposing Richard II. De tyranno, which appeared in 1400, provided intellectual justification for the conquest of the realm and deposition of the tyrannical Richard II by Derby, a Caesar-like exiled soldier to whom the archbishop would lend his intellectual support by preaching a sermon, in which he claimed that the Lancastrian revolution enjoyed God’s approval and was divinely ordained; in other words it was a manifestation of the awesome will of God that Salutati perceived triumphed over intellect and the ambitions of men which he saw working throughout Dante’s poem.82 Salutati would continue to write to Arundel between 1388 and 140383 when he promised to send him a copy of his De nobilitate legum in which he celebrated the superiority of the active and mixed lives over the contemplative life, a concept that would influence the reinstated archbishop of Canterbury’s pastoral policies (Arundel in return promised to send Salutati a copy of Augustine’s treatise on music).

English poets and The Divine Comedy The English clergy, especially friars and monks with connections with Italian houses, may indeed represent the earliest connections between Italy and England and The Divine Comedy. Among Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims, it is the clerical storytellers who make the numerous references to Dante and Italy, which raises the possibility that Chaucer may have heard about Dante from clerical travellers before his own earliest visits to Italy, which were possibly in 1368 (when he received 10 pounds for travel abroad)84 and 1373 and 1376. Chaucer’s Pardoner had been to Rome;85 his clerk cited Petrarch and Boccaccio in his tale and claimed to have met Petrarch in Padua,86 and it was the clergy in The Canterbury Tales who quoted from The Divine Comedy: the monk told the tale of 27

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

Ugolino of Pisa; the prioress and the second nun used St Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin from Paradiso; the friar tells of a devil paying tribute to Dante’s expertise on Hell;87 and the wife of Bath cites clerical sources that include translations of Dante’s account of gentility from Purgatorio and Il Convivio.88 A likely source for Chaucer’s clerical information on The Divine Comedy was the papal city of Avignon, a hotbed of literary discussion and theological debate, where Petrarch and Boccaccio had read and commented on Dante and where Adam Easton had engaged in his dialogue with the Monarchia. Avignon was an obvious destination on Chaucer’s many diplomatic missions to France in 1360–1, 1366, 1368–9, 1370, 1376–7 and en route to missions to Spain in 1366 and to Italy in 1372–3 and 1378. It is possible that Chaucer wrote The Second Nuns’s Tale, recounting the legend of St Cecilia, with Adam Easton in mind. The tale incorporates Chaucer’s reworking of St Bernard’s invocation to the Virgin Mary from Dante’s Paradiso, and Easton in the 1380s was engaged with texts relating to the cult of the Virgin. The Second Nun’s Tale concludes with the burial, under the auspices of a pope named Urban (like the then current Roman pope) of the mutilated St Cecilia (an image of the suffering church at the time of the Schism) in the church from which Easton took his name as a cardinal in 1381. Easton was buried in the Basilica Santa Cecilia in Trastavere, Rome, in 1397.89 There are even similarities in the way both men approached Dante: Easton took issue with Dante’s attacks on the papacy and support for the emperor at the pope’s expense, and Chaucer, in The House of Fame (as we shall see), took issue with Dante’s concept of the afterlife. However, the most important source of inspiration for Chaucer’s interest in Italian literature, and in particular Dante, was not the clergy, but the diplomatic and mercantile contacts he made in France and Italy. As a civil servant, clerk of the works, and chief tax inspector of wool for twelve years from 1374, he would have been able to develop his linguistic abilities inspecting the quays along the north side of the Thames where the goods of Italian, Flemish Dutch and Francophiles were exchanged.90 Chaucer’s knowledge of Italian probably predated his first possible visit to Italy in 1368 and his visit in 1373. As a youth he would have heard Italian spoken by the pepperers of London with whom his father associated.91 Like the members of the upper ranks of the clergy, he would have been fluent in Latin, and he certainly perceived a close relationship between Latin and the vernacular Italian: when he adapted Boccaccio’s vernacular Il Filostrato into Trolius and Criseyde, he described Boccaccio’s Italian vernacular as Latin, and in The Man of Law’s Tale, the emperor’s daughter, Constance, adrift in the sea, lands on the coast of Northumbria, and her Italian is comprehensible to the constable of the castle: A type of corrupt Latin was her speech But in every way through this she was understood.92 This suggests that for many of Chaucer’s class, clerical and lay, a thorough grounding in Latin facilitated the acquisition of Italian.93 In the counting house on the riverside near the Tower and on the wool quay, Chaucer, as controller of customs from 1374 to 1386, lodged in rooms over Aldgate at the same time as the philosopher Ralph Strode, who had 28

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

a prestigious reputation in Italy, and he was therefore in constant contact with merchants from Genoa and Lucca; for Edward III, despite the establishment of Calais as the staple port for the export of English wool in 1363, had been selling licences to Italian merchants, and Chaucer had been appointed by John of Gaunt to mediate with Italian merchants, allowing them to ship wool directly to Italy to such an extent that between October 1372 and 1375, 40 per cent of English wool was diverted from Calais. Since the start of the Hundred Years’ War, most of these merchants were from Florence and Lucca: by the third quarter of the fourteenth century there were at least sixty Florentine merchants in England, and the heaviest concentration of Italian merchants, especially Lombards, was in Bread Street. The merchant companies were from Tuscany, and the Bardi family were at the heart of the affairs of the city state of Florence, and under Philip Bardi (d. 1362) and his son Guiltera (Walter), they became moneylenders to Edward III. As a king’s clerk, Chaucer would have had dealings with the Bardi dynasty. Walter Bardi, who was resident in London from 1350 to 1391 had been acting as moneylender to Edward III and Richard II since 1361. Walter held positions in London as head of the Royal Mint in the Tower of London, 1363–94, and Chaucer, as clerk of the works, was a regular visitor to the Tower, supporting its upkeep and presumably having regular dealings with Walter.94 Through this connection Chaucer would have heard about Beatrice Portinari, daughter of the banker Folco Portinari, the inspiration for Dante’s Vita Nuova (New Life) and The Divine Comedy. Giovanni Boccaccio’s mother was related to the Portinari family and his father (also named Giovanni) worked for the Compagnia dei Bardi in Florence from 1312. In 1326 Giovanni senior was appointed head of a Bardi bank in Naples and his son (b.1313) served a reluctant apprenticeship in this bank from 1327. Edward III’s failure to repay all his loans contributed to the financial problems of this banking dynasty and may have affected Boccaccio’s father who returned bankrupt to Florence in 1338, followed by his son in 1340. Boccaccio wrote in his Esposizione, his commentary on Inferno 2.52, that Beatrice married Simone dei Bardi, who belonged to one of the two main branches of the Florentine banking family who commissioned Giotto to paint the frescoes of the chapel of Santa Croce, 1325–30.95 This was confirmed by Dante’s son, Pietro, and it suggests that Chaucer with his connections to the Bardi bankers may have been exposed to discussions about Dante before his momentous visit to Italy in 1473. Chaucer’s contact with Italians and their literature (Tuscan merchants were among the early readers of Boccaccio’s Decameron) was furthered by his diplomatic commissions on the king’s business as an ambassador in northern Italy in Genoa, Milan and Florence. These activities, along with his poetry, strengthened his identification with Dante, a fellow diplomat and ambassador, although Dante had been appointed as a political and civic official whereas Chaucer, like Petrarch, was employed because of his rhetorical skills to attend to the delicate matters of treaties and trade, the scope of which would extend beyond the brief of the letters he was carrying.96 It was work that necessarily combined persuasive linguistic skills with a certain amount of duplicity and double dealing, the arts of Ulysses and his Tuscan alter ego, so that in both the realms of diplomacy and poetry Chaucer’s identification with Dante ran deep. Chaucer was granted £10 to travel abroad as king’s envoy in 1367–8, possibly to Italy (the sum of money and the length 29

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

of his stay, 106 days, allowed him plenty of opportunity for an Italian visit)97 and to join the entourage of his former patron, Lionel the duke of Clarence, whose marriage to Violanda Visconti was celebrated the previous month and attended by 500 English guests. The marriage may well have been expedited by Walter Bardi who, as head of the Mint, received an annuity of 20 pounds from Edward III. Chaucer was sent by the king to receive from Galeazzo II Visconti, lord of Milan, the dower of his daughter, Violanda. Violanda’s uncle, Giovanni Visconti, archbishop of Milan, had employed a number of scholars to explain and illustrate obscure passages of The Divine Comedy seventeen years previously. Chaucer may well have attempted to improve his Italian to ingratiate himself in his mistresses’ household, and this made him an obvious candidate for the diplomatic mission to Italy for the six months of 1373 to arrange an English seaport for Genoese merchants.98 From Genoa, where he had the opportunity to see the oldest known copy of The Divine Comedy, made in 1337, Chaucer went to Florence (then twice the size of London) on a secret mission, accompanied by two Italians, including Jacoba Provan, possibly a member of the Bardi family, probably to arrange another loan for Edward III from the Bardi bankers who served Edward III throughout the fourteenth century. Chaucer was visiting Florence in a crucial year: Dante was the talk of Florence, and Boccaccio was commissioned to give his public lectures on the poet. He was sixty and Chaucer thirty, and the two may well have met.99 At this time the city’s chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, identified Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio as the three crowns of Florence. Petrarch was living nearby in Padua, and Boccaccio in Florence. Chaucer’s contacts with Florence were strengthened in 1375 when the city was placed under a papal edict. The English crown was reluctant to publish it and took Florentines into the Tower under the protection of Edward III. Chaucer was sent to Italy again in 1378 to Milan (where Petrarch lived for six years) to negotiate with Bernabo Visconti, and his son-in-law, the mercenary, John Hawkwood, concerning the war between Milan and Genoa and to recruit their help against the French. These two visits would have a profound impact on Chaucer’s imagination. The Florentine regime from 1343 to 1378 was a broadly based association of shopkeepers, artisans and tradesmen sharing power with merchants and bankers but excluding magnates, and Milan under the Visconti was an aristocratic tyrannical autocracy (Chaucer would describe the Lombard court as the house of Caesar in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women), and these two very different social, political structures influenced the overall structure of the Canterbury Tales: an associationalist company of pilgrims comprising craftsmen, tradesmen, officials and aristocrats who drank in fellowship together and quarrelled (a microcosm of Florentine society), but who in some cases told tales about aristocratic tyranny set against a background of a Ricardian regime that was at one time involved in marriage negotiations with the Visconti and which had autocratic imperial ambitions, although without having the Visconti’s economic power.100 It was during this mission that Chaucer would have passed through Avignon (where Dante may have studied in 1310) and consulted the library used by Petrarch.101 Chaucer’s diplomatic and cultural contacts with Italy were atypical and no other Middle English writers towards the end of the fourteenth century showed the same 30

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

familiarity with Dante. Chaucer’s friend, John Gower, who had power of attorney over his affairs while he was in Italy in 1378 related an anecdote in the seventh book of his second recension of the Confessio amantis (The Lover’s Confession), which allowed Dante to haunt his work the way Boccaccio used an anecdote about Guido Cavalcanti to summon the ghost of Dante in his Decameron. A flatterer observes that he is better clothed and fed than the poet Dante, who replies: ‘a flatterer may rule and lead a king and all his land’.102 This anecdote is a conflation of a similar tale about the caustic wit Dante displayed at the court of Can Grande della Scala in Verona, narrated between 1340 and 1343 by Petrarch in his Rerum memorandum libri, and an account from around 1300 in the anonymous Il novellino, of the wit and wisdom of Marco Lombardo, a diplomat and one of Dante’s alter egos, who features in Purgatorio xvi. Marco, when asked by a courtier why he has received fewer gifts than him, replies: ‘You have found more of your kind that I of mine.’103 Gower could have conflated these two stories himself if he had read Purgatorio xvi (the anecdote features in fourteenth century commentaries on The Divine Comedy),104 but it is more likely that he relied on oral transmission of these stories, for the second recension of The Lover’s Confession was completed between 21 June 1392 and 21 January 1393 and dedicated to Henry of Derby who was in northern Italy between December 1392 and spring 1393 on his way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and stopping at Padua and Verona (sources of the story) en route to Milan, Gower was in direct contact with this entourage when it returned to England, perhaps bringing stories about Dante.105 There is a possibility that the other major vernacular writer of this period with court connections, the anti-clerical Gawain poet, who composed for Richard II’s court in Cheshire, may have known about The Divine Comedy. There are parallels in the themes and imagery of Purity and Pearl with Dante’s poem. In Purity there is a description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, seen in terms of the breaking up of a book at which Christ would have wept; this recalls Dante’s description of the universe as a book bound with the knot of Christ’s love, and in Pearl the bereaved dreamer is lectured by a heavenly maiden on matters of Christian doctrine and desires to join his child on the other side of a river but, because he craves more than he is granted, he is exiled from the ecstasies beckoning him in Paradise; whereas Dante, whose will was purified, was carried to the other side of the River Euonie to join Matelda and ultimately Beatrice.106 There are also parallels between Dante’s knot of God’s love and the protective pentangle on Sir Gawain’s shield: ‘endless everywhere, and the English call it, in all the land I hear, the endless knot’.107 All these parallels should however be viewed with caution as there are no direct references to, or translations of, The Divine Comedy in the Gawain author’s opus. There is further evidence of interest in Dante’s The Divine Comedy among the sort of circles that Chaucer moved: merchant communities and aristocratic households. By 1451 vernacular copies were being circulated in merchant communities in London. On the first of August, a transaction occurred in which an Italian merchant sold a copy of the poem to one Messer Benedetto Vituri, who was on a Venetian galley.108 In 1458 A London civil servant, Henry Windsor, wrote to John Paston I about a mutual friend, William Worcester, formerly servant to Sir John Fastolf: 31

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

I may say to you that William (Worcester) has gone to school to a Lombard called Karoll Giles (Carlo Guigli, a merchant from the governing class of Lucca who lived in London from 1452–1467) to learn and be taught poetry or else French, for he has been with the same Carlo two or three times every day and he has bought diverse books from him, because of which I imagine he has put himself in debt (daunger) to the same Carlo. I urged William to have a care to his business and he replied that he would be as happy to have a good book of French or of poetry as my Master (Fastolf) would be to purchase a fair manor.109 The implication is that poetry refers to the Italian lessons, and it is tempting to think it could be Dante’s The Divine Comedy Worcester had in mind when he explored the megalithic cave in Dimmin Vale in the valley of the River Wye: ‘where spirits suffer torments and where there is a marvellous entrance into the earth of peat where souls are tortured’.110 Worcester also spent money on a copy of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium On the Fortunes of Famous Men,111 which he obtained from Bishop Waynflete in 1461, and which, as we shall see, was in part a reaction to Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the source, via Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, for Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.112 Worcester also referred to Boethius in his Boke of Noblesse (Book of Nobility) and recorded in his notebook passages from Dante’s sources, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses. With Carlo Guigli, Worcester was in contact with a highly connected Italian community: Carlo’s family was in the silk trade, and he had dealings with the upper echelons of Venetian society and the Roman Curia, including the humanist pope Pius II. Carlo's son, Giovanni, was said to have studied at Oxford in the early 1450s and may have benefitted from the books donated by Humfrey duke of Gloucester. That the sale of an Italian copy of The Divine Comedy by, and to, an Italian in London, occurring at the same time as Giovanni and his father Carlo, was in the city and Worcester was buying Italian books and taking poetry lessons from an Italian suggests that The Divine Comedy was very much in the air at the time. Other members of the English nobility, clerical and lay, were beginning to undertake early versions of the Grand Tour to Italy. The duke of Gloucester’s confessor, friar John Capgrave, followed Dante’s footsteps by making a pilgrimage to Rome in the jubilee year of 1450.113 The Rome jubilees of 1300 and 1350 and the Muslim stranglehold on the Holy Land meant that pilgrims to Jerusalem, such as Margery Kempe, William Wey and John Tiptoft the earl of Worcester, were exceptions, and a more typical venture was that of Thomas Spofford, who obtained leave from his bishopric of Rochester to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1429.114 William Grey, bishop of Ely and chancellor of Oxford, studied in Italy after 1444 and collected books in Florence, Padua and Rome, including Plato’s Timaeus and studied classical learning and rhetoric in Ferrara under Guarino da Verona with John Gunthorpe dean of Wells. John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, an ambassador to Pope Pius 11 in 1458, explored the monuments of Rome and spent four years travelling in northern Italy studying at Padua for two years, visiting Florence and Venice and buying books in Padua and Ferrara;115 Anthony Woodville, earl Rivers, travelled to Italy after the battle of Tewkesbury, making pilgrimages to shrines in Rome, 32

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

in Bari, Venice, Naples, and in Rome where he was robbed;116 the alchemist, George Ripley, studied in Italy and Sir John Paston made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1475.

Latin commentaries and translations of The Divine Comedy Chaucer, because of his contacts with Italian merchants, diplomats and courtiers, was fluent enough in Italian to read The Divine Comedy in the vernacular in which it was written. However English clergy such as Easton and Whethamstede would have found Dante’s Latin works, such as the Monarchia, more accessible. The process of making a version of The Divine Comedy in the simple Latin vernacular of the English clergy began at the Council of Constance. In November 1414, Nicholas Bubwith, bishop of Bath and Wells and king’s ambassador, left England for the Council of Constance, where he met up with fellow English ambassador, Robert Hallam, bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Salisbury. The forty-four sessions of the council were spread over four years from 5 November 1414 to 23 April 1418, and this provided the opportunity for pan-European intellectual and cultural exchanges. Many of the participants witnessed the burning of Jean Hus and Jerome of Prague on 30 May 1416, and Poggio wrote to Leonardo Bruni exclaiming that none of the stoics ever endured death with such strong and constant spirit.117 Musicians were brought from all over Europe. Another cultural exchange was this meeting between two English bishops around a text of Dante under the tutelage of an Italian bishop. Nicholas Bubwith and Richard Hallum were befriended at this council by the Franciscan, bishop of Fermo, Giovanni Bertoldi (also known as John of Serravalle) who was giving lectures on Dante, and he shared with them his enthusiasm for The Divine Comedy.118 Bertoldi, who had studied theology between 1394 and 1397 at Florence’s Santa Croce and had attended Benvenuto da Imola’s classes on Dante, was influenced by the debate about the need to translate and disseminate Dante’s vernacular poem into Latin, a debate that fuelled his popularity. One of the original instigators of the debate was Coluccio Salutati who attempted to get members of his household to speak in Latin. In a letter to Niccolo da Tudareno, Salutati expressed the need for a philologically reliable Latin edition of The Divine Comedy that would linguistically ennoble the literary status of this poem and place it alongside the Latin compositions of Virgil.119 He began to translate sections of the poem into Ciceronian Latin hexameters, the medium of epic poetry, possibly as part of a larger effort to translate the whole poem, and he suggested his translation should be read face to face with Dante’s vernacular text because the poet’s mastery could not be rendered in a different language. In this enterprise of rendering Dante’s Italian into classical Latin he thought he was following the example of classical authors in what he believed was a bilingual ancient Rome who translated their works from the native volgare into Latin.120 Salutati would have elaborated on his ideas concerning the importance of Latin as a vehicle of written communication to his friend Thomas Arundel during the latter’s exile in Florence in 1397–1399, and after Arundel’s reinstatement as archbishop of Canterbury in 1399, these ideas influenced the prelate’s decision to implement a vigorous campaign against the dissemination of theological, religious texts in the vernacular. 33

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Bertoldi, confronted by the enthusiasm of the two English bishops for The Divine Comedy, deliberately chose a different approach to Salutati: abandoning any attempt to emulate the Latin of the ancients, he decided to work quickly, between January and May 1416, to create a rough and ready literal Latin translation, sacrificing humanist style for a faithful rendering of Dante’s text in what amounted to a Latin vernacular of the less-educated clergy. In the following month he began his commentary, in which he emphasized Dante’s classical knowledge, and this was completed on 16 January 1417. In an incipit, Bertoldi described how he set to work as expressly instructed and required by the Avignon cardinal, Amedeo di Saluzzo (who had been an advocate for Petrarch in Avignon in the 1380s and 1390s) and the English bishops Nicholas Bubwith and Robert Hallum, to whom he also dedicated the commentary. Another Oxford educated English cleric who may have been interested in this translation was the New College fellow, John Catrik, a king’s proctor at the Roman curia who was in an envoy to the Council of Constance in October 1414, heading the English delegation from April to May 1415; he remained at the council until its conclusion before accompanying the Roman curia to Italy on the departure of Martin V. Catrik died in Florence on 28 December 1419 and he was buried in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce.121 Humfrey duke of Gloucester, who acquired copies of Bertoldi’s translation and commentary, may have had his interest in The Divine Comedy aroused at the time of the council, for his interest in the proceedings was such that he purchased from the executors of Thomas Poulton a king’s proctor who attended the council, his Acta of the proceedings of Constance in 1433.122 Bertoldi’s commentary123 displays an investigative acumen concerning the cosmology underlying the poem and in particular Dante’s original conception of the creation of Purgatory; he fretted over the contentious lines concerning the headlong, meteorite-like fall of Satan into the Southern Hemisphere, thrusting him into the centre of the earth with his head pointing to the north and feet to the south and the subsequent cataclysm: On this side he fell down from Heaven; and the dry land, which previously extended over here, for fear of him took the sea as a veil, and came to our hemisphere.124 Bertoldi, aware that Satan’s fall took place on the first day of creation, when the earth, at the centre of the universe, surrounded by the elements of water, fire and air, had not yet been differentiated from the waters that covered the world to emerge as dry land and argued that Dante’s suggestion that dry land fled from the fallen Satan into the Northern Hemisphere was a poetic fiction and that what Dante was describing was the cataclysmic creation caused by the impact of the fall of God’s most beautiful angel, which generated displacement of earth at the centre of the world to form the funicular hollow of Hell and the emergent mountain of Purgatory, opposite Mount Zion divided into nine corniches winding around its side, in the Southern Ocean, neither of which events are recorded in Genesis. On the island of Purgatory Dante’s pilgrim sees in the morning shining on Cato’s face: ‘four stars never seen except by the first people’.125 These were not the Southern Cross, 34

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

of which Dante could not have been aware, but his own invention, the four stars, created on the fourth day, representing the four cardinal points of the earth, and the four letters of the name of the first man, and the four classical cardinal virtues. Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden on the top of Mount Purgatory, after being there for six hours, is explained by Bertoldi in this way: he is returned to the Vale of Hebron where his body had been created out of undifferentiated earth to lament the loss of the sight of these four stars: The sky seemed to rejoice in their flames: Oh northern site, widowed because deprived of gazing on those!126 For Dante and Bertoldi the Southern Hemisphere, representing the head, was the noblest hemisphere and Satan fell here, upside down, confirming the existence of a void, an inferno where ‘pity lives when it is truly dead’127 where morality is inverted only to be restored at the place where Purgatory emerged, in the place where Adam first fell by ‘going beyond the mark’.128 It is also the site of the now deserted Garden of Eden, the place on earth closest to Heaven towards which it is pointing.129 Besides its intellectual curiosity, Bertoldi’s commentary gives an indication how clergy had had their imaginations sparked by Dante’s poem, and how they could closely identify with the pilgrim’s journey. Bertoldi had spent time in England in 1398, when he probably first encountered Bubwith and Hallum, and in his commentary on Inferno 20, in the bolgia of the diviners, he evocatively recalls his homeward journey to Florence, following in reverse order the doomed journey of Ulysses, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Bertoldi instead sailed through the straights between Gibraltar and Ceuta into the Mediterranean to Florence, the home of Ulysses creator: ‘Around 100 leagues from Seville is the Mountain of Gibraltar, past which the ocean flows for seven leagues through a narrow strait to enter the Mediterranean; and I once travelled through that strait when I was returning from the realm of England to the land of Italy.’130 Unlike Ulysses, who fatally found the island of Purgatory in a storm in the Southern Ocean, Bertoldi chose to identify with Dante’s pilgrim who safely negotiated his way to the mountain thrown up in the Southern Ocean by Lucifer’s fall, through a hole in the earth. In his prologue to Purgatorio Bertoldi suggests that England too is an island, surrounded by sea, with no possible access without the aid of a ship: But just consider if such a person were to come from the southern pole of the other hemisphere toward our hemisphere by means of an opening bored through the ground, and what if such an opening were to begin in the other hemisphere to pass through the centre of the earth and were then to end up at Oxford (the Earthly Paradise) or in some other place in the middle of the island of England?131 This fantasy reflects the interest in Purgatory that was stimulated by the reading of the second canticle of The Divine Comedy. Purgatory, and its location, was the subject of discussions at the Council of Constance, and one topic under consideration was that 35

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

Britain (described by Bruni as an island in the ocean almost at the edge of the world) had its own version of this hole entering into Purgatory, in St Patrick’s Purgatory, described by a notary, James Yonge in 1422 in his version of the Secreta Secretorum (The Secret of Secrets)132 as a cave on Station Island in Lough Dergh, County Donegal, in Ireland, which had been revealed to St Patrick by Christ in the fifth century. This site had become a centre of pilgrimage for those wishing to sleep in the cave in the expectation of having visions of their departed friends and family in Purgatory. Word of the visions of Hell that St Patrick had experienced there had spread to Dante’s Italy. In 1346, in the Umbrian monastery of San Marco, the Sienese painter, Jacobo di Mino del Pellicciaio, completed a fresco depicting the Madonna welcoming souls freed from Purgatory and the horrors awaiting sinners in the afterlife.133 It is possible stories of St Patrick’s Purgatory may have reached and influenced Dante, and that word of his poem may have influenced some of the stories of pilgrims to the shrine, such as the claims of William Stanton of Durham in 1409 to have seen in the cave his sister and her lover, whose marriage he had prevented, a vision possibly influenced by Dante’s account of his meeting with the lovers Francesca and Paolo, thwarted by relatives.134 Word of St Patrick’s Purgatory certainly reached the participants of the Council of Constance who were discussing Dante. The Holy Roman emperor, Sigismund, who presided over the Council of Constance (he was welcomed in an address in 1417 by Hallum135), was a dedicatee of Bertoldi’s translation of, and commentary on, The Divine Comedy in a second manuscript, and he gave letters of commendation to Antonio Mannini, a Florentine, and his servant, a Hungarian knight, Laurentius Ratholdi, to visit St Patrick’s Purgatory, a journey Laurentius recounted to James Yonge, in which he resolved to report back to Sigismund his adventure, one mile into the earth, where he saw a number of his family in the flames.136 Bertoldi’s fanciful journey following the footsteps of Dante ended in Oxford, the equivalent of Dante’s Earthly Paradise on top of Mount Purgatory. As a theologian he is likely to have visited Oxford in 1398, and he obviously intended to flatter his dedicatees Hallum, who was chancellor of the university 1403–6, and Bubwith, who probably attended but never incepted. Bertoldi’s anecdote is also the source of the legend that Dante himself studied theology at Oxford, between March 1309 and the autumn of 1310 when, according to Boccaccio, Dante travelled to Paris. In reality he fled Lucca when the commune required Florentine exiles to leave the city, and Purgatorio traces a journey along the old Roman road to Provence, stopping at Arles and possibly Avignon, the cultural centre of Europe where, under Clement V, there was anti Boniface sentiment and where Dante’s patrons, the Malaspinas, had influence.137 Bertoldi claimed that this period of theological study was Dante’s affair with Donna Gentile the lady philosophy who appears in two of his canzoni and who that caused his betrayal of Beatrice. Bertoldi’s approach to commentary owed much to the influence of Benvenuto da Imola, who had attended the pioneering lectures on Dante given by Boccaccio in Florence in 1373–4. Bertoldi also attended lectures given by Benvenuto on Dante from 1374 to 1376 and continued to be subject to his influence while he was at the Franciscan convent of Ferrara 1379–83 and during his years teaching theology in Florence’s Santa Croce from 1394 to 1397 and in the city’s studium. Benvenuto applied a literary as well 36

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

as a theological approach to the poem: when on the third terrace of anger in Purgatory, Dante revealed to his fellow counsellor and diplomat Marco Lombardo: I have come here through the anguish of Hell. And if God has enclosed me in his grace so much that he wills that I see his court in a manner entirely beyond modern usage.138 Benvenuto commented that this journey to the heavens was by poetic speculation and none of the ancients or moderns had ascended Heaven in this way.139 Bertoldi, inspired by Benvenuto, while applying the medieval principles of analysing a vernacular text as if it were scripture, departed from the austere, early fourteenth century commentary traditions followed by Pietro Alighiero, to introduce a more Boccaccio-inspired novelistic approach, which drew on biographical details of the poet in his youthful Vita Nuova (New Life) to find pathos and drama in the poem to broaden its appeal.140 In his gloss to Inferno 5, where Francesca recounts her tragic love affair with Paolo and Paolo weeps and Dante faints, Bertoldi, who would have been aware of Boccaccio’s commentary in which he wrote that the lovers were buried in the same grave, commented: ‘It’s worth noting that this really happened to Dante, who empathised with them because of his youthful love for Beatrice.’ In the preamble to this canto, besides discussing why Dante adopted Virgil as his guide, he discusses Dante’s childhood love for Beatrice and his betrayal of her when he falls in love with another woman, Pargoletta (a young girl), referring to the period of Dante’s life after Beatrice’s death, when he was writing lyric poems in the vein of his friend Guido Cavalcanti, to a real, or imagined real, young girl, an anti-Beatrice.141 The same principle, of broadening the appeal of The Divine Comedy, was applied to the Latin translation of the poem itself. Bertoldi, in his dedication, was self-critical of the way his translation failed to meet humanist, Petrarchian standards, being an inept and presumptuous attempt to transfer Italian verse to Latin prose.142 However, he was engaged in a compassionate and generous endeavour to meet the requirements of the clerks of different nationalities at Constance, a relatively humble readership of clergy who only had modest Latin, and therefore he wrote in the Latin of everyday speech, creating from Dante’s vernacular, a Latin vernacular for working clergy, and the first translation of The Divine Comedy to appear in England until the nineteenth century. Perhaps it came too soon after the Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel in 1409 against the dissemination of theological material in the vernacular to represent an attempt at a wider circulation among the laity of abstract philosophical learning; nevertheless this enterprise was in accordance with the ideals of the General Prologue of the Wycliffite Bible in that it provided everyday rustic Latin to communicate sophisticated theology in the common language of the working clergy of England. Hallam’s sympathy with these ideals is suggested by his patronage of Richard Ullerston, the author of a tract defending the use of simple English to translate and disseminate the Bible.143 Bertoldi’s translation certainly facilitated easier accessibility to Dante’s original as it was a close line-by-line 37

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

translation, keeping the form of a carmen (poem).144 Hallum never made it home: he died in Constance on 4 September 1417 and was buried in Constance Cathedral. Bubwith seems to have taken to heart Bertoldi’s claim that Dante emerged through the hole of Purgatory somewhere in the middle of England, because he took the Latin Divine Comedy and commentary with him to his native Somerset and deposited it in the new Wells cathedral library, for which he left funds before his death on 27 October 1424.145 It was still there in the 1530s when John Leland, as part of his royal commission to examine the libraries of the religious houses of England, compiled his list of books in Wells Cathedral library and noted: ‘Dantes translatus carmen Latinum’.146 The manuscript was probably destroyed during the English Civil War.147 Bertoldi’s copy of Dante would have found there a wide readership of humanist scholars and middling clerks: fourteen of the fifty-six clergy that the bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Beckington, collated to prebends were doctors of theology and twenty-five had law or arts degrees, and the simplicity of the Latin of Bertoldi’s translation would have made it accessible to students of the grammar school or the vicars choral in Wells.148

Plesaunce, St Albans and The Divine Comedy It was possibly through Beckington that a copy of this translation and commentary passed into the hands of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester and his circle of writers and clerks at Greenwich Palace, known as Plesaunce (which means the satisfaction of a deity or Christian God and fine cloth from Piacenza worn by knights). Beckington was consecrated bishop of Bath and Wells on 13 October 1443, and under his auspices the library at Wells became the largest in England, an intellectual centre of European stature. Beckington had entered Humfrey’s service as a chancellor in 1420 and was thereby introduced to a wider circle of humanist scholars, and he recognized the duke of Gloucester as a lifelong benefactor. The duke possessed two copies of The Divine Comedy, one containing Bertoldi’s Latin translation of the poem and its commentary; the other could have been a copy of the translation and commentary, but it may feasibly have been a copy of the original Italian poem: they are itemized as ‘commentaria Dantis secundo folio et tormentabunt’ and ‘item librum Dantis secundo folio a te (or ate)’, which if ‘a te’ may correspond to Inferno i. ll. 91: ‘A te convien tenure altro viaggio’ (‘You must hold onto another path’), Virgil’s advice to Dante confronted by the wild beasts in the wood, interpreted by Bertoldi as the three routes of: obstinate sin or Hell, sin repented or Purgatory, and the working of grace, or Paradise.149 A more indirect filtering of Dante’s philosophy and poetry would reach Gloucester through the works of Coluccio Salutati. A manuscript of Salutati’s Opera that includes the Declamatis lucretiae (Declamation of Lucretia) and De fato (Concerning Fate) with its translations from The Divine Comedy, copied by one of Salutati’s scribes, was owned by the duke along with a copy of De laboribus Hercules (The Labours of Hercules), completed between 1382 and 1396, which expands Salutati’s belief, inspired by Dante, that poetry is of divine inspiration and concludes that a valorous man who has endured labours in his earthly life is justly entitled to a dwelling among the stars.150 38

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The most likely source of Gloucester’s interest in Italian literature, and in Dante himself, was Zeno Castiglione, the French-born bishop of Bayeaux, who was of Italian descent. Zeno arrived in England in 1432, when he probably first met Gloucester. In 1434 he was sent to the Council of Basel as a representative of Henry VI, and he took with him Humfrey’s commission to purchase as many books as he could find. Zeno went on to Florence, where he stayed a year, singing the praises of an English prince’s interest in literary matters, and it was his stay in Florence that probably helped to arouse Gloucester’s interest in Dante, and his interest in the writings of Bruni of Arezzo, secretary to the Florentine republic 1427–44. It was probably Zeno who sent over to Gloucester Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, an important source for Dante’s depiction of the circles of Hell, or perhaps it came from one of the delegates of the Council of Constance; Humfrey, in a letter of 1432, expressed his approval of Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics. In 1433 he invited Bruni to England to join his service, and although Bruni declined, he did work for Gloucester as a translator of Aristotle’s Politics. It was while working on the Politics, which he completed in 1436, that he wrote his Life of Dante (Vita de Dante e Petrarca) in Italian during a time of debate about the use of vernacular,151 and Humfrey’s request in his correspondence with Zeno for Bruni’s biographies of Dante and Petrarch implies that it was Bruni’s Life of Dante that he was after.152 Bruni’s Life of Dante may have been an attempt to temper Boccaccio’s poetic mythology by rooting the poet’s life in the context of Florence’s intellectual and political life but he did sum up for his readers the scope of The Divine Comedy: His invention was admirable and was hit on by a true stroke of genius, for it unites the description of the world, the description of the heavens and the planets, the description of men, the rewards and punishments of human life, bliss, misery, and all that lies between the two extremes. And I do not suppose that any man ever handled a subject more large and fertile in giving scope for the very expression of the very soul of all his thoughts.153 Another great patron and collector who shared Gloucester’s interest in Dante’s The Divine Comedy was Alfonso V, king of Sicily and Naples, with whom the duke corresponded and to whom he sent in 1445 the copy of Livy he had received from his brother, John duke of Bedford. Alfonso commissioned Giovanni di Paolo of Siena to provide 115 illustrations to Paradiso in the mid-1440s;154 it is possible that Gloucester may have heard more about Dante and this project from Tito Livio Frulovisi (the historian from Ferrara), who had been in Naples in 1443 prior to his joining Gloucester’s service.155 Interest in Italian literature is also revealed in Humfrey’s commission to his secretary, Antonio Beccaria, to translate Boccaccio’s Corbaccio from Italian to Latin, to which was added in one copy of the translation some tales from the Decameron.156 Beccaria addressed the duke, explaining that his intent was to make the Italian more accessible, a goal in accordance with Bertoldi’s translation of The Divine Comedy. The two manuscripts of Bertoldi’s translation of Dante’s poem may have served to introduce clerks and writers in Gloucester’s Plesaunce circle to the original language of Dante: they certainly shared an interest in Italian literature. Gloucester also owned Boccaccio’s On the Fortunes of Famous Men (1355–74), a pseudo biographical dream vision describing encounters with 39

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famous and infamous political figures of antiquity in an antagonistic relationship with fame and fortune which, as we shall see, engages in a dialogue with many of Dante’s ideals and assumptions, a dialogue that John Lydgate continued in a translation of this work, The Fall of Princes, which survives in thirty manuscripts and was done, Lydgate claimed, at Humfrey’s specific request because he had such admiration for Boccaccio’s work, using Premierfait’s French translation, De casibus nobles hommes et femmes, but also presumably, Boccaccio’s Latin original which was in the duke’s library, as well as Boccaccio’s De genealogia deorum (On the Genealogy of the Gods) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.157 There is no direct evidence that Lydgate, a Benedictine, had read one of Boccaccio’s original inspirations, The Divine Comedy, but he certainly refers to Dante in The Fall of Princes as a poetic model alongside Virgil and Petrarch and when he described his attaining celestial fame among the Lombards by telling in three books of ‘great wonders’ of ‘Heaven above, of Purgatory and Hell’,158, he was alluding to the Latin translation of The Divine Comedy in the duke’s Greenwich library, which must have tempted him as it had been designed especially for clerks like himself. Lydgate’s fondness for imagery of light and darkness, his extolling the luminosity of great men and women who acted as lamps, lanterns, lodestars and the sun, may have been influenced by Dante, and he subverted Premierfait’s attempt to enhance the cultural prestige of French literature by omitting his French source’s claim that The Divine Comedy was derived from the Roman de la Rose. Lydgate had previous experience in reading about an otherworldly pilgrimage, having translated Deguiville’s Pilgrimage of the Soul. The French original and Lydgate’s translation have some affinities with the structure and imagery of The Divine Comedy, but a dialogue and debate with Dante’s assumptions about this world and the next would have to wait until Lydgate encountered the more confident and combative work of Boccaccio, which enabled him to complete his own masterpiece, The Fall of Princes.

The house of Lancaster and the English vernacular One of the most widespread aspects of Dante’s influence in England was the creation of an awareness of the possibilities of the unifying and stabilizing influence of a national vernacular. Dante had seen that the Italian ruling class, the nobility, who communicated in an array of regional dialects and had little Latin, did not possess a national language. He regarded Latin, the prerogative of university academics, high-ranking professionals and upper clergy, as the language of advantage and gain, unconcerned with the common good or individual happiness. His task, outlined in Il Convivio and in On Vernacular Eloquence, between 1304 and 1306, was to unify the nobility by giving the vernacular language of bankers and merchants a stability, uniformity and nobility to make it an instrument of political and cultural communication.159 In this he was consciously and stubbornly kicking back against the early humanist movement in the cities of the Venuto and the academic community of Bologna, where he had such contacts as the rhetorician, Giovanni Virgilius, an exponent of nascent Latin classicism who could not understand why Dante chose to write his epic in the unworthy language of the marketplace, casting pearls before wild boars. 40

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

Dante’s resistance to early humanist trends and his championing of the vernacular was a message that reached English writers such as Chaucer and Lydgate, who became aware of the possibilities of elevating the English vernacular to the status of a national literary language. Lydgate in the prologue to The Fall of Princes hinted at Dante’s influence on Chaucer and writers like himself in extending awareness of the possibilities of elevating the vernacular to the status of a national literary language when he referred to ‘Dante in English’.160 With Chaucer’s House of Fame in mind, he seems to have recognized that there was an intimate relationship between the vernaculars of these two great poets. Chaucer provided the rationale for this enterprise in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, written in the mid-1390s. The low-born Allison tells of an ugly, low-born woman delivering to a snobbish knight forced to marry her, an excursion on true nobility and gentilesse as something manifested in personal, virtuous actions revealing the influence of God’s grace,161 which, like the light of God’s love in The Divine Comedy, floods the universe, falling on everything and everyone, the birthright of all, high born or low. Chaucer puts into the mouth of this humble woman, the elegant words of Dante: Well can the wise poet of Florence Who is called Dante speak in this sentence.162 The old woman delivers a sermon taken from Convivio (The Banquet), Dante’s vernacular commentary on a vernacular poem written by himself. Through her Chaucer, without naming the Convivio, cautiously suggested, at a politically dangerous time after the Blackfriars council of 1382 had condemned Wyclif ’s opinions on dominion and grace and generated suspicion of vernacular Bible translations and commentaries, that Dante inspired him to recognize that his ancient, clumsy, ugly and low-born English language could aspire to the same gentilezze as Dante’s pretioza volgare; that regardless of pedigree, it contained the seed of true nobility, and by implication it was a vehicle fit to bear the light of God’s grace and worthy to be a vehicle for his word.163 Dante elevated his vernacular to such heights that it was seen as a fit vehicle for conveying the highest of religious truths, and in the period between 1340 and 1410 there was golden period for the expression of religious, visionary and theological material in the English vernacular. Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the Cloud author, William Langland, the author of Pearl, and Julian of Norwich, all to some degree envisaged a wide horizontal readership. In the case of the popular and theologically complex Prick of Conscience there was even outlined a cosmology of Hell, and the Canterbury Tales presents a chaotic hierarchy in which tradesmen and housewives expressed opinions on religion and theology and gave scriptural citations. However Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, forbidding the translation of the Bible or any theological matter, including the translation of individual texts of scripture, or even ownership of copies, without diocesan approval, brought to an end this Ricardian, golden period of theological creativity. Under the Lancastrians, especially after the Oldcastle revolt of 1414, by the terms of Article 7 of the Constitutions, even to own a copy of the Canterbury Tales or Pearl without diocesan authorization constituted heresy, and such works could not have been written under 41

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the terms of this legislation.164 As far as the ecclesiastical establishment was concerned the terms of Archbishop Pecham’s programme of 1281 to extend the laity’s religious knowledge were now limited to showing them what they should fear rather than how to aspire to Heaven. There were critics such as Reginald Pecock who wrote theological works in English, but he ended his career in disgrace with the burning of his books.165 A notable exception within the ecclesiastical establishment was the Queen’s fellow, Richard Ullerston, who in the Wycliffite Bible defended the use of the mother tongue for Bible translation, claiming it was not a barbarous language and its capacity for borrowing words made up for any shortfalls in expression. He maintained that it was not possible to attack a Bible translation which had been moved by the spirit of the Lord. The laity, he believed, were not swine but people of God to whom Jesus had preached in the mother tongue.166 There is much in Ullerston’s defence of the vernacular that strikes a chord with Dante’s championing the use of the vernacular in On Vernacular Eloquence. There is however a crucial difference. Dante’s vernacular, especially in the Inferno, did reach the marketplace, and the Arundel Constitutions effectively banned copying and dissemination of vernacular theological material for the lower classes. The trials of the Lollards show that the 1409 legislation was not aimed at the aristocracy, the gentry, urban elites and mercantile classes and they were free to react to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, if they could read Latin or Italian and to follow the philosophical, scientific and spiritual issues raised by his poem and which were independent of the theological restrictions imposed by the constitutions and which were discussed in such Middle English works as the Fall of Princes and vernacular translations of Ovid and other classical texts that were outside the boundaries laid down by Arundel’s legislation.167 This may explain, in part, why the intellectual life of the fifteenth century lay aristocracy and clergy to whom the term the early English Renaissance can apply, who were sympathetic towards classical antiquity and Italian literature, were becoming more secularly orientated. Dante’s Inferno may have been in part directed at the boars in the marketplace, but his ambitions for the elevation of the vernacular were also directed towards the nobility. His Italy however lacked a political aggregating structure: the very institutions that should have exerted this control, the cities and the church, fuelled conflicts, and the empire was a distant ideal, and all the pressure therefore was on a reformed nobility. In Lancastrian England the situation was different. The nobility still read and communicated in French (the most prestigious English vernacular) as well as English (French was Humfrey duke of Gloucester’s preferred medium); a strong centralized monarchy was intent on enforcing stability and uniformity, and although the vernacular used by Chaucer, who represented the governing class based in London, was still much more fluid than Dante’s Tuscan, with many variations in spelling and syntax, the house of Lancaster nevertheless shared Dante’s ambitions for a national vernacular language. Chaucer appreciated the link between the English language and the Lancastrian crown, and in his Treatise on the Astrolabe he first articulated the concept of the king’s English declaring: ‘God save the king that is lord of the language.’168 Henry V switched from French to English in his correspondence in 1417, and Humfrey duke of Gloucester 42

Mercury: The Arrival of Dante in England

was influential in patronising vernacular literature.169 Although there is no surviving evidence of Humfrey having read Chaucer, it is probable that he did: he was a guest of his son, Thomas Chaucer at Ewelme, and another member of this Oxfordshire literary circle of Thomas and Alice Chaucer was John Lydgate, who wrote the Ballade at the Departing of Thomas Chaucer into France in 1417.170 Gloucester also owned a copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession) in which his erased signature has been recently discovered.171 One of the first authors Gloucester encouraged was Thomas Hoccleve who, as a privy seal clerk in Westminster, had numerous opportunities to encounter Gloucester in the adjacent Star Chamber. He praised Gloucester as a worthy descendant of the first duke of Lancaster: ‘for there is no lord in this world so good to me as he has been for many years’. Hoccleve was rewarded by Humfrey with the granting of his petition for a stable income with a corrody in Southwark priory, granted in July 1424 by the council with Gloucester, who was present, subscribing to the petition. Other vernacular writers subsequently patronized by the duke included John Lydgate, a regular reader in the duke’s library; John Russell, an Oxford graduate172 and author of The Book of Nurture, who praised Humfrey ‘as one who loves to teach’, and Thomas Norton, whose translation of Palladius’s de re rustica (The Book of Husbandry) provides evidence that Humfrey was more than a patron, that he showed a close interest in vernacular poetry. According to Norton, the duke read the translation in chapters, as they were completed, and corrected the metre at the end of each month; an envoy refers to the work going to the author’s protector: ‘who said, I am your protector from all foes less and more’ and who ‘taught me metre to make’; and in January’s envoy the author writes: And now my lord beholds his book In truth he nevertheless begins crosses to make, With a plummet; and I know well his look, His expression is strong, changing. I almost quake, for fear I shrink away, no leave I take.173 Gloucester, unlike his brother Bedford, was not interested in manuscripts as objects of art, and few of his books were decorated; The Book of Husbandry is an exception because the translator or scribe wrote in different colours (highlighting the patron’s name, described as the ‘flower of princes’ in different colours) to illustrate the rhyming scheme, and colours were also used to make the volume more accessible.174 The duke’s patronage extended to others on the periphery of the Plesaunce circle. George Ashby, a clerk of the signet, imprisoned by the Yorkists, who in his Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet, acknowledged in 1463, after his patron’s death when there was no prospect of preferment or reward, his upbringing in court and remembered the kindness of the king’s uncle, Gloucester: ‘God rest him he cherished me in all that was needful’;175 and Reginald Pecock, the first bishop to write philosophical and theological tracts in the English vernacular, owed his early promotion to a prebend in 1431 and the mastership of Whittington College to Gloucester’s intercession.176 Another vernacular author to seek 43

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Gloucester’s patronage was the Augustinian friar, John Capgrave, the duke’s confessor until his death,177 and author of a Chronicle of England,178 who dedicated his vernacular Commentary on Genesis to the Humfrey, presenting it in person as a New Year’s gift in 1439, on the grounds of the duke’s subtle intellect, which he applied to the science of judging literature.179 Theology was no longer seen as a science apart, but as a branch of literature that could improve a man’s mental, moral state and his critical faculties. This is the same approach that Bertoldi applied to Genesis and geohistory in his commentary on The Divine Comedy. Humfrey’s brother, Henry V, had attempted to give the English language status in government, and Humfrey tried to give English the prestige of a literary language to dignify it as a vehicle for the transmission of the practical, political and philosophical wisdom of the ancient Romans, making it the language of culture in the same way that Dante had done for Italian.

The Divine Comedy and new learning 1370–1450 In February 1444, Bertoldi’s claim that Dante found his way to Oxford proved to be prophetic when Gloucester’s two manuscripts of The Divine Comedy were included in his third donation to Oxford University for the use of the students, but they (or copies) would also have been used before this by clerical members of Gloucester’s Plesaunce circle, and especially by the abbot of St Albans, John Whethamstede, who may have first heard of The Divine Comedy from Leonardo Bruni, whom he met on his visit to Italy (his grand tour) in 1423–5. A letter he wrote to the brethren of St Albans while he was approaching Florence, on a detour during the removal of the Council of Pavia to Siena, is replete with classical allusions, and his excitement at nearing Dante’s natal city seems to imbue his writing with some of Dante’s sensibility: he expresses regret that he has fallen from grace and has been so marked by the left hand of Fortune’s step dame, rather than her right hand (a crucial distinction for the pilgrim in The Divine Comedy) that he was prevented from getting better acquainted with a fellow traveller on the road to Florence; ‘a star hid beneath a cloud which, when it came near him, he could not recognize its effulgence’.180 Some awareness of Inferno is implied in a Latin poem against Lollard unrest that Whethamstede wrote and delivered in 1427 in which he labels the Lollards ‘a Stygian sect’ and refers to the River Acheron.181 In an entry in his encyclopaedic work on poets he has a note on famous Romans mentioned in Dante’s Paradiso which refers to Bertoldi da Serravalle, who describes himself as Arriminensis in a colophon to his translation and commentary on The Divine Comedy. Although he used Bertoldi’s translation and commentary, Whethamstede was aware that the original was composed in Italian, and if the second item in Gloucester’s gift of The Divine Comedy to the university was the Italian original, he may have used it alongside the Latin translation. Whethamstede was responsible for making a reference to Dante as one of the three crowns of Florence, along with Petrarch and Boccaccio, the only other moderns to be included in his brief compendium of poetic lives, perhaps intended to form one of the sheafs of his Granary, which was dominated by ancient Romans. Whethamstede was only concerned with Petrarch and Boccaccio’s Latin works, but he 44

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singled out ‘Dante de Aldigeriis, the Florentine poet who wrote in his vernacular speech three remarkable comedies, namely on Paradiso, Purgatorio and Inferno’.182 Whethamstede was the author of nearly fifty texts, several of which were encyclopaedic projects that included references to Dante. The Palearium poetarum, a pun on his name which means chaff-store, has 692 entries and is a guide to classical references, literary sources and places organized alphabetically.183 Whethamstede discusses such topics arising from his reading of The Divine Comedy as the rivers of Hell; Geryon, the monster who carries Dante and Virgil on his back into the circle of fraudsters in Inferno; and, from the opening of Paradiso, there is a note on Marsyas, the satyr drawn out of his body by Apollo as punishment for challenging the god to a contest of music; and Glaucus the fisherman who ate magic herbs and turned into a sea god.184 Whethamstede also makes references to Dante in his discussions of such Roman practices as sacra (rites);185 he also quotes the speech of Justinian in the sphere of Jupiter and justice in Paradiso 6 about famous Romans who served the imperial eagle through conquest. In an article about Roman names, commenting on their division into two parts186, he referred to the commentary of John of Rimini on ‘the comedy of Dante, the sixth canto of Paradiso’, and he also explains the derivation of names in Dante: the name Quintius Cincinnatus, the patrician recalled from retirement to defend Rome against the Sabines, means curly.187 He was also interested in Dante’s classical sources (something he had in common with his older mentor in the abbey, Thomas Walsingham, whose literary interests, besides the Trojan War, included a lifetime study of Dante’s sources Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Statius, Terence and Virgil). Whethamstede added his own notes on Ovid, Statius and Virgil and was concerned with some of the philosophical, theological issues raised by Dante. He has a note on the Trojan, Ripheus, a virtuous and patriotic pagan in book ii of Virgil’s Aeneid, placed by Dante in Paradiso, while his author, Virgil, remains in Limbo in Inferno: ‘A Trojan who practised such loyalty and righteousness that in the view of Dante he deserved eternal salvation for his virtues. See the third part (of the) Comedy of Dante … also on this same man, Virgil in the second book of the Aeneid.’188 This suggests Whethamstede had concerns about Dante’s soteriology and admired Virgil. Lydgate may have shared some of these concerns for he inserted the salvation of Ripheus into his Life of St Alban, and he implied that even before his conversion the protomartyr was instinctively monotheistic and found it hard to understand the concept of God having a son.189 Dante’s The Divine Comedy seems to have satisfied Whethamstede’s interest in poetry, mythography as well as ecclesiastical politics. It is even possible that his deployment of agricultural imagery in his encyclopaedias was influenced by Dante, who used harvest imagery, separating kernels from chaff, to describe Dominican sermons and who compared the activities of the Franciscans to a book or arch, which also means granary, in the context of their storing a good harvest in a granary while the tares are burned.190 There is evidence in the period 1370–1450 of increasing interest in Italy and Italian literature, and classical antiquity, including the sources used by Dante, such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius, among the mercantile classes, aristocratic households and the ranks of the middle and upper clergy. This raises the question: why was such a work, full of strong 45

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opinions, controversy and invective, allowed so much freedom from moral judgement and accorded the privilege of such elevated aesthetic status accorded it by Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola? It is tempting to see Dante as part of a linear development towards the Renaissance, and ultimately to the modernist literary movement, but there was a real clash between the way Dante and his earliest admirers saw the world. The strange beauty of this poem lies in this difference and is one of the themes of this book, and it is probably the reason why Dante’s epic escaped the attention of censors. Although by 1370 only forty-nine years had elapsed since the completion of The Divine Comedy, many of the foundations of Dante’s world view had been undermined by rapid progress in the fields of science, philology and natural history. The landscape of Dante is dependent on a literal acceptance of the time scale of the Old Testament. The creation of his Inferno and Mount Purgatory were geological events that occurred just four thousand years before Christ (the age of the earth had been calculated by Eusebius of Caesarea for the emperor Constantine as 6,498 years) and doubts concerning this chronology were being aired in the University of Paris. Jean Buridan (c1301–c.1359/62) assumed, with Aristotle, that the physical universe was eternal, and this led him to postulate a geological history of the world in which mountains eroded into the sea and others emerged, and he even suggested that one day Jerusalem would sink into the sea. Dante’s entire universe, consisting of the seven planets; the eighth sphere of fixed stars revolving around the earth once every twenty-four hours from east to west; and the ninth crystalline heaven, the primum mobile (the first moveable) forming the nine heavenly spheres, were all seen to revolve around the Earth, the centre of the universe and the farthest point away from Heaven, on the axis of the Pole Star directly above the North Pole which seemed to be still, like the hub of a wheel, and the Earth was regarded along, with the Empyrean, as the only still point of this universe,191 which was pointed out in the realm of Saturn by Beatrice who asked Dante to look down at the stationary Earth. It was at the Merton College in the University of Oxford in the first half of the fifteenth century that Aristotelian assumptions about a static earth, any moving body left in an undisturbed state, and the incorruptible unchanging heavens, were beginning to be questioned by a group of theologians who combined theology with the study of natural science and mathematics. Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Swineshead and William Heylesbury prepared the way for the development of mathematical and mechanical laws of motion. Bradwardine explained the motion of an object through the air, not in terms of the air propelling it forwards or an innate force within the object, but as an original impetus of force, shown in the throwing of a ball, so that it was theoretically possible for an object to continue in motion through space indefinitely.192 Bradwardine conceived God as a clockmaker who wound up the universe with such an original impetus.193 The implications for the notion of the revolution of the planets around a moving Earth were clear, and these ideas were developed after Bradwardine’s death from plague in 1349, when the centre of gravity for these studies shifted to the University of Paris. Jean Buridan (c. 1300–1361), in his commentaries on Aristotle’s De caelo et mundo (On the Heavens) and Meteorologica (Meteorology), was speculating on the possibility of a heliocentric universe, with the Earth and the other planets revolving in a daily fashion 46

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around the Sun. He illustrated this with an analogy of two ships, one moving and one stationary, an analogy that had been used by Dante’s ancestor, Cacciaguida, to reconcile for the pilgrim God’s seeing everything that will happen as if he were observing events unfolding in the pages of a book (if the observer were to be on the stationary ship and free will on the moving ship).194 If, Buridan argued, one ship is moving and one is stationary, for someone on the moving ship it must appear as if the stationary ship is moving. With such a relativistic perspective, Buridan was able to suggest that the cosmos was a working system with no privileged point of view, no single unchanging axis, and by doing so he cast doubt on the notion of an absolute left and right, the fundamental premise of Dante’s winding journey down into Hell on the left and up the mountain of Purgatory on the right, loosening, untying and straightening the sins of the penitents.195 In 1377 these ideas were adapted by Nichole Oresme (c. 1320–25-1382), regent master of arts at the University of Paris, in his French commentary and translation of Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Le Livre du Ciel et du Monde: ‘if the part of the heavens which is East in the morning is on the right and is turned continually so that by evening it is in the West, then the right of the heavens will be in the West and the left in the East. And so East is no more right than West’.196 These speculations concerning the movement of the Earth rather than the heavens, in contrast to Dante’s assertion that the whole of the heavens, including the realm of the fixed stars and the primum mobile moved in concert with the Sun from West to East,197 would not be endorsed until Copernicus in 1525, but they were topical in academic circles in the fifty years after the completion of The Divine Comedy, and they implied a connection between the turning of Fortune’s wheel with the possibility of a revolving Earth. In the same period, 1350–70, Oresme, attacking in his Treatise on the Commensurability or Incommensurability of Celestial Motions astrology’s naive belief in the numerical exactitude of celestial motions, times and conjunctions, cast doubt on the way Dante explained the working of the cosmos in human terms, when he suggested science could only make sense of the universe when it gives up the explanation that the world must make sense in human terms. What is needed, he suggested, is an understanding of the rationality of an irrational universe, an autonomous machine made by God.198 Such ideas were being discussed in the same university circles where Dante and his sources, Aquinas, Ovid and Aristotle, were being read. When Dante the pilgrim made his journey into Hell and Purgatory, the shades noticed that he cast no shadow; the rays of sunlight or moonlight do not pass through him. This marks him out as living flesh in the world of the spirits. The shadow, or darkness, was seen by Dante as a product of earthly flesh, and he applied this concept to his understanding of space: the black night sky was merely the product of the Earth’s shadow blocking the rays of the Sun as far as the planet Venus;199 beyond the fixed stars away from the Earth’s shadow there was no void of dark infinite space,200 merely the splendour of the light reflected from the Empyrean to the primum mobile, and then diffused throughout the universe; the light of the Sun, the heart of the cosmos, was the direct origin of life in the same way as the human heart created the seed of conception, but it was merely one aspect of this divine light. Dante’s universe was therefore circumscribed and contained, but as early as 1277 the foundations for questioning this reassuring view were laid when Pope 47

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John XXI condemned the Aristotelian doctrine that limited the power of God, thereby opening up the field of theoretical speculation on spacial infinity as a corollary of God’s immensity.201 By the fourteenth century theologians in the universities were beginning to speculate that the universe was infinite. Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1290–1349), in his course of lectures at Oxford, published as De causa dei contra Pelagium (In Defense of God against the Pelagians and on the Power of Causes), placed God in an imagined infinite void, and this way of thinking about infinite space was followed by Oresme and succeeding generations of theologians, such as William Collingham fellow of Merton (1331) who composed questions on Aristotle’s Physics and wrote a tract entitled De infinito (On Infinity).202 Dante’s encounters in the other world, apart from those with his fellow Italians, were based on his knowledge of the Bible and the Greek myths which he absorbed in his reading of Ovid. He had no knowledge of the Greek language, and he was aware that his times possessed only a fragment of knowledge of antiquity. The generation of Boccaccio and Petrarch would double the number of ancient texts available to readers. By 1360 a Greek monk, Leontus Pilatus, in residence in Boccaccio’s house, began translating word for word the Iliad and the Odyssey into Latin.203 Dante was dependent on Greek philosophy for his depictions of Hell and Heaven, but this was from second-hand sources. His ethical system and division of Hell into categories of distortions of love of self, neighbours and God, was derived from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics elaborated by Aquinas and Brunetto Latini. A complete Latin translation of the Ethics was undertaken by the chancellor of Florence, Leonardo Bruni, in 1416. The only work of Plato available to Dante in Latin was about half of the Timaeus, and it was not until the fifteenth century that a Latin version of the Republic would be made available to subsequent generations of readers. Even Dante’s understanding of the identity of Latin language would soon undergo drastic re-evaluation. He believed that he and his guide, Virgil, who was from Mantua in Lombardy, could write in Latin and communicate with him in the Lombard Italian of 1300 and that the written Latin employed by Virgil in the Aeneid, and by himself in such philosophical treatises as the Monarchia, was an artificial construction, a ‘lingua artificialis’. By 1435 a debate in the papal chamber surfaced about the possibility that Latin was once a spoken vernacular. Leonardo Bruni had been educated in the household of Coluccio Salutati, who was convinced Latin in ancient Rome was spoken and written only by an elite and could never have been the vernacular of ordinary people; to prove his point he tried to encourage educated members of his entourage to speak in Latin. Bruni, who outlined the debate in a letter to Flavio Biondi in May 1435, continued to hold onto the belief, entertained by Dante, that Latin had always been the language of an elite and had never been a vernacular mother tongue.204 Poggio Bracciolini however observed the way illiterate labourers at the curia picked up bits of Latin from their exposure to it, and argued that a version of Latin in ancient Rome was learned by children as their mother tongue, which negated the difficulties of learning it as an adult, and this paved the way for an acceptance that the Italian vernacular had evolved from a classical Latin that had been in Virgil’s time a national vernacular.205 48

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The political landscape of Dante’s time was also changing. Central to the aspirations in The Divine Comedy was a belief that the destiny of Italy and the rest of Europe rested with a revival of the Roman Empire as a divinely ordained model for peace, stability and justice, one that to his mind had been fatally compromised when the emperor Constantine, out of gratitude for being cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I in 315, transferred all the provinces palaces and districts of the city of Rome and Italy and of regions of the west into the power and sway of Sylvester and the pontiffs, his successors. This basis of Dante’s rebukes of the wealth and avarice of such popes as Nicholas III and Boniface VIII was in fact a forgery, composed in c. 760, and this would be demonstrated in the mid-fifteenth century by Reginald Pecock, bishop of Chichester, applying techniques of scholastic reasoning that involved a comparison of authorities, elevating the authority of reason above the church fathers, tradition, divine prophecy and miracles, to reject, as historically inaccurate, the accounts in the Life of Sylvester of the angel’s voice, the emperor’s miraculous cure, conversion and baptism in Rome, and therefore the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine.206 Lorenzo Valla would come to the same conclusion by applying linguistic, philological and grammatical criteria to prove that the Donation was written in the eighth rather than the fourth century. Some of the commentators of The Divine Comedy even subjected the poem to the scrutiny of historical perspective. Francesca da Buti of Pisa in his commentary, released in 1396, suggested that the chariot bearing Beatrice in the Garden of Eden which was supposed to represent the tribulations of the Christian church must have been a Jewish synagogue, for the church did not exist before Christ. In the early fourteenth century the imperial ambitions of Henry VII seemed to give the Roman imperial idea some credence. Described by Dante as ‘a new Caesar’ who would bring fruitfulness to ‘the garden of the empire’, and initially boosted by papal support of Clement V, he was crowned in Milan in January 1411 (Dante may have been present) and in Rome in St John’s Lateran in June 1312. Henry VII died of malaria while marching south to attack Robert of Anjou on 24 August 1313 at Buonconvento near Siena. Beatrice’s last words were to prophesy a judgement in which Henry would occupy a place in Heaven and Clement, for his treachery, would be thrust into Hell. Dante responded to Henry’s death the way he had to that of Beatrice, with renewed visionary fervour, this time for the concept of divinely ordained emperor rather than love. But in reality Henry’s death signalled the end of imperial hopes in the Italian peninsula with the expansion of the papacy, the increasing influence of the French monarchy, and especially Philip the Fair, who disbanded the Templars, and the emergence of the Italian city states.207 By the fifteenth century, the strong centralized states around monarchies in the Iberian peninsula, France and England, made such imperial dreams seem increasingly utopian. In fact if there was any imperial ideal in the period between 1370 and 1450 it was that of the English, Lancastrian empire in Northern France. Even Dante’s belief in the old legend that his native Florence was the daughter of imperial Rome in the sense that she had been founded and built by Julius Caesar in his campaign against the Fiesolines who supported the Catilines in their rebellion against Rome was refuted by Salutati who demonstrated in Invectiva in Antonium Luschum in 1403, on the basis of architectural 49

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evidence and reading of Sallust, that Florence had been founded long before Caesar in republican times.208 However, despite such profound sea changes in intellectual, spiritual and political life over such a short period of fifty years, Dante had not suddenly become quaintly Medieval, a relic of the so-called age of St Francis and Giotto. His capacity to move and to shock meant that in important areas of historical, philosophical and emotional outlook he aroused conflicting responses. It is with Geoffrey Chaucer and the writers associated with the household of Humfrey duke of Gloucester, who left behind their impressions of Dante’s work, that these responses can be evaluated: they were full of admiration for his technical virtuosity and powers of imagination, but they reacted in a robust and challenging way to his world view in ways that indicates the considerable role of intellectual, cultural and scientific change in this period, and which provides a clear indication of the collision between two worlds that occurred in the early English Renaissance. One area of considerable divergence was changing attitudes to classical antiquity.

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Figure 4  Dante in Oxford: Proctor: Your Name and College? Illustration from Poet’s Corner by Max Beerholm, 1904 51

52

CHAPTER 2 JUPITER: ANCIENT ROME

The times of Cicero and Demosthenes indeed seem much more familiar to me indeed than those even of sixty years ago. Those illustrious men shed so much light on their time, that even after a long lapse of time their age seems to be visibly present to us. – Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People1 I am of the firm opinion that the stones lodged in her walls and the soil in which she rests are worthy of reverence than man can preach or prove. – Dante, Convivio2 The most common ground existing between Dante’s The Divine Comedy and English writers, courtiers and clergy in the period between 1370 and 1450 was in attitudes to ancient Rome. The Italians and the English believed they shared a common heritage through Rome with ancient Troy, and Dante’s admiration for the ethical principles of the Roman poets, philosophers and statesmen who he placed in Limbo was shared by the duke of Gloucester and his circle, and indeed the English aristocracy as a whole. For Dante Rome was a part of his heritage as a Florentine, and despite the divide of faith that separated thirteenth century Florence from ancient Rome, he saw continuity between Roman history and contemporary events in Italy and close ties of family and place. For the English Rome was more geographically and chronologically distant, but Dante’s aspirations for a revival of the Roman Empire were to some extent shared by the duke of Gloucester and members of Sir John Fastolf ’s circle, including William Worcester, all of whom had imperial ambitions and saw parallels between Julius Caesar and Henry V. However, the crucial divide between Dante and English writers and the English governing class, as in all aspects of political and intellectual life, proved to be Dante’s faith. Dante saw the Roman Empire as the fulfilment of God’s providential plan for the human race, and the calibres of individual emperors (like the attributes of popes and clergy) were irrelevant to the fulfilment of this destiny. In England, however, by the 1440s, there was growing disenchantment with the perceived tyranny of Julius Caesar, and a growing admiration for more republican ideals in Gloucester’s circle, which were assimilated into aspirations for the emergence of a nation state, separate from Europe, under a strong monarch. Nevertheless attempts were made to integrate an admiration for Roman culture with Christianity through the cult of St Alban, which was orchestrated by England’s protector, the duke of Gloucester, and the abbot of St Albans, John Whethamstede. This was a cult of the nation’s first saint, a Briton who was also a

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

Roman and a Christian, which achieved a fusion of Roman pragmatism and Christian passion (in the form of martyrdom) in a symbolical, alchemical marriage.

Dante and ancient Rome One of the most beautiful yet terrifying aspects of The Divine Comedy is the ease with which salvation can be obtained through faith in God’s grace; this of course leads to irrevocable separations at the port of Ostia between family members, especially fathers and sons, on either side of the divide of faith. Members of Dante’s family inhabited all three realms of the otherworld, and The Divine Comedy has many examples of the separate destinies of fathers and sons. Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194–1250), the Holy Roman Emperor, is in the sixth circle of Hell reserved for heretics who denied the immortality of the soul (he was accused by the Guelphs of being an Epicurean and a mortalist)3, but his son, Manfred, the last king of Sicily, defeated by Charles of Anjou and killed at the Battle of Benevento on 26 February 1266, his body, which had been exhumed from the cairn erected by his soldiers on the orders of the archbishop of Cosenza and scattered beyond church lands along the River Verde, appears before Dante in the antechamber of Purgatory, a symbol of hope, smiling mysteriously and displaying his wounds like Christ: despite his ‘horrible sins’ he has been taken up ‘into the arms of infinite goodness’ because, after his body was broken, he gave himself up to him ‘who gladly pardons’.4 But the most poignant separation occurring between father and son is that of Virgil and Dante at the top of Mount Purgatory. It is a paradox that the most tender and intimate relationship in the entire poem, apart from that of Dante and Beatrice, is the bond between Dante and his putative father, both are addressed in the intimate tu form (Beatrice in the pilgrim’s farewell prayer). Virgil is everything a father should be: he protects his charge from physical dangers and gives him practical and moral advice; he is able to read his thoughts; he comforts him and, when necessary, he scolds him, imparting to his adopted son all his wisdom. As they approach the top of Mount Purgatory and departure for Heaven: ‘My gentle father would confront me as we walked’,5 and yet while the son is destined for Paradise with the father’s help, the parent remains behind in Limbo because, as a pagan, he has lived before the time of Christ and does not have the necessary faith to secure his salvation. Virgil’s destiny is to be the bearer of the lantern, showing others the way through the darkness to the sunlight of divine love. The relationship between Dante and Virgil, despite their very different destinies, sums up the poet’s conviction that he shared a filial bond with ancient Rome. When he meets his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, who descends like a shooting star to greet him like Anchises greeting his son, Aeneas. Dante sees him as a descendant of a line of Roman patriarchs and addresses him in the respectful Voi form instituted by Julius Caesar, projecting onto him all the emotions that, as a son, he had invested in Virgil: You are my father. you lift me up so high that I am more than myself.6 54

Jupiter: Ancient Rome

Dante also admired the culture of imperial Rome. His decision to abandon the writing of Il Convivio to undertake The Divine Comedy was inspired by his returning to the study of the great writers of Rome: Virgil, Statius and Ovid. Like St Augustine he had a conflicted and guilty relationship with the classical past. His attempt in Il Convivio to outline a guide to happiness through the pursuit of secular philosophy was as bold and doomed as Ulysses’s quest for the absolute.7 His last refuge from 1319 to 1321 was Ravenna where he was surrounded by monuments from the time when the Byzantine emperor, Justinian (527–65), attempted to rebuild the empire of Augustus by binding together the eastern and western sections of the empire, reversing Constantine’s departure to the East, which had turned the course of the eagle against the westwards course of the movement of the heavenly spheres and Aeneas’s journey to the site of Rome. Justinian made the port of Ravenna the capital of the Byzantine governor and Beatrice would anticipate the time when the prows of the imperial fleet would all point in the direction ordained by Heaven.8 Images such as the mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale representing Justinian, his wife, Theodora, and the court,9 influenced Dante’s depiction of the heaven of Justinian in the realm of Jupiter where he looks up towards the imperial eagle, as a young chick would gaze up to a stork circling above its nest.10 Dante may ostensibly have written an epic about the Christian concept of the otherworld, demonstrating the operation of the penitential machine of the church, but his admiration for Pagan Rome is everywhere apparent. In his vision of the night sky above Purgatory he accords equal gravity to both civilizations by having the four pagan stars representing the four cardinal virtues appearing in the dawn, and in the evening sky, the three stars illuminating the South Pole representing the Christian virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. In the Limbo of Inferno that he invented he sees Ovid and Cicero, and a great sorrow seizes his heart.11 He consoles himself with the observation that the poets of antiquity are gathered around a fire that overcomes a hemisphere of shadows and, although they are deprived of the sun, their learning still generates a little light.12 Moreover these pagan poets, inhabiting a paradise on their own limited terms, are still ranked above the majority of mankind, those who have not lived, loved and sinned, who are left outside the borders of Hell (along with the angels who chose neutrality when Lucifer challenged God) contemptuously dismissed by Virgil as unworthy of consideration, and it is Virgil, a pagan Roman (and not Boniface VIII the author of the Papal Jubilee) who is the inspirational figure who guides the pilgrim’s penitential progress through Hell and Purgatory. When they begin their dangerous descent into the circle of fraud on Geryon’s back, it is Virgil who provides the classical discipline to the pilgrim’s Gothic imagination by prescribing a spiralling journey in imitation of the ecliptic of the Sun, the path to which Phaeton should have kept, which was fundamental to the order of temporal existence.13 Purgatory, its gateway, and possibly the entire island are guarded by Cato of Utica (the Younger), who, despite his hostility to Julius Caesar, is appointed to this role because he embodies the finest traditions of republican Rome, along with Trajan and Ripheus, in his devotion to justice and law, the virtues behind the concept of the universal empire. If the heavenly spheres were hammers which imprinted God’s seal on the world,14 it was the universal empire that gave the world its governing structures and revealed the will of God, guaranteeing, through the discipline of the divinely ordained emperors and 55

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the pursuit of the intellect, freedom of the human will from unswayed passions, and when necessary the influence of these golden hammers of the stars.15 The pilgrim’s attachment to ancient Rome was not just ideological. When he meets his idol, Virgil, who is from Mantua in Lombardy, they are able to communicate as fellow Italians sharing the same homeland in the same dialect, because Dante believed that Virgil’s vernacular was his own Italian and not Latin, and he is at pains to demonstrate his pride in his connection as an Italian with ancient Rome, the tangible closeness he felt with the Roman past. In the sphere of Jupiter, the emperor Justinian (527–65), who reunified the empire after its division by Constantine, tells Dante about the civil wars between Scipio and Pompey and the raising of the standard of the imperial eagle at Fiesole overlooking Florence: ‘the hill where you were born’.16 The power of the pagan gods was still felt in Florence, especially that of Mars, who was believed to have presided over the city until the Roman temple dedicated to him was reconsecrated to John the Baptist following the conversion of Constantine. The endemic violence of the city was attributed to the offence done to this pagan deity when the baptistry was built on the site of his temple, and this was seen to be confirmed, on Easter Sunday 1215, near the equestrian statue of Mars (that, according to Giovanni del Villani, stood on the Ponte Vecchio until it was washed into the Arno in the flood of 1333), when Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti was murdered for spurning the Armidei bride in favour of a daughter of the Donati, initiating the hostilities between the Guelphs and Ghibbelines that would have such a profound effect on Dante’s life. Dante during his formative years in Florence was surrounded by the tangible remains of Roman culture: the original walls of his beloved city were Roman; the marble columns of the baptistry, built between 1059 and 1125, where he was baptized, in the San Pier Maggiore district where he was born in 1265, were taken from the forum of the Roman city of Fiorentina, and Florence still operated the Roman calendar. Florence was labelled by Dante as an errant daughter of Rome, and Brunetto Latini, his former tutor and another father figure, prophesizes that his exile will be caused by the rustic descendants of the Cataline rebels of 62 BC in nearby Fiesole, but that he, Dante, is a true Florentine, a descendant of true Romans, and he calls on the goats of Fiesole to ignore this new plant: in which may live again the holy seed of the Romans who remained there when that nest of so much malice was built.17 Verona too, where Dante spent part of his exile, was even more ‘the daughter of Rome’ with its first century arch of the Gavii, the double archway of the Porta dei Borsari, and the amphitheatre, begun in the reign of Augustus, which inspired Dante’s description of the Empyrean.18 Such colossi from the past governed Dante’s sense of the tangible, linguistic and genetic links between the ancient Romans and contemporary inhabitants of the kingdoms of Naples, Tuscany, Lombardy, Romagna and Lombardy, and contributed to his belief that there was a viable, and potentially fruitful, relationship between these two worlds, held together by Christianity. 56

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The movingly emotional dimension to Dante’s relationship with the pagan writers of ancient Rome is illustrated when Dante and Virgil are on the fifth terrace of Purgatory and the Neapolitan poet Statius joins them, like Christ joining the disciples at Emmaus. The shade of Statius, unaware he is speaking in Virgil’s presence, expresses his admiration for the Aeneid to Dante, who cannot hide a smile: staring at the smiling Dante he: gazed into my eyes, where the expression is most visible,19 and says: Why did your face just now show me a flash of laughter? 20 Dante then reveals Virgil’s identity, and Statius falls to his knees proclaiming his burning love: ‘“When I forget our emptiness, treating shades like solid things,”’21 and for a moment he forgets his ‘insubstantiality’. This encounter shows the power of the eyes to reveal feelings, the workings of the spirit, the joy of being alive and the power of emotion to transcend the centuries and, through poetry, to express shared ideals and feelings that can form bridges over the chasms of time and between the living and the dead. The one thing that separated Dante from his fellow poets of antiquity was religion, and he ameliorated this while he was in exile by turning from the Black Guelphs (who supported the papacy) to an idealized Ghibbeline position, which anticipated the emperor ending the internecine violence in Italian cities by re-establishing Roman imperial authority in a city Dante described as a widow without Caesar, in an Italy compared by Sordello, the thirteenth century Mantuan troubadour who embraces Virgil in Purgatory, to a horse with a bridle (the laws given by Justinian), but riderless.22 Dante saw the emergence of the Roman Empire as the unfolding of a divine plan, a holy mission announced to Aeneas and accomplished by Augustus; ‘that sacred people in whom was mingled the lofty blood of the Trojans, namely Rome. God chose this people for that office’.23 King David was believed to have been born when Aeneas arrived in Italy from Troy (and in the Convivio Dante suggested the key events of Roman history were divinely inspired like those in the Old Testament),24 and the Romans’ prophet was Virgil, whose heralding in 40 BC, in Ecolog ue 4, of the birth of a boy (possibly he hoped for offspring of Mark Anthony and Octavia or Asinius Gallus, the son of the consul Asinius Pollio), a saviour who would become divine and eventually rule the world.25 This was interpreted by Dante and many others before him, as referring to the coming of Christ in the reign of Augustus to establish universal peace and justice (a tradition Dante used to assert that Statius was converted to Christianity after reading Virgil). In a letter Dante 57

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described the triumph of Octavian resulting in the whole world being wrapped in peace for twelve years in the following terms: ‘Sometimes we are the instruments of God and human will is subject to the eternal will.’26 Even the reign of the depraved Tiberius, by exerting judicial authority over the entire world, fulfilled God’s purposes, as he became the instrument to justly punish mankind, in the form of Christ, for Adam’s sin. Rome provided the laws and structure that facilitated both the death of the Saviour and the prospering of his church. The church of St Peter was seen as a fulfilment of Virgil’s prophecy, but it was the empire and the imperial eagle that was regarded as the safeguard of Christian destiny: Julius Caesar’s triumph was described as the time when all the heavens wished to reduce the world to their own serene measure;27 and the history of the Roman Empire was understood as the unfolding destiny of divinely preordained events, with Roman Emperors, such as Titus, who sacked Jerusalem, as agents of God. When Dante enters the sphere of justice, he sees the souls of Jupiter, a group of lights in formation, like a flock of feeding birds on a riverbank, forming the letters, ‘Diligitte Justitiam’, punning on justice and the name of the emperor, Justiniam, and spelling out the words: ‘love justice you who judge the earth’, as the spirits land on the letter M in terram representing the world monarch, which evolves into the Florentine lily and finally the imperial eagle,28 symbol of the Roman Emperors and the bird of the prophecies of Joachim (placed by Dante in Paradise) heralding a golden age.29 The pilgrim is ushered into the Earthly Paradise by Matelda, identified by Pietro Alighieri with the reputedly beautiful Matelda countess of Tuscany (1046–1115) who mediated between church and empire after the investiture conflict between Pope Gregory VIII and the emperor King Henry IV, who was obliged to kneel in penance (like Dante's pilgrim) in the snow for three days outside Matelda's castle at Canossa, a significant gesture terms of the theme of the Monarchia heralding the cooperation between emperor and pope that would bring temporal peace and establish eternal peace in the afterlife. The pilgrim sees a chariot drawn by a griffon, symbolizing two conflated events: the church triumphant established by Christ, and the triumphant procession of Augustus, the emperor chosen by God to lead the human race to peace and happiness on earth, the Earthly Paradise. This vision may have been influenced by an event Dante witnessed as a child in Florence in the summer preceding his springtime meeting with Beatrice. In June 1273 a meeting coinciding with the feast of the city’s patron saint, John the Baptist, occurred between Pope Gregory IX and the emperor Charles of Anjou, accompanied by pageants, processions and dancing.30 This attempt at establishing peace between the warring factions of Guelphs and Ghibbelines was an all too brief drama of reconciliation.31 At this point Dante falls asleep, and when he wakes Beatrice, a spokesperson for the imperial ideal, guides him to a triumphal chariot sent from Heaven to Eden, and he witnesses a procession showing the history of the suffering church, but despite allusions to the defilement of the temple of Jerusalem, Beatrice’s lament, written around 1314, is for the widowed Rome bereft of emperor and pope (the papacy would be vacant for two 58

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years as a result of Avignon). The chariot is assaulted by an eagle (the persecution of the Christians in Rome) covered by its feathers to show the disastrous implications of the donation of Constantine, as Satan rises to break the floor of the chariot, and the papacy, corrupted with wealth, abandons Rome for Avignon and fornicates with a giant (the illegitimate power of the French kings). However Rome remains the harbinger of Roma eterna the civitas dei that is the focus of Aeneas’s sacred mission where Peter and Paul returned to establish their church and Beatrice promises the pilgrim: Here you be but briefly a dweller in the wood; and with me, without end, you will be a citizen of that Rome of which Christ is a Roman.32 In his identification of Augustus's Rome with the heavenly city Dante may have been influenced by his reading in Tristia of Ovid's anguished exile on the frozen shores of the Black Sea in Comis and conceived of the icy wastes of Cocytus in terms of its distance from Rome.33 The centrality of Rome in Dante’s religious imagination may have been stimulated by Boniface’s Jubilee Bull of February 1300, making the city the focus of pilgrimage rather than an increasingly inaccessible Jerusalem that had been left in ruins by the Tartars in 1244, and which, from 1263 to its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, was controlled by a military dictatorship of Mamluk Turks, a corrupt and dangerous city where pilgrims, although guided by Franciscans, were not welcome and at best fleeced.34 Dante’s conception of Paradise itself was influenced by notions of imperial Rome rather than the heavenly Jerusalem. The pilgrim’s examination on his faith in the realm of the fixed stars takes place in an imperial court with St Peter and James as the emperor’s barons (a term first used by Charlemagne).35 With his first sight of the Empyrean (an anagram of imperio), he compares his amazement to that of barbarians (perhaps Goths from Croatia) who on first: seeing Rome and its lofty works, were stupefied when the Lateran surpassed all human things.36 It is a vision of an idealized city, a Rome where all the citizens have a common purpose like a swarm of bees that enflower themselves at one moment and in the next return where their labour ensavors itself, was descending into the great flower that is adorned with so many petals.37 When St Bernard shows Dante the Empyrean, he is conducting him into a Roman amphitheatre of a thousand tiers, with God at the centre, possibly based on the 59

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amphitheatre at Verona.38 Bernard shows him the blessed in their tiered ranks, ordered like the Roman senatorial class: ‘And note the great patricians of this most just and merciful empire’.39 In the highest tier is Mary, described as Augusta,40 and places are reserved for such imperial candidates as Manfred and Henry VII, on whom hopes for this regeneration of the Roman Empire had rested. Dante’s vision of Roman history as an integral part of the Divine plan was based on very few sources: Virgil’s Aeneid, fragments of Livy and Orosius (c. 375–after 418), a Roman priest who collaborated with Augustine on the City of God and who saw the Crucifixion as a central turning point in history, followed by a new transfigured kind of time. These ideas of the continuity between ancient Rome and medieval Christendom would not long survive the scrutiny of the next generation of humanist scholars in Italy, led by Petrarch and Boccaccio, who investigated extant sources and acknowledged the mythical nature of traditional tales of ancient events and saw them taking place in the same untransfigured historical space.41 Petrarch even coined the phrase ‘ancient Rome’, and in England there was an even greater sense of chronological and ideological separation from the concept of ancient Rome. Until the fifth century Britain had been part of the Western fringes of the Roman Empire; there were still tangible reminders of this empire in many of the cathedral cities in the late fourteenth century and the Roman walls of London were still standing in the fifteenth century, but the shadows of classical Rome were less intimidating than those in Italy, and there were not the same tangible links with this Roman past in terms of race, language and institutions. This was reflected in both the similarities and differences between Dante’s relationship with ancient Rome and that of English intellectuals in the period between 1370 and 1450 who shared his admiration for Roman politics, philosophy and culture, while lacking any sympathy with his attempts to resurrect a tangible connection with the empire. Dante sensed, when writing Paradiso at the time of the Scottish wars of independence in 1314, that his ideology of universal peace and justice under the auspices of the Roman Emperor would have little resonance in a Britain dominated by nationalistic considerations of territorial borders. In the sphere of Jupiter, the imperial eagle proclaims that many professed Christians, including contemporary rulers, would not be saved because there will be seen the thirsty pride that so maddens the Scot and the Englishman that neither can bear to stay within his bounds.42 For Dante, kings of nation states, free from the supreme sovereignty of the emperor could only rule incompetently and aimlessly.

Chaucer and ancient Rome In England, by the 1370s, attitudes to imperial authority and Rome and the classical heritage were very different. The emperor, the Roman past and even the popes were 60

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more distant than they were for Dante. Chaucer, like Dante, created a literary language from one fragmented into different dialects, and he saw himself working in the same classical Roman tradition as Dante, but he did not share his conviction that the literature of Rome represented a tangible link with Christian revelation and therefore he took issue with Dante’s elevation of two pagan poets into the Christian pantheon. Statius, according to Dante, converted to Christianity after reading Virgil’s Aeneid, and the conversion of Dante’s pilgrim was also inspired by his reading of the Aeneid and consolidated during his progress through Inferno and Purgatorio under Virgil’s guidance. Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde presented himself, like Dante, as sixth in a line of classical poets, that included Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Cicero and Statius, who wrote in the Thebiad of the battle between the sons of Oedipus for the throne of Thebes, just as Dante had claimed himself to be sixth in a line of Homer, the poet of the Trojan wars, Horace, the author of the art of poetry, Ovid (who adapted the Greek myths for the Romans), Lucan, who narrated the history of Rome and the civil war that led to the establishment of the empire, and Virgil, who told the story of Aeneas’s founding of Rome;43 but in his list Chaucer substituted Statius for Horace, thereby defining the author of the Thebiad’s pagan status and his exclusion from Paradise. He also cast doubt on Dante’s claim that the poetry of Virgil reconciled pagan literature with Christian allegory by incorporating Dante’s longing for religious transcendence into Troilus’s idolatrous love for Criseyde, thereby expressing his scepticism for Dante’s claim for the inclusiveness of poetry to describe the afterlife.44 Perhaps influenced by his 1378 visit to the Lombard court, and what he perceived to be the despotism of the Visconti overlords, Chaucer chose to parody Dante’s hopes for a revival of Roman imperial grandeur in his House of Fame, written around 1382. He begins the poem by invoking Dante’s hero Virgil, proclaiming in mock heroic style: I will now sing of, if I can The arms and also the man.45 On the lower slopes of Mount Purgatory, Dante has a dream about the Roman imperial eagle: In dream I seemed to see an eagle hovering in the sky, with golden feathers and open wings, intent to swoop …. Then it seemed to me that, having wheeled a little, it descended terrible as lightning, and carried me off, up as far as the fire.46 The dream is a prophecy foretelling Dante’s emerging through the flames of Purgatory into Paradise, where he will hear from Justinian all about the triumphs of the imperial eagle and its apotheosis under Augustus. Chaucer (who throughout his writings distances himself from Dante’s self-proclaimed prophetic role with self-deprecation) 61

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satirizes the concept of the imperial eagle: his pilgrim is seized by an eagle that is a composite of the eagle of Dante’s dream in Purgatory; the imperial eagle at the top of the purgatorial mountain; and the imperial eagle in the heaven of Justinian. Chaucer’s eagle is as bold as lightning and refers to Jupiter’s thunderbolts, but this is a laconic, boring bird lacking in vision and interest in political prophecy. Chaucer’s deliberate satire and debunking of the imperial pretensions of Dante’s eagle may have been influenced by the way Richard II’s imperial and autocratic ambitions were encouraged by the prophecies of the eagle originally incorporated in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which were widely circulated at this time, and the prophecy of the holy oil of St Thomas of Canterbury, given to the saint by the Virgin in an eagle-shaped ampoule, which could bestow on a king anointed with this oil the ability to recapture lost French territories. According to Walsingham, Richard claimed to have rediscovered the ampoule in the Tower of London and unsuccessfully tried to persuade Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, to reanoint him in a second coronation.47 Rather than taking Chaucer’s pilgrim on a journey to a vision of imperial grandeur in Paradise, the eagle takes him to a house in the sky that serves as the ear of humanity where there is a hubbub of noise, of all the voices that have ever been. It is the opposite of the hierarchical tiers of Dante’s amphitheatre in Paradiso, more like a vision of a noisy parliament, of which there were many in England in this period, a more democratic vision of a mass of humanity all demanding to be heard, and this was written only a year after the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. The anti-imperial theme is continued and more explicitly linked to the English Parliament, in The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer’s next satirical portrayal of Dante’s otherworldly vision, written in the 1380s (Chaucer sat in the lower chamber in 1386 as an MP for Kent) in the aftermath of the Good Parliament of 1376, the hostility of the Commons to Italian merchants and their monopolies, and the slaughter of Lombards during the Peasant’s Revolt.48 This vision of a parliament of birds, gathering in a garden on St Valentine’s Day, arguing their cases in an effort to secure a mate, is an English MP’s answer to Italian despotic and imperial pretensions, a testimony to the power of vox clamantis, the voice of the parliamentary class. Chaucer even connects the voice of Parliament to the forces of history and destiny in his Troilus and Criseyde (1381–86), when the fate of the two lovers, and ultimately that of Troy, and the eventual founding of New Troy or London, is sealed when Parliament decides that Criseyde will be exchanged as hostage with Troy’s eventual betrayer, Antenor. On a more personal, aesthetic level, Chaucer’s attitude towards antiquity was very different from Dante’s. He follows Dante’s footsteps into Hell to meet the heroes of antiquity in the House of Fame and dreams of a temple of glass, the temple of Venus, patron of Aeneas, and therefore Rome. On the walls of the temple he reads about Aeneas’s flight from Troy to Carthage, his desertion of Dido, and his voyage to Italy, where he founds Rome. It is a more passive engagement with the past. Dante claimed to have experienced a vision and to have embarked on an actual journey to ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’;49 Chaucer merely dreams. While Dante engages in a passionate relationship with ancient Roman poets with whom he claimed 62

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to share companionship, kinship and bonds of country and language, Chaucer just reads stories on the wall as a passive spectator while Dante aspired to be included among the company of the Roman poets, to be one of them and to be crowned in his hometown of Florence with Apollo’s laurel.

Humfrey duke of Gloucester and imperial Rome Although Rome, for Englishmen of the late fourteenth century, was part of a more distant past, it was nevertheless regarded as a social, political, and religious culture on its own terms, independent of the Christian civilization, and worthy of independent study and investigation, with valuable moral, philosophical, political and military lessons to impart. The house of Lancaster after all adopted the imperial eagle as its insignia and pursued imperialistic policies until the mid-fifteenth century. The Benedictines were at the forefront of these developments. Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422), who spent nearly all of his life in the abbey of St Albans, was interested in Latin poetry and prose for its mythological content, interpreting and investigating its inner meaning rather than reconciling it with the truths of Christianity. He also compared contemporary political events to classical ones in his Chronica Maiora and compared Henry V's England to Augustan Rome in their just and merciful administration of their empires, describing the inhabitants of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and France as barbarians. Walsingham's account of Agincourt, with its praise of the archers of Rome and England, is drawn from quotations from Virgil’s Aeneid, Statius’s Thebiad, and Lucan's On the Civil War.50 Walsingham may be one of the first intellectuals to have perceived a model for Henry V’s imperial ambitions in ancient Rome. In 1419 he dedicated to Henry V his Ypodigma Neustriae (Chronicle of Normandy), justifying Henry V’s invasion of France.51 John Whethamstede, the abbot of St Albans, similarly looked to antiquity for a revival of chivalric prowess and suggested that contemporary knights, even of the household, were elegant but effeminate and given to luxury, and they followed Paris in fleeing at the thought of bloodshed, rather than exhibiting martial prowess like Hector.52 The concept of emulating Roman conquerors like Julius Caesar and Augustus certainly took root around this time among Henry V’s military staff. Sir John Fastolf, Bedford’s lieutenant and steward in France in 1418, shared a connection with the two prominent opponents of the Suffolk regime, Richard duke of York and Humfrey duke of Gloucester: he acted as Gloucester’s feoffee in 1415, served as his lieutenant governor in the Channel islands in 1439–40, and witnessed a charter favouring the duke in 1441, and Gloucester was his feoffee for his Southwark property in the 1440s.53 Fastolf was a party to the acquisition in 1425 of French translations of Roman history, poetry and philosophy from the 843 volumes of the library of Charles VI in the Louvre, which became the basis for a library in Rouen where Fastolf was captain. Some of these translations subsequently found their way to his library at Caister and others in 1427 to Gloucester’s library in Greenwich. They included Chronicles of Livy and accounts of Lucan and Suetonius on Julius Caesar’s and Pompey’s campaigns.54 There were links 63

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between the pro-war households of Fastolf and Gloucester: Fastolf ’s stepson, Stephen Scrope, attempted to join Gloucester’s service in 1428, selling his only manor of Hever for 500 marks to purchase the necessary horse and armour,55 but Fastolf persuaded him to rejoin him in France in 1429, something Scrope subsequently bitterly complained about to his stepfather.56 Fastolf, and members of his entourage, such as William Worcester, continued to advocate an aggressive, imperial police in France. In his Book of Nobility, begun in 1451 and dedicated to Fastolf, Worcester claimed the Romans had been gloriously magnified throughout the world because they were prudently devoted to the common good and ruled their subjugated peoples with justice. Another of Worcester’s heroes and emulators of Roma military values was Humphrey duke of Gloucester, praised in the Book of Nobility for his military prowess and in one of Worcester’s notebooks for his love of virtue and the commonweal.57 These values were encouraged by Gloucester’s acquisition of French translations of such Roman classics as the Campaigns of Julius Caesar, Vegetius’s De re militarii (Concerning Military Affairs) which Gloucester received from Sir Robert Roos, a relative of Eleanor Cobham; Livy’s History, which he received from his brother Bedford in 1427, and the writings of Cicero and Seneca. The image of imperial Rome, instead of being a continuation and fulfilment of Roman imperial destiny envisaged by Dante, took the form of simple imitation of a civilization that was not divinely sanctioned, but seen in a historical context and therefore human and fallible. For Humfrey duke of Gloucester, the imperial ideal, thanks to his brother’s conquests, was now more relevant to the English crown than the hereditary title of Holy Roman Emperor. According to the reminiscences of James Butler, fourth earl of Ormond, Humfrey waded out to sea at Dover with sword in hand to prevent the emperor Sigismund from landing until he declared he had no imperial rights in England. For Gloucester, and the writers in his circle, there was no evidence of the sort of continuity between the Rome of Caesar and Augustus and contemporary England that existed for Dante and fourteenth century Italy, but although they recognized that ancient Rome was a different period of history, separated by many centuries (John Lydgate condemned Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 AD, for attempting to turn Rome back to its ancient values and religion),58 they shared Dante’s admiration for the Roman values of prudence, good government, order and rationality, and instead of regarding Roman history and mythology as a quarry for Christian moralization and typology, like the fourteenth century classicizing friars, they saw Roman history as a series of real events in the past, indeed as wounds and scars that could still be felt by those who were in tune with classical literature. No wound was felt more sharply than the assassination of Julius Caesar. For John Lydgate this ‘unwar stroke’ or unforeseen blow of Fortune was not just an isolated event in the past: it would be repeated in 1422 with another turn of Fortune’s wheel with the premature death of Henry V. Dante placed Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius with Judas, in the lowest pit in Hell, in Cocytus, the circle of betrayal, in the actual maw of Satan, the ultimate traitor. However for Humfrey duke of Gloucester the death of Caesar did not represent an attempted betrayal of the divinely ordained imperial mission of Rome; it merely mirrored the death of his brother, Henry V, a soldier, conqueror and 64

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model of good kingship, whose life was similarly tragically cut short, a denial of a potential destiny that had been articulated by Dante through the voice of Charles Martel, who identified himself with the sense of wasted potential over the premature death in the Aeneid of Marcellus, Augustus’s nephew and successor, when he tells the pilgrim: The world had me but a little, while, and had it been longer much evil to come would not exist.59 Gloucester, following his brother’s footsteps, commissioned from Lydgate The Serpent of Division (a life of Julius Caesar), which stressed Humfrey’s identification with Rome’s first emperor. The author, described in one manuscript as ‘a chaplain of my lord of Gloucester’,60 translated the work at the request of his ‘most worshipful master and sovereign’ around 1422. He evokes the confusion following the deaths of Caesar and Henry V and mirrors the conflict between the senate and Caesar and Gloucester and the council. Caesar, a soldier, scholar and aristocrat like Gloucester, returning from his conquests in Gaul, has a triumphant entry into the city of Rome arousing the serpent of envy which, Lydgate implies, is also infecting Cardinal Beaufort’s faction dominated party, the advocates of a conciliar government, against the wishes of the protector, Gloucester. In the power vacuum created by his brother’s death, Gloucester followed Caesar by asserting his right to rule, in his case as regent, during his older brother Bedford’s absence in France. During this period Gloucester shared Dante’s mistrust of republicanism, but he did not see Caesar as a harbinger of a divine imperial destiny, simply as a model of strong kingship, from which would incur the benefits of the acquisition of an empire, although not necessarily with divine sanction. The idealization of powerful monarchy was manifested in a work commissioned by the duke between the second half of 1431 and the first half of 1432, John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes, an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men. One tale, included at the duke’s insistence, was the rape of Lucretia, for which Gloucester provided source material from Italy, from the account of the chancellor of the republic of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, the Declamatio Lucretie (Declamation of Lucretia), which he received in 1431–2. Although Salutati in his de Tyranno (On Tyranny) defended monarchy as the ideal form of government in which human affairs are arranged in imitation of the divine order whereby the heavens are ruled by one god,61 he nevertheless, in his Lucretia, celebrated the discrediting of the perpetrator of the rape, the king, Tarquin Superbus, for initiating the death of Roman kingship and the birth of the republic. Lydgate, under the prompting of Humfrey, who also believed in monarchical government, and in a radical departure from Boccaccio, lamented Tarquin’s crime, not because it tarnished the honour of Lucretia, who he maintained was complicit in the act, but because it discredited and destroyed the Roman monarchy, ushering in the conciliar, senatorial rule that Julius Caesar was to abolish.62 Gloucester’s desire to identify with some of the Roman imperial ideals celebrated by Dante and pursued by Henry V was shown, for a while, in 1436 when he employed the Venetian humanist, Tito 65

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Livio Frulovisi, to write Vita Henrici Quinti (Life of Henry V) which upheld an idealized concept of kingship involving strong rule and military prowess by portraying Humfrey as a faithful executor of Henry V’s dying wishes. The highlight of the work is Humfrey’s raid on Flanders in which, according to Frulovisi, the English army was accompanied by an eagle, a symbol of Lancastrian dynastic status and the Roman imperial ideals so important to Dante, flying high in the sky to suggest that Gloucester was acting with the approval of, under the supervision of, and in place of, his dead brother, following Dante’s dream of the pursuit of an imperial destiny under the eagle. This imperialism had surfaced in a 1422 version of the Secret of Secrets by written an English settler in the Dublin pale, James Yonge (fl.1406–38), and addressed to James Butler the fourth earl of Ormonde, who was born in Kilkenny, Ireland and served as the lord deputy of an Ireland identified in the work with Alexander’s Macedon. Yonge urged English colonists to maintain superiority through a tolerant and realistic appreciation of the differences of a subjugated people.63 He displayed no interest in the Christian heroes of the later years of the Roman Empire, such as Jerome and Augustine, and held up Augustus and Trajan as models of authority, even echoing Dante’s insistence on placing Trajan in Paradise, by providing the well-known anecdote about Pope Gregory who, after hearing of the emperor’s justice and clemency, prayed to God for the release of such a person from Hell. This imperial dream was held by some of Henry V’s servants who shared Gloucester’s values. Sir John Fastolf, Henry V’s captain at Agincourt and Harfleur, brought home from France French translations of Caesar’s Histories and the Roman military manual of Vegetius, and in his retirement he regaled members of his household with stories of his military exploits under the dead king. His secretary, William Worcester, may have owed his career to the English imperialism in Ireland that influenced James Yonge. He was a native of the port of Bristol and was described as an Irishman, and he sometimes signed himself HR (Hibernia). Worcester may have settled in Bristol after coming over the Irish Sea to England with Sir Stephen Scrope, who served as Thomas of Lancaster’s deputy and viceroy of Ireland until his death from plague in 1407.64 Worcester commemorated his master, Fastolf, in his Book of Nobility, originally composed in 1451 in the reign of Henry VI and adapted by his son for Edward IV, in which he urged the nation to return to the militaristic and disciplined values of the Romans and the imperial vision of Henry V. Sir Stephen Scrope’s son, Stephen Scrope esq., perpetuated these imperial ideals in his 1440 translation of his stepfather, Fastolf ’s illustrated copy of the French original of Christine de Pisan’s Book of the Epistle of Othea to Hector in which Roman ethics and martial values are used to convey the imperial values that galvanized the conquests of Henry V.

Roman ethical educational ideals For Dante, pagan Rome had been the main source of ethical, moral and political teaching, encapsulated in the figure of his mentor, father figure and guide, Virgil. Humfrey duke of Gloucester similarly looked to ancient Rome for ethical and political guidance, and he 66

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regarded the prince, cultivated in Roman learning, as the exemplar of authority. In doing so he was flying in the face of Italian prejudices concerning Englishmen’s ignorance of Roman history and culture. Poggio Bracciolini, the papal servant of Pope Martin V, visited England between 1418 and 1423 at the instigation of Cardinal Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and he was condescending about the relative youth of a nation lacking Italy’s immediate connection with classical antiquity. He complained that the oldest religious houses were no more than four hundred years old and that there was nothing of humanist interest in their libraries.65 Poggio, as far as we know, never met Humfrey, whose literacy in three languages was unusual. Dante wrote his Convivio in Italian because he judged that princes, barons, knights and other nobles were not scholars and could only use the vernacular, but the duke’s scholarship and interest in classical antiquity were noted by many. His ability to read Latin was remarked on by Hoccleve, who, between 1419 and 1422, wrote that he intended to translate Vegetius’s Concerning Military Affairs for the duke, until he realized Gloucester had mastery of this tongue and did not need it.66 Humfrey’s ability in Latin and French (his preferred medium) was praised by a number of Italian humanists. Antonio Beccaria wrote to the duke on completion of his Latin translation of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio, praising his patron’s ability to read the language, while stressing his fondness for French (Humfrey admitted in a letter to Alfonso V that he preferred to read Livy in the French version given him by his brother) and noted his curiosity about books in other languages (presumably Italian): ‘I will not speak of those French histories or rather Latin histories which you know by heart so that often you move listeners to wonder in admiration since there is no notable event of this or other matters which is not known to you, more than the sunrise to the attentive eyes of a lynx,’67 a striking image reminiscent of Dante’s description of the Troubador poet, Sordello of Mantua, on the ledge of the late penitents in purgatory, proudly and disdainfully sitting alone: How worthy and slow was the moving of your eyes! The soul said nothing to us, but was letting us go by, only gazing, in the manner of a lion when it couches.68 Other Italian humanists praised the duke’s patronage of letters and interest in antiquity. Enea Sylvio Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) attributed the high degree of the classical learning of Adam Moleyns, a friend of Poggio, to the wise patronage of Humfrey duke of Gloucester;69 Pietro del Monte, who had echoed Poggio’s condemnation of English scholarship in a letter to the Florentine Greek scholar Ambrose Traversari written in October 1438, was in England from 1435 to 1440, and in his adaptation of Poggio’s treatise on Vices and Virtues, submitted to Abbot John Whethamstede for his judgement in 143970 and presented to the duke of Gloucester in 1434, he described Humfrey as a prince among men whose only real pleasure lay in reading books, who was tenacious in discussing literature and who possessed such a good memory that 67

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he could quote from many passages – a man who, like Julius Caesar and Augustus, was able to combine the pleasures of study with concern for the affairs of state.71 The humanist writer, Antonio de Beccaria of Verona, who became Humfrey’s secretary, praised the duke in his Liber d’Amore, as one learned in humane life, well versed in literature and history, like Julius Caesar and Augustus.72 In his enthusiasm for classical literature and his attempts to create, in the words of the author of Gloucester’s Book of Husbandry a ‘universal library’, he emulated the Italian princes whom he admired, such as Filippo Mario Visconti, the duke of Milan, who was asked by Humfrey to provide a catalogue for his library. Humfrey shared his interest in classical literature with English clergy and Italian humanists. His friend, John Whethamstede, the abbot of St Albans, was the author of several encyclopaedic projects that included the Chaff Store of the Poets which, with 692 alphabetical entries providing a guide to classical references, literary sources and places,73 displayed the sort of antiquarian curiosity showed by William Worcester in his Itineraries. Whethamstede’s entry on Leonardo Bruni, describing him as a historian, shows that Whethamstede, in his interest in ancient Rome, was concerned with content and not style.74 Other clergy who shared Gloucester’s classical interests included Nicholas Biddleston, dean of Salisbury 1435–46 and friend of Poggio Bracciolini, from whose executors Humfrey acquired a copy of Seneca’s letters; and Gloucester’s chancellor, Thomas Beckington, who saw the value of the Ciceronian, Latin side of humanism in diplomacy and criticized John Whethamstede’s Latinity.75 From Zeno Castiglione, bishop of Bayeaux, Gloucester acquired a collection of the letters of Cicero.76 Gloucester was no mere collector: he was closely involved in the production of texts that revealed his interest in Roman antiquity.77 When Gloucester commissioned the translation and verse adaptation of Palladius’s De re Rustica (The Book of Husbandry) he was described by the translator in the prologue as someone who fostered and gave shelter to a community of writers; he also referred to the Oxford clerks at work in the duke’s library, which contained, for the use of clergy, knights and husbandmen: ‘each leaf and line of anything that has been treated, told or taught by orator, poet or philosopher’.78 Those Gloucester is reported to have helped included John Whethamstede, Pietro del Monte, Tito Livio Frulovisi and Anthony (Beccaria).79 The translator praised the prince, not as a soldier, but as a scholar of wit, wisdom, and prudence, who was proficient in natural philosophy, physics, metaphysics, ethics, grammar, logic and rhetoric. His reference to Humfrey’s donation of books to Oxford, and the duke’s donation of the Latin Palladius to the university in 1443, would suggest that The Book of Husbandry was written between 1439 and 1443. Humfrey also specifically requested envoys to the twelve books of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes providing source material from his library for specifically requested stories. The composition of The Fall of Princes, the first work in English to represent the heroic ideal of antiquity, presenting its heroes without interpreting them in the light of chivalric or Christian principles,80 is connected with the growth of Humfrey’s collection of classical works, and Lydgate is depicted in an illustration to The Fall of Princes showing the author seated at a circular reading desk in a library (presumably Plesaunce) exchanging books with Gloucester (the presentation 68

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copy does not survive).81 William Worcester in his Book of Nobility drew attention to his master’s gift of books to Oxford scholars to nurture them in the seven liberal arts, the education system of late imperial Rome, and in one of his notebooks he praised Humfrey as a unique patron of scholars.82 Apart from Plesaunce, the other model for Lydgate of a classical enthusiast’s library would have been the collection of over two thousand volumes at his abbey at Bury, supervised by Abbot William Curteys (1429– 45), who had a new building erected to house a collection which included all the classical sources used by Dante: Virgil, Ovid, Virgil, Statius, Caesar and Horace and Juvenal.83 Lydgate’s secular, classical outlook was undoubtedly stimulated by this library and by the library at Gloucester College, Oxford, where at least three promising Bury monks were resident at any one time.84 Lydgate was here in 1406–8 when the prince of Wales wrote to the abbot of Bury asking leave for Lydgate to continue his studies at Oxford because of the good reports he had received concerning him from his close friend Richard Courtenay, the chancellor of the university (1406–8) and chaplain of his household. Lydgate’s studies in an MA course were of a sufficiently general nature (like those of William Worcester) to encourage his classical interests and to fit him for later administrative roles in Bedford’s service, and they contributed to his Reason and Sensuality (The Assembly of the Gods) in 1408, which is a treasure chest of ancient mythology with stories of Venus, Adonis, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Jason and the Golden Fleece, that anticipates Whethamstede’s Granary.85 The enthusiasm for the pedagogic works of the ancient Romans was shared in circle of Sir John Fastolf. After his retirement in 1349, Fastolf brought back from France translations of Latin classics that had been made available since the second half of the fourteenth century. Fastolf ’s pedagogic desire to influence young minds gave his household at Caister the character of an educational institution. His secretary, William Worcester, was a layman who attended Oxford in 1432 as an undergraduate at Oxford training for administrative service in Fastolf ’s estates, which he commenced 1438. Access to Fastolf ’s library broadened his horizons to include Roman history, and in 1459 he translated Cicero’s De senectute (On Old Age) at the ordinance of the sixtyyear-old Sir John Fastolf, perhaps with the help of Sir Stephen Scrope’s son, Stephen Scrope, and he translated Cicero’s De amicitia (On Friendship) for Bishop Waynflete in 1473.86 Ideals of friendship and concerns over advancing old age were a special concern of this circle. Worcester added to his interests in poetry and Italian literature an interest in those Roman classics that were the backbone to The Divine Comedy: he copied into his notebooks Chretien de Troyes French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and extracts from Virgil’s Aeneid87 and the works of Cicero and Seneca.88 Dante’s vision of the skies of the Southern Hemisphere placed equal emphasis on the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Temperance Justice and Mercy and the three Christian virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity, but within the circle of Fastolf and Worcester it was the Roman cardinal virtues that predominated. Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea89 is in part a letter of moral instruction to a man of authority, urging the cultivation of the cardinal virtue of Prudence: quotations attributed to Cicero and Seneca, classical myths and Trojan history are used to uphold Roman ethical, rational and moral values. 69

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Education of the king: Imperialism to tyranny However it was at Gloucester’s manor at Greenwich that the educational ideals of Rome were most zealously pursued. Humfrey’s position as regent of England, upholder of the principles of strong kingship of Henry V, was always contingent on his older brother Bedford’s absence in France, and on his return, Bedford supported the claims of Beaufort and the council. However, Gloucester’s conviction that there was a need for strong kingship ensured there was a role for which he had a stronger, legal claim, and this was as the guardian of the young heir to the throne, Henry VI, with responsibility for his moral welfare and education. This was a role decreed for Humfrey in a codicil to Henry V’s will, made at the Chateau de Vincennes on 26 August 1422, five days before his death, which assigned to ‘our beloved brother, Humfrey duke of Gloucester, the protection and custody of our beloved son’.90 This was a role, ratified on 3 December 1422, to which Humfrey dedicated his life, at least until 1441, serving his brother’s memory and upholding his vision of the Lancastrian dynasty by controlling the education of Henry VI; it was a tragically misplaced vision of his being a Cicero to Julius Caesar,91 so desperate was he to continue his brother’s legacy. It was while Humfrey was invested in the idea of strong kingship along Roman lines, and his role as the tutor to the young king, that civic rituals in London, written and orchestrated by John Lydgate, with presumably Gloucester in the background, emphasized London’s importance as the focus for Roman political ideals. In the goldsmith’s mumming, performed on Candlemas Eve on 2 February 1429, there is a description of David as he enters Jerusalem, dancing before the arc, which protected the holy city in the same way that the wooden palladium guarded Troy. This fusion of myths from the Old Testament and the Trojan heritage of Rome that lay behind the concept of New Troy was reinforced in the Mercers’ mumming, performed before Mayor Eastfield by the silk merchants on Twelfth Night, 6 January 1429: a herald from the East, after passing through Jerusalem, Mount Parnassus and the Mediterranean, disembarks with three ships in London on the Thames, with letters for the mayor, telling of the dwelling place of the gods and goddesses, and the well from which sprung the works of Cicero, Ovid and Virgil that would culminate in the writings of Petrarch and Boccaccio.92 This pageant conveyed the idea that by 1430 London was becoming a conduit for these twin biblical and classical influences, following the lead of the Italian cities, and it was the young king, whose education Gloucester saw as his responsibility (although officially this had been entrusted to Thomas duke of Exeter and, after his death in 1426, to Richard Beauchamp earl of Warwick), that would be the ultimate beneficiary. Warwick’s appointment as the king’s personal tutor in 1428 was made by a council presided over by Gloucester, and Warwick’s brief was to encourage virtue by putting before the king mirrors for princes and examples from past times of prosperity and wealth that fall to a virtuous king and warnings about the contrary fortune that falls to the negligent.93 Gloucester’s control over the king was tightened further in December 1429 when the seven-year-old Henry was crowned king of England and France, terminating Gloucester’s commission as protector, but marking the end of conciliar government, and since the 70

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king was so young, the premature coronation offered opportunities for Gloucester to occupy a position regarding the king close to the terms of Henry V’s will. His position was further strengthened in February 1432 when the removal of authority from the council to the court (isolating Beaufort) was ratified by Parliament. Gloucester was now in a position to proceed with the classical education of the king on the theory and practice of kingship and, with Lydgate’s help, tableau vivant were organized for February 1432 for the king’s triumphant entry into London, after a lacklustre coronation as king of France in Notre Dame de Paris on 16 December 1431, displaying at Cornhill the importance of the liberal arts and Dame Sapience in the education of the king, who was urged to learn from the wise.94 Henry was greeted at Lombard Street by a depiction of the seven liberal sciences and their classical practitioners: Cicero, Priscian and Pythagoras. Sheriffs and aldermen presented the king with a hamper of gold to emphasize the city’s Roman heritage: ‘Be glad O London in your beginning called New Troy, such joy never seen since Julius Caesar came here with his victory.’95 This was the context of many of Gloucester’s commissions to authors in this period including his commissioning of The Fall of Princes. His own exposure to the maxims of antiquity had started early: in 1407, he was the dedicatee, along with his brothers, of the Moral Balade of Henry Scogan, a member of the royal household, which provided positive and negative exempla from such figures of antiquity as Cicero, Julius Caesar, Nero and Boethius.96 The Fall of Princes was commissioned between 1431 and 1432 on Lydgate’s return from France,97 to coincide with Lydgate’s obtaining permission to return to the abbey of Bury in 1434, which allowed him to devote himself to completing this monumental work by 1439. The Fall of Princes was partly conceived as an educational manual for the young king. It was at Gloucester’s insistence that Lydgate provided ‘a remedy’ to these gruesome, entertaining tales from antiquity, at the conclusion to each of the twelve books, so that proud, overreaching princes could correct themselves upon seeing others fall.98 Gloucester’s 1436 commission of Frulovisi’s Life of Henry V celebrates Henry V as the paradigm of a classical hero and provides the sort of analysis of character to be found in Latin translations of Plutarch;99 its educative purpose is shown in the provision of an exemplum for the young king in the example of his deceased father who upholds an ideal concept of kingship involving strong rule and military prowess. The lesson was reinforced the following year, 1437, when Humfrey commissioned Frulovisi to write an account of his own life, the Humfrois, which concentrates on his worthiness as executor of his brother Henry V’s dying wishes, and his role as lieutenant of Calais, to which he had been appointed on 1 November 1435, in the relief of the Burgundian siege of Calais in 1436.100 This is described in Virgilian terms: ‘I will again here sing of Humfrey, of the men, of the great victories of the magnanimous people of England.’ Humfrey, like Virgil’s Achilles, makes his appearance a third of the way through the narrative, and the skirmish with Burgundy is given classical dignity with the appearance of a Greek fury, Alecto (who once caused havoc among the Trojans), disguised as Crux Lord of Croy and sent by Pluto from the underworld assembly to advise Charles the Bold to attack Calais. This facility for seeing contemporary events against the backdrop of antiquity was shared by others in Gloucester’s circle. Lydgate, in an Epithalamium on the occasion 71

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of Gloucester’s marriage to Jacqueline of Hainault in January 1423, gave an exclusively classical background to the nuptials, with references to Pagan gods, and, wary of the possibility of the marriage endangering the Burgundian alliance, he gave Helen of Troy as an example to be avoided.101 All these works from the duke’s library in Plesaunce attempted to provide a classical education for the young king and a role model that conformed to patterns established by heroes of antiquity. This was an educational programme with wider concerns, which were revealed in the statute the University of Oxford passed in December 1431 establishing classes in rhetoric and classical literature in response to a suggestion from Duke Humfrey, and in the duke’s institution of a lectureship in the seven liberal arts in 1434,102 that emulated the academy in Athens.103 A letter from the university to the duke in 1436 refers to Gloucester’s contribution to this arts curriculum: ‘O divine inspiration by whose work and order the study and doctrine of the seven liberal arts and of philosophies, once almost fallen into oblivion, have been renovated.’104 Humfrey also made three separate donations of his books to the university with an educational programme in mind.105 Gilbert Kymer (d. 1463), one of the duke’s household physicians, who was associated with the Oxford library from the time it was opened to scholars in 1412, and who became chancellor of the university in 1431, was probably an intermediary in these donations. The first was made in 1439 of 129 volumes (the fellows compared the donor to Julius Caesar, who founded a library in Rome, and Alfred, the Great the supposed founder of Oxford), and there was a predominance of conservative, Galenic medical texts, and astrological and astronomical works for the medicine faculty. The second donation in 1441 of 106 volumes included patristic texts for the divinity faculty, and the third donation in 1444 of 134 volumes contained humanist texts, including the works of Cicero and Livy, a basis for a university library that could provide a humanist education for the young.106 The books were housed at St Mary’s Church for the use of lecturers, and in their absence students were allowed access. Humfrey was the only one with borrowing privileges. A letter of thanks from the university ended by asking the duke to visualize the students bending over his books, thirsty for knowledge, in a library that would be his everlasting monument. The crowds using them were so great that the accommodation was insufficient, and it was suggested to Gloucester that a new Divinity school being constructed should house them and be called by his name. Humfrey died before the building was completed and opened in 1488 under the chancellorship of John Russel, who donated to the library copies of Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men, Pliny’s Natural History, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Virgil’s Aeneid, Statius’s Thebiad and the works of Cicero. Humphrey’s books were dispersed in the sixteenth century, and just under fifty survive from a collection of 500 or 600.107

Retirement to Plesaunce In considering the wisdom of the ancient Romans the most disconcerting problem Dante wrestled with in the realm of Jupiter or justice was soteriology, the issue of the reasons behind the damnation of the virtuous pagan. He is told by the eagle: 72

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Now who are you, who wish to sit on the bench and judge from a thousand miles away, with sight as short as a handbreath?108 Dante’s resolution of this problem, to include Greek and Roman pagans in a vision of the afterlife, was unprecedented and reveals his deep love for classical antiquity. He placed Virgil and his fellow pagan poets and philosophers in the first circle of Inferno at the mouth of Hell in Limbo, a comfortable enough place representing the head, the seat of memory, without sunlight but illuminated by the light of intellect (Lydgate declared that a university should radiate light).109 Limbo is a castle surrounded by a swift running stream, a river of eloquence, and its seven walls represent the seven liberal arts fostered by the duke of Gloucester at Oxford and the seven doors represent the cardinal virtues. This retreat, with its meadows and Elysian fields, resembles an Oxford College (a secular version of the Earthly Paradise to which it had been compared in Bertoldi’s commentary to his translation of The Divine Comedy). Whethamstede may have had Dante’s classical idyll in mind in 1458 when he described Oxford, in a letter to a monk of Tynemouth, as a bubbling hippocrene fountain of eloquence, located amidst winding rivers.110 Here in Limbo, Virgil and his colleagues lived without the hope of ever seeing the sunlight of God’s love, but nevertheless shedding a little light themselves with their learning in ‘a fire that overcame a hemisphere of shadows’ as they communed with each other about philosophy.111 Dante’s community of classical scholars also bears some resemblance to the community established by the duke of Gloucester at Greenwich Palace on the River Thames, formerly a religious house on the site of a Romano British temple dedicated to Jupiter on the old Roman road of Watling Street that ran from Canterbury to London and on through Greenwich. Gloucester acquired Greenwich manor after the death of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, in December 1426, and probably before December 1428, when he celebrated Christmas there; he enclosed 200 acres, acquired a further seventeen acres from the monks of Shene between 1432 and 1437, crenelated the manor house to give it, in the words of Aristotle in the Ethics, a status ‘befitting a great man’, and built a tower, perhaps to observe the stars (the tower, demolished in the 1660s, became the site of Greenwich Observatory and source of the navigational meridian).112 It was here, in 1436, that he followed his heroes Cicero and Seneca, into semi-retirement in a place that became known as ‘maner de la Plesaunce’.113 The issues behind Gloucester’s retirement relate to his disillusion with Roman imperial authority figures and his anxieties that the young king, lacking the qualities of an Augustus, would be more likely to follow either the tyrannical precepts of a Caligula or the disinterested ineptitude of a Honorarius. Humfrey therefore began to deviate from Dante in later years in his growing disenchantment with the idea of identifying strong kingship with the Roman imperial ideal. Education, in his eyes, was now the tool for preventing the realm and its king from following the Roman path from Republicanism, ethical values and devotion to the common good, to the assertion of tyrannical power. This growing tendency to see the Roman Emperors as tyrants was perhaps influenced 73

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by his increasing inability to influence and educate a young king who was falling under the influence of the Beaufort faction and who was beginning to show a will of his own, to the alarm of many at court, and who was becoming suspicious of his uncle. In 1436, Calais was besieged by Burgundian troops and Gloucester led a force to raise the siege. By the time he got there the siege had already been raised by the Calais garrison itself. Burgundy’s troops fled in disarray when they heard of Gloucester’s approach, and he pursued them into Flanders, pillaging the countryside, before returning to Calais with much booty. His subsequent arrival in London when he was at the height of his power was accompanied by great celebrations. His brother, John the duke of Bedford, had died, making him Henry VI’s sole heir to the throne and the most authoritative figure to hand down Henry V’s legacy to his juvenile son. However, the death of Bedford also posed problems, sowing seeds of suspicion concerning the duke’s possible aspirations towards the throne. A denial of any such ambitions was issued in 1436 in the Gesta Henrici Quinti, which begins with a panegyric to Humfrey, praising his scholarship and his role in looking after the education and religious development of his nephew.114 Humfrey is explicitly compared to Lysurgus (fl. c. 820 BC), the semi-mythical creator of the Spartan constitution, who came to Gloucester’s attention through the humanist, Latin translations of Plutarch’s Lives by such scholars in his household as Bruni and Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger.115 Echestratus, king of Sparta, died leaving his wife pregnant. His younger brother, Lysurgus, became regent, and Lysurgus transferred the kingship to the newly born male heir, Charillus, undertaking the role of guardian and unofficial regent. However, the young king’s mother and her relatives assumed the child’s uncle was plotting his nephew’s death, and Lysurgus, always mindful of the common good, went into voluntary exile until the child grew up. He visited Crete, where he studied the laws of Minos, and Asia Minor where, among the Dorians, he was reputed to have encountered Homer. He returned after consulting the oracle at Delphi; using his wisdom and learning, he bequeathed to Sparta its laws before disappearing from history. Frulovisi highlighted the obvious parallels with Humfrey, the disinterested guardian of an infant king and imbiber of the wisdom of antiquity: ‘He nourished thee (Henry VI) tenderly faithfully so that he might be renamed another Lysurgus … a steadfast nourisher of the king his nephew.’116 Further indications of Humfrey’s increasingly vulnerable position were provided by Pietro del Monte (1380–1459), the Venetian papal collector and acquaintance of Leonardo da Vinci who, before leaving England in late 1440, came to the duke’s assistance as a pamphleteer in his dispute with Cardinal Beaufort, who returned to England in October 1439 while Parliament was in session in Oxford, where Gloucester was strong. In 1438, aware of Beaufort’s appropriation of large parts of the Lancastrian inheritance, del Monte reworked for the duke Poggio’s De Avaritia (Dialogue against Avarice) as De Virtutum et Vitiorum inter se Differentia, (A Dialogue on the Effects of Avarice), and in 1439 (following his 1437 presentation of a Latin translation of Plutarch’s Lives), del Monte sent a copy of the work with an accompanying letter to John Whethamstede.117 In January 1440, while Beaufort was moving Parliament to Westminster, he rewrote the Scipio Caesar controversy between Poggio Bracciolini and Guanaro de Verona, a competition 74

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that took place between Ferrara and Florence in which Poggio, as a representative of republican Florence, made a case for Caesar as a tyrant who sacrificed the constitution to further personal ambition by celebrating instead the civic values of Scipio Africanus and Cato the Younger and their willingness to devote their lives to the defence of the Roman republic.118 In the second half of 1439, Poggio sent a copy of the debate to the duke,119 and del Monte, seeing its relevance to Gloucester’s struggle as defender of the Lancastrian constitution against the personal ambitions of Beaufort, adapted it by 31 January 1440, portraying Caesar as an ambitious usurper and suggesting parallels between Cato’s willingness to stand up to tyranny and Gloucester’s role as servant of the people.120 Del Monte’s version influenced Gloucester’s indictment of Beaufort in February 1440, which presented a vision of the strong kingship expected of Henry VI and Beaufort’s destruction of civic unity, abuse of the prerogative and abandonment of the English colonists in France.121 Similar sentiments were expressed by William Worcester in his analysis in the Book of Nobility of the causes of the failure of the English occupation of Normandy in which he cited such apologists of the Roman ideal of the common good as Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, Vegetius, Boethius, and Christine de Pisan, to urge Henry VI to follow his father’s example.122 Similar sentiments were expressed in Worcester’s notes on Roman history and the wars of Caesar and Pompey, which were drawn from Seneca, Livy and Cicero.123 Where Gloucester’s indictment differs from Worcester is in his disillusionment with Julius Caesar. This treatise represents a turning point in Humfrey’s relationship with the young king. Julius Caesar, the conqueror and model for Henry V, was no longer Humfrey’s exemplar: he is openly criticized in this work and identified with Beaufort as one whose hunger for power endangered the common good defended by Scipio.124 By 1446 Humfrey, faced with growing suspicion of his motives, and a king entering adolescence and (for a time at least) beginning to show a will of his own, came to the conclusion that he could no longer consider himself a Caesar or a Henry V, and he chose instead, in his role as a servant of the Lancastrian dynasty and a servant of the people, to identify himself with another role model, Cato the younger, celebrated in Del Monte’s work as a scholar who stood up to a tyrant. For Dante, who had many heroes in ancient Rome, there had been no such conflicts. He regarded Caesar, soldier and emperor, and Cato the younger, scholar and republican, as equally heroic figures in Roman history and assigned Cato a place as keeper of the gateway in Purgatory. But del Monte’s treatise did not mark a conversion from imperial authority to republicanism, but towards the Lancastrian concept of the state upheld by Henry V, and archbishops Chichele and Arundel, which would be taken up by the house of York and the writers and courtiers of Edward IV.125 It also marks the beginning of Humfrey’s attempt to follow his heroes from antiquity, Cicero and Lucius Quinctius Cincinattus, into retirement from political life. His last effective political action was to force Beaufort to accept Richard duke of York as commander in France instead of one of his nephews, but he failed to secure his impeachment.126 Humfrey would have received guidance from Aristotle’s Ethics on the good life. In this text he was taught that the ultimate purpose of education is not utility, but to live happily 75

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in retirement, cultivating virtue and displaying large heartedness and magnanimity,127 virtues which were celebrated in The Book of Nurture, written by Humfrey’s Usher and Marshall of the Household, John Russell, sometime before 1447 and dedicated to Humfrey as a ‘prince of light’.128 Russell, with obvious affection for his lord, describes the elaborate feasts with all manner of fish, fowl and beast, served (in an age before the development of large herds of cattle) with multiple courses, all chosen with the duke’s humoral health in mind. Loving attention is paid to the personal care of Humfrey ‘for his plesaunce’ by devoted servants stoking his fires in the bedrooms and the grooming of his person. Plesaunce sums up an ideal of the good life, the cultivation of intellect and the pursuit of learning for its own sake. Perfect happiness is seen to rest in the practice of philosophy, the attainment of detachment from affairs of political life. This detachment was something that could also be attained (according to Lydgate) by a reading of his Fall of Princes and achieving the state of pleasance through meditation on the fates of all those who enter the public arena. But Humfrey, through Dante (albeit indirectly), was offered the prospect in his life of aristocratic retirement of an even higher degree of happiness. Nicholas Upton, who was made precentor of Salisbury Cathedral through Gloucester’s influence, dedicated to the duke his Libellus de officio militarii (On Military Matters) and quoted ‘the poet Danty’s Canzone Le dolci rime d'Amor’, the heading to the fourth treatise of the Convivio’s discussion of nobility, which refutes emperor Ferdinand II’s definition of nobility as ancient riches adorning fine manners, and suggests that the cultivation of virtue, implanted in the soul by God through virtuous living, was the road to salvation and true felicity at the end of a human life.129 The link to Dante may be circumlocutious, for Upton probably took the quote from the canonist Bartolus of Saxoferrato, but nevertheless, after Chaucer, all references to the Tuscan poet in the fifteenth century seem to lead to the duke of Gloucester.130 The text that reveals Humfrey’s rural idyll most eloquently is the translation he commissioned between 1439 and 1443 of Palladius’s Book of Husbandry.131 Humfrey’s enthusiasm for Roman writers on agriculture, and estate management, was shown in his ownership of Columella’s De re rustica (On Agriculture), Virgil’s Eclogues or Bucolics, and in a letter he wrote to Pier Candido Decembrio in 1444 lamenting that he has not yet received Cato the elder’s De agri cultura and Cato and Varro’s De re rustica (On Agriculture).132 Humfrey’s ownership of Virgil’s pastoral Eclogues, and his enthusiasm for a vernacular translation of another classical pastoral text, places him firmly in the tradition of elevating the vernacular as a medium for expressing the highest modes of literature. It was a tradition defended by Dante, who only deigned to cross the paths of the academic proto-humanists of the university of Bologna expressing surprise at his choice of the vernacular,133 when he received a visit from the rhetorician, Giovanni del Virgilio in Ravenna in 1319. They discussed the relationship between vernacular and Latin literature, and Virgilio maintained his position that the vernacular was an unworthy medium for writing great poetry, especially epics. Dante did not bother to defend his vernacular poem, but as a riposte to Virgilio’s challenge, he composed ten Latin Eclogues in the style of Virgil.134 He would have approved of Gloucester’s commission. This month-by-month guide to estate management does not contain a single reference 76

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to public life, suggesting that the duke in this period was attempting, like his heroes Cincinnatus, Seneca and Cicero, to live a life of rustic contemplation and retirement from court, modelling himself on Diogenes contemplating in his barrel the passage of the sun, rather than on Alexander, with his preoccupation with worldly glory.135 The duke’s preoccupation with the lifestyle of antiquity is poignantly presented in an account of his activities in planting vines, harvesting grapes, making wines and tending bee hives. The irons of warfare are exchanged for the mattock and pruning knives: ‘It is husbandry to cut the barre branch if rank, just as you would cut a mortal foe.’ Although The Book of Husbandry is transposed to a northern setting, the lure of the southern Mediterranean is preserved in instructions for making bath houses: A husbandman on his bath should give thought For there may plesaunce and health arise Towards the drying sun it must be wrought In the southwest and south the sun will be brought.136 The atmosphere of this work is pervaded by the spirit of Virgil’s Georgics,137 creating the impression that Humphrey’s manor of pleasance is an Earthly Paradise, a bucolic classical, gentrified vision, an enclosed world like that of the aristocratic retreat at Fiesole in the Decameron, bearing little resemblance to the countryside of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which is powerful and mysterious.138 The householder’s estate management, in which he works in harmony with the three elements of earth, air and water, runs throughout the text like the motif of plesaunce,139 creating the impression of someone removed from the fever and fret of court and city. A similar, bucolic evocation occurs in a poem written about Plesaunce, ‘How a Lover Praises His Lady’, which describes a walled park overlooking the River Thames containing a fresh conduit, with flowers and healing balms, a well, fruit trees and birds.140 However, Humfrey’s peace was fragile: the disruptions of state politics always threaten (the shadows of Plato’s cave from which the philosopher retreats, sheltering under a wall in a storm), and this was demonstrated in The Fall of Princes by Lucius Quinctius Cincinattus, the Roman statesman and leader of the early republic, who worked on his farm: Clearing ditches to get his sustenance Without grumbling, always glad of cheer Both in his bearing and his countenance He judged he had as much as was sufficient To do his plesaunce, as did Croesus king of Lydia (Lide) Content with little; Nature was his guide,141 until an invasion of the Aequi from the East prompted him to reassume leadership of Rome. Humfrey's attempt to live a life of scholarship and contemplative isolation was always going to be illusory, and he probably saw himself inevitably following the paths 77

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of Cicero and Seneca. He was brought out of seclusion into the dangerous political arena over the issue of the release of Charles of Orleans in 1439. Gloucester, when he walked out of the ceremony at Westminster that finalized the deal, showed that the precepts of Roman military history still exerted a strong hold over him. Henry V, in the original will he made at Dover on 10 June 1421, ordered Charles, taken prisoner at Agincourt, to be confined until the conquest of France was complete. Eleanor Cobham’s father, and Gloucester’s father-in-law, Sir Reginald Cobham, was given custody of Charles at Sterborough Castle in 1436. Gloucester drew up an indictment of Cardinal Beaufort’s policies in 1440 (supported by Sir John Fortescue, chief justice of the King’s Bench) and demanded they be registered in the Great Seal. In this indictment he repeatedly referred, in English, to the memory of the king’s ‘blessed father’ and protested against this repudiation of the terms of his brother’s will, bringing up the issue of Beaufort’s illegitimacy, the misappropriation of the king’s possessions, and expressed concern for the French Norman subjects of the English king. Gloucester was still preoccupied with his brother’s imperial legacy: he had always advocated war with France as a distraction from civil unrest, following the precepts of Aegidius’s de Regimine Principum (On the Government of Rulers) a copy of which he gave Oxford, and the anger in the document suggests Gloucester’s retirement may not have been voluntary.142 His interest in pursuing the war continued to the end of his life. Nicholas Upton’s Military Matters gave the duke a practical manual of warfare, in the same way that The Book of Husbandry provided him with a handbook of agriculture, and both drew heavily on classical writers.143 The important difference between Gloucester’s ideal of philosophical retirement at Plesaunce and Dante’s concept of Limbo is that Gloucester and his circle (ostensibly at least) were Christians destined for salvation. The most revered and tragic figure in The Divine Comedy is Dante’s putative father, Virgil. Despite all his wisdom, compassion and foresight, Virgil had the misfortune to be born before the redemption of Christ. One of the most poignant moments in the poem occurs after Virgil walks ahead of a fearful Dante through the flames of Purgatory to meet Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, encouraging him by saying: ‘Already I seem to see her eyes.’144 Dante turns around to Virgil for reassurance and he is no longer there because he cannot be admitted to Paradise, even though he has shown his son the way. He left at the point when he, the pilgrim, and Statius were watching the procession of sacred history, led by a candelabra of seven lights, come to a halt, as if directed by the Pole Star, within the seven lights of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, preparatory to the appearance of Beatrice. At this point Matelda urges the pilgrim to look ahead to what comes after and to think on what follows, referring to the imminent appearance of the Four Evangelists heralding the Incarnation. This is an allusion to the composition of the prophetic Fourth Ecologue during the consulship of Pollo in 40 BC, and Virgil turns away to his left, away from his own prophetic vision which he either does not understand or believe, in contrast to Statius, who has been converted by Virgil’s prophecy and yet fearful of the persecutions of the emperor Domitian, hides his faith in his poetry, and Dante, who is similarly divinely inspired, in part by his reading of Virgil, and who will proclaim his vision in his poem. Virgil had asked Statius: ‘What candles dispelled your darkness’:145 it was the lantern held behind Virgil’s back to illuminate 78

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subsequent generations, a light of divine wisdom shining everywhere and impeded only by the shadows cast by our corporeality. This powerful metaphor illuminated the way for fifteenth century readers of the classics of Rome to reconcile admiration for Roman civilization (Virgil’s lamp) with Christianity. For the duke of Gloucester (who owned the Eclogues) this would be achieved through the cult of St Alban.

Humfrey duke of Gloucester and St Alban: protectors of the realm In this cult all the threads of Gloucester’s life coalesce: his enthusiasm for Roman political and ethical values and education, his identification with the role of protector of the realm, and his impending martyrdom. ‘Protector’ was a loaded term, used repeatedly in connection with both St Alban and Humfrey. The University of Oxford, which no longer had the same support from the church that it enjoyed in the fourteenth century because of its association with John Wyclif, became dependent on Gloucester as its protector, who was first described in this way by the university in 1430: his donation of books was reciprocated with a letter thanking him for his generosity ever since he had been the university’s ‘protector’. Three years later Gloucester received 100 marks from the executors of the king’s proctor Thomas Poulton, bishop of Worcester so that he might act as defender and protector.146 He was so described by the university in 1446, the recipient of his gift of classical texts, as ‘our benevolent protector and guardian of the young’.147 Humfrey closely identified with the Benedictine abbey of St Albans and its protector St Alban. As soon as the naturalization of his new bride, Jacqueline of Hainault, was formalized, he took her to visit the monastery where they met the prior. They approached the abbey on Christmas Eve and stayed two weeks, keeping the Feast of the Epiphany, and the following day they were received into the fraternity of the abbey, with voting rights in chapter. This old custom of conferring spiritual confraternity on benefactors in ceremonies of admission had been revived in the fourteenth century under abbot Walter de la Mare. Other prominent members, who joined after Whethamstede returned to the abbey from the Curia, included John duke of Bedford in 1426; Richard Beauchamp earl of Warwick, who spent two weeks there in May and June 1427; Cardinal Beaufort, who made a pilgrimage there in 1426, making a public benediction on the steps of the high altar and celebrating Mass; Catherine Valois, who carried the five-year-old Henry VI to the shrine in solemn procession, and the king’s stepmother, Joan Navarre.148 Whethamstede presented the abbey with a silver tablet depicting the protomartyr. Humfrey spent Christmas of 1427 at the abbey to celebrate Epiphany, and on 25 July 1431 he secured the admission of his second wife, Eleanor the Duchess of Gloucester, to the fraternity of St Albans.149 He also made eight different presentations to the abbey including vestments, hangings for the high altar and a gift to the shrine of a figure of the Virgin bearing her crucified son. The duke always turned to the shrine of his special saint when in trouble. When he fell ill in 1427 his recovery was attributed by an anonymous annalist to St Alban,150 and he undertook a pilgrimage to the abbey on St Mark’s Day to give thanks at Alban’s shrine for his recovery. Gloucester associated his role as protector and preserver of the peace, with that of Albion’s original protector, St Alban: before 79

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attending to a feud in the Midlands between John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, he visited and paid his respects to the holy martyr at St Albans. The term ‘protector’ was reserved for upholders of the ideals of Roman civilization. Boethius, another Roman, Christian martyr and victim of pagan barbarians, was similarly described in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes as ‘our true protector and steadfast champion against tyrants’;151 Constantine, who according to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Lydgate was born in Britain, was hailed upon taking the Cross ‘to all Christians protector and defender’, and Charlemagne (who revived the ideal of the empire) was described as ‘true protector to holy church’.152 Gloucester’s threefold identification with St Alban as an educated Roman, a protector of the realm and a martyr would be sealed when he was arrested at Bury in 1447, probably because of his opposition to the release of Charles of Orleans. The cult of Humfrey’s fellow protector, St Alban, represented a fusion of pagan Roman and Christian British sacrificial myths in the service of a foundation myth of the British nation enabling the English to share, to some extent, Dante’s conviction that they had a tangible connection with ancient Rome. It was believed in the fifteenth century that Rome and Britain shared a common ancestor in Troy: Lydgate in his Troy Book, undertaken for the prince of Wales in 1412 and completed in 1420, has Julius Caesar, who anticipates Henry V, invoking ‘our worthy ancestors Troy’,153 and it was popularly believed that both civilizations owed their birth to the fall of Troy and the dispersal of the brothers, Aeneas and Brutus, to Italy and Britain, a mythology initiated by Virgil and perpetuated in: a sixth century Roman forgery claiming to be an eyewitness account of the story from the Trojan perspective of Dares Phyrigius; the twelfth century French collation of Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie (The Romance of Troy), and in the main source for Lydgate’s Troy Book, the 1287 Latin translation of the Italian Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy). Dante had been able to use the destruction of Troy to show that Rome shared the Christian redemptive view of history, the fortunate fall: around the eye of the Roman imperial eagle in the sphere of Jupiter, that ‘temperate sixth star’ and ‘jovial torch’, he placed, among the five twinkling lights of blessed souls, two pious pagans: the Roman Emperor, Trajan, and the Trojan, Ripheus, killed when the Greeks sacked the city so becoming a Christ-like martyr and saviour of his people. He was the seed of Rome and Britain, a manifestation of the divine grace behind the founding of Rome and New Troy or London. The abbot of St Albans, John Whethamstede, preserved in his Chaff Store of the Poets an autographed note on Dante’s Ripheus, which reveals his interest in the foundation myth of Britain’s origins, a Trojan and Roman heritage shared with Dante’s Italy that was fundamental to the cult of St Alban and which had been reinforced in Lydgate’s Troy Book.154 There had been a cult of St Alban since the early fifth century. The earliest record of England’s protomarty is in the life of Bishop Germanus of Auxerre, written by Constantinus of Lyon c. 480 AD. Germanus was sent to Britain in 429 to combat the Pelagian heretics, and after succeeding, he visited the tomb of St Alban to offer thanks. Oral traditions may have been brought back to the continent by Germanus and Constantinus, and they were incorporated in an otherwise fraudulent eighth or ninth 80

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century Passion of St Alban that merely collated tales from other saints’ legends, which were incorporated into Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with the addition of the name of Alban’s teacher, Amphibalus. This was expanded by William, a monk of St Albans, between 1167 and 1183 to encourage pilgrims to the tomb, rebuilt for the translation of the relics between 1120 and 1150.155 The protomartyr emerged to prominence in the late fourteenth century.156 Thirty miracles, reported at the shrine from 1300 to 1396, were recorded by Thomas Walsingham, the author of the Continuation of Gesta Abbatum (Deeds of the Abbey) 1371–81, who referred to St Alban as the proto martyr of the English and the Britons in his Chronica Maiora. These miracles were performed by a saint associated with alleviating attacks of madness and the preservation of the nation (he was supposed to have aided Edward II’s escape from Bannockburn in 1314, and he was involved in the deliverance of the English fleet at the naval battle of Sluys in 1340).157 It is in John Lydgate’s life of this Romano/British official, converted to Christianity, that we can see a reconciliation of the conflict between Christianity and the ideals of Roman civilization, traced back to a mythical primal source in a life of Britain’s protomartyr that has few supernatural miracles and is instead an exploration of the personality of a potentially conflicted individual in a divided nation lacking a real identity. This conflict of identity on the individual and political level is resolved in Lydgate’s Life of St Alban and Amphibalus, by fusing Britain’s classical and Christian heritages. The original Latin life of St Alban (On the Nobility and Deaths of Saints Albon and Amphibalus) was probably written by Abbot Thomas Walsingham, or under his supervision, before September 1384, with the addition of a fictional account of The Life of Amphibalus, who converted Alban to Christianity, by Geoffrey, abbot of St Albans (1119–46).158 The earliest copy of this text is in a manuscript compiled by Walsingham in 1415, when John Whethamstede was a junior monk of the abbey, and it is described as a translation from an unnamed French source.159 It offers an original account of Alban’s martyrdom, not found in Mathew Paris’s account, and instead of being a conventional hagiography, it examines the background of Alban as a member of a patrician family who, with his friend, Amphibalus, a Welsh prince, was sent to Rome to become a member of the bodyguard of the Diocletian. Alban spent seven years with Amphibalus in Rome before the emperor sent him back to Britain to serve as seneschal in Verulanium, but Amphibalus remained in Rome where he converted to Christianity, and when Diocletian began the persecution of Christians he fled to Wales, visiting on the way his friend, Alban in Verulanium (St Albans). The fact that Alban proved to be a model of secular virtues suggests Walsingham found his inspiration from classical sources. A copy of this text is preserved in a manuscript book owned by John Whethamstede who, between 1420 and 1440, commissioned John Lydgate to translate the work into English Chaucerian stanzas, and a completed manuscript was placed before the saint’s altar (a list of expenses incurred during his abbacy, before he resigned in 1440, refers to a life of St Alban translated into English verse).160 The cult of the saint was given added prominence with the composition by John Dunstable (probably on a visit to the abbey in 1426 with Bedford) of the motet Albanus roseo rutilitat (rosy glow).161 A copy of the Life of St Alban was owned by Thomas Chaworth of Ulverton, Nottinghamshire, a friend of chief justice Richard Bingham, which he left to his cousin 81

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Robert Clifton esq.,162 and the concluding prayer to the protomartyr was included in the Talbot book of hours owned by John Talbot the earl of Shrewsbury and Margaret Beauchamp, daughter of the Earl of Warwick. In the sixteenth century an abbot of St Albans, Robert Catton, had John Hereford print at his request ‘a Life and Passion of Saint Albon by dom John Lydgate’ and a breviary for the use of St Albans.163 Alban probably lived between 251 and 259 AD under the persecutions of the Roman Emperors, Decimus and Valerius, but Lydgate places him in the era of Diocletian (284– 305). Although he was born in Verulanium, Lydgate, following Walsingham, emphasizes his Roman citizenship (the name ‘Alban’ derives from Albania or Alba Longa, on the hills 10 miles south of Rome, birthplace of Romulus and Remus and home to the city’s aristocracy). Roman civilization and its empire are admired for its prudent rationality and concern for the common good: The prudent Romans threw everything behind The common profit and thought it was right … No man should, unless he were sworn To the Romans, with heart body and might Always to be true, to receive the order of knight …. First he should appear in the presence Of the emperor.164 Lydgate, with his invocations to the muse, allusions to Christ as Orpheus, and his celebration of Hercules and Achilles as progenitors of Romans and Trojans, introduces a uniquely classical dimension to the genre of saint’s life. In his additions to his source, he has Diocletian ordering his knights to be chaste, to be prepared to shed their blood in serving the common weal, and to protect women and the pagan priests.165 Alban is described as a model Roman citizen, rational, prudent and concerned above all for the public good: ‘To learn Roman manners and ways’.166 He was a model representative of the Roman senatorial class so admired in the works of Cicero which were being read in the circle of Sir John Fastolf by men such as William Worcester and Stephen Scrope, and the knights and gentry who were themselves members of a class of imperial soldiers and administrators in Northern France. Alban embodied the virtue of prudence and the other three cardinal virtues celebrated in Scrope’s Epistle of Othea. It was this concern for the common good that impelled Alban to secure Diocletian’s reluctant consent to allow him to return to Britain, as governor of Verulanium, to deal with the rebellion of the usurper and tyrant Carousias. Alban, once he had restored Roman authority and ensured the coronation of Maximus, became protector of the realm, devoted to public service, a protector of the weak and poor, and an upholder of the virtue of prudence. Alban’s two identities – as a Roman official who embodied that civilization’s qualities of pragmatism, reason and dedication to the common good and as a Christian saint and martyr – encapsulated the need to reconcile the Roman political, cultural heritage with Britain’s identity as a Christian country. These apparently irreconcilable opposites, 82

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pragmatic rationality and passionate martyrdom posed a potentially irreconcilable gulf that could however be bridged through the science of alchemy, which specialized in reconciling opposites: the marriage of the body or red sulphur (the earth, passion and the heart), with the head or white mercury (the intellect). This alchemical marriage occurred through the Passion of St Alban.

The cult of St Alban: The alchemical marriage of Rome and Britain Alban’s name, echoing Richard Wallingford’s St Albans clock, England’s first dial-faced horologe showing the movements of the Sun and the planets, designed before 1336 and known as Albion (all by one),167 is in Lydgate’s life associated with white lilies and red roses, which represent his impending Christ-like sacrifice of red blood and white water, and the alchemical symbolism of the white mercury and red sulphur: This name Albanus, by interpretation Is compounded of plenty and whiteness … It was well seen that he stable stood For Christ’s faith when the pagans shed his blood. Which two colours of lilies and roses red Never did fade… Thus was his chaplet made of red and white.168 St Alban was converted to Christianity after a sermon by Amphibalus on the Annunciation and Incarnation, which was replete with classical imagery. The conversion of this model Roman citizen was facilitated by Amphibalus’s appeals to the classical education of Alban and such followers of his cult as Duke Humfrey. The Annunciation occurs in spring with Flora decking and clothing the earth; The time approaches of grace and gladness Towards Summer, when the lusty queen Called Flora, with spotless sweetness Clads all the soil in new green, And amorous Spring brings again the sun shining Cherishing April with his showers Bringing the first of May and his flowers.169 Phoebus warms the soil, and the spring rain brings forth flowers. It is a scene that would, some thirty years later, be depicted in Botticelli’s Primavera and can be interpreted as an alchemical allegory: the germination of the fruits of the earth by the spirit of mercury. Amphibalus went on to explain the Passion in terms of alchemical medicine. Christ’s blood is a treacle, a precious liquor of liquors and a miracle of distillation (celebrated by Humfrey’s ancestor Henry the first duke of Lancaster), the celestial quintessence of the 83

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philosophers that can restore life to the dead.170 Amphibalus explains the significance of Alban’s dream of Christ’s Passion in terms of alchemical medicine; his spent blood is as a medicine, balm and chief treacle liquor of liquors, distilling by miracle, From the conduits of Christ’s wounds five, restoring man again from death to live, Whose blessed passion is our restorative … The philosophers celestial quintessence, To all mankind his welfare to restore.171 Alban is converted in Verulanium: When Summer flowers bloom white and red. In the highest, lusty fresh season.172 Alban’s martyrdom, which occurred in mid-summer with the sun at its height, before its descent into the realm of the moon, was depicted in the same terms, a transformation of suffering into symbols of mercury in imitation of the Passion of Christ. Alban is arrested at dawn with the falling of the wholesome balm of mercurial, silver dew-like round pearls of shining crystal, descending onto the summer flowers: The wholesome balm began in meadows sweet Among the flowers and wholesome leaves of green The silver dew that sought the soil to wet Like pearls round as any crystal sheen, 173 He stands before his judges: This manly prince, this hardy knight Albon, Stood between both, stable as any stone.174 He is dragged to prison as the four elements rebel: The elements for his wrongs began to complain … The earth was scorched with the fervency of the sun, The heat at nights was intolerable; There grew no fruit, skies were darkened; … The people cried for lack of victuals, Judging the cause to be sorcery That the elements chose to hold a battle’ for Christ’s knight.175

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Alban prays for the zephyr, the spring wind to bring rain to nourish the parched, sulphuric earth, burning as he is tortured. He prays for a reconciliation between the warring elements to establish an alchemical mean: This rigorous air with temperate dew… Between hot and cold set a mean indeed.176 His prayers bring forth rivers and springs of crystal waters: Full plenteous, with crystal streams clear, A wondrous thing and marvellous to hear, From a dry hill, of moisture void of all, Was seen to spring a well, clearer than crystal! … The wholesome stream was of such great plesaunce.177 This account of the parched, burning earth, a more explicit version of the alchemical imagery of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, depicts the alchemical marriage of the earth and the rain, the real miracle of regeneration, rather than the cures that the pilgrims were seeking at the shrine of Thomas a Becket. The origins of this alchemical, medical imagery of the distillation of precious liquors from Christ’s Five Wounds, the red and white flowers, may lie in the fourteenth century. The same images can be found in Henry Grosmont the first duke of Gloucester’s Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines (The Book of Holy Medicines),178 and Humfrey, his great-grandson, received a copy of this work from Thomas Carew, a Lancastrian soldier, before his death in 1438.179 Lydgate may well have had access to this text. After the debacle of the Battle of Nicopolis, in September 1396, which signified the failure of the crusading movement, the minds of educated men of the fifteenth century interested in alchemical science, especially those associated with St Alban’s Abbey, such as John Whethamstede, John Lydgate and Humfrey duke of Gloucester, were focused on the challenge posed by another civilization, with claims to have a higher value placed on reason, the pragmatic civilization of ancient Rome, a culture which, as their reading of Cicero, Seneca and Ovid attests, these men had a high regard. The alchemical imagery associated with St Alban could become an ideologically useful tool in another conflict, this time with the Christian country of France. The Roman origins of Britain’s first Christian saint symbolized a union of Roman and Christian cultures, and Alban’s cult reconciled the challenge of Roman rationality to Christian civilization in such a way that intellectuals like Humfrey duke of Gloucester were able to follow Alban’s lead in successfully integrating Christian belief in the Incarnation and Passion of Christ with Roman pragmatism: in effect to practise a religion compatible with science, reason and pragmatic political realities. The martyrdom of Alban focused on a conflict between Roman logic and Christian Passion, resolved in an alchemical conjunction of the white and the red. Before his conversion, Alban and his knights have a baptismal bath and don white shirts and red mantles,180 and the conversion is marked by the appearance of red and white flowers. In Alban’s 85

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subsequent teaching ministry he shines like a lodestar, and his trial and martyrdom occur against a backdrop of symbols of white lilies and red crosses: he wears a chaplet of red and white flowers and he prays to Christ, from whom spills red blood and clear water.181 As he prays shedding silver tears, Alban remembers his vision of Christ, of the sulphuric red blood and mercurial white water: Through whose heart there did a spear glide At which there ran through the wound water and blood Out of your heart too liquids ran down, That is red blood and water clear The two fluids of our redemption.182 A remnant of Roman Britain in Chester symbolizes the late medieval conflict about British identity: it is a Roman amphitheatre (a last survivor of the Roman Empire) once thought to be the source of legends about the round table of Camelot. In the centre there once was a stone where the Christians were supposed to have been martyred. Christians may have perished in the blazing sun of Rome’s Colosseum while pagan spectators sat in the shade of vast awnings, but many in the fifteenth century thought of the Colosseum as a temple consecrated to the sun and moon, and Lydgate lamented the loss of its mythical roof of the zodiac, a model of the cosmos and forerunner of the mechanical clock of St Albans abbey: Where is thy temple of crystal bright shewing, Made half of gold, most richly mustering the heavenly spheres, by compass wrought and line.183 Capgrave’s admiration for the Colosseum was such that in his 1450 Jubilee pilgrims guide to the city he claimed it had been destroyed by pious vandals on the orders of Pope Sylvester.184 The alchemical conjunction of red and white in The Life of St Alban reconciles what must have been some troubling anomalies for English intellectuals of the fifteenth century: their admiration for the culture and values of a pagan, classical society that once persecuted Christians, when the white mercury of reason was opposed to the red sulphur of passionate martyrdom. St Alban, in Lydgate’s life, and by implication Humfrey, through their integration of classical and Christian values, attempted to embody what was best in both civilizations, and they both occupied positions as protectors of this Romano/British identity. Lydgate’s life concludes with a prayer for the saint and his followers containing allusions to St Germanus of Auxerre and King Offa, the reputed founder of the abbey of St Albans: O blessed Albon … Be our pavis shield of protection For all thy servants do succour

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who through devotion do your plesaunce. Of your church they were the chief builders and founders And of your liberties royal protectors. They brought the first men of religion Into the oldest abbey in Brutus’s Albion.185 There follows a general plea to remember and cherish the shrine which is their protection against all adversity: And always keep in mind the city which is made famous by thy passion O protomartyr of Brutus’s Albion. To this city be a patron prince and guide.186 This prayer may allude to both St Germanus of Auxerre (c. 378–c. 442 AD), who enlisted Alban’s help in combatting the Pelagian heresy and visited his tomb, and King Offa the founder to the abbey (793 AD), but the emphasis on the words ‘protector’, ‘prince’ and ‘plesaunce’ links the saint with the current protector of the nation’s orthodoxy, the prince of plesaunce and patron of the abbey, the duke of Gloucester, praised in the saint’s life for his prosecution of the Lollard heretics.187 The Life of St Alban explores the origins of British identity, the coherence of Roman, British and Christian elements, under the aegis of a protector guardian, and mythologizes Britain’s Roman ancestry in the way that Dante, on a personal level, mythologized his ancestry from the Romans through Cacciaguida. Whethamstede, who, around 1440, condemned Geoffrey of Monmouth's history as a fable, and Lydgate located the source of national identity in the third or early fourth century Roman city of Verulanium around St Alban, instead of placing it in the fifth century around a Romano/British King Arthur, in an imprecisely located Camelot. The myth of King Arthur would be politically more influential under the Yorkist monarchy, but the cult of St Alban prefigured it, and Humphrey duke of Gloucester played his part. Facing his death in Bury, he must have had an eye to the future in the form of his illegitimate son, Arthur (who could always have been legitimized like the Beauforts). Humfrey’s interest in Arthurian myth was stimulated by the French translations of The Quest for the Grail and The Death of King Arthur he received from Bedford. His meditations on this matter can perhaps be witnessed in The Book of Husbandry which has detailed descriptions of the art of grafting (an activity evoking such primeval transmutations as Ovid’s account of the myth of Hermaphraditos, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who is embraced by a nymph who asks the gods to merge their bodies: ‘As when a gardener sets a graft by joining both together’, but which has a wider political significance.188 Noble cultivated plants can revert to a wild state, and diseased and weak noble strains (the house of Lancaster represented by Henry VI) can be invigorated in a marriage where the eye of a bud of the original stock can be grafted with an illegitimate, vigorous strain:

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In the wild, olives will stand Even though they be burnt out of their nature They change not. In this craft be not behind. Dig grooves, and set in them your wild olive …189 Thrust in a branch of rugged wild olive.190 Arthur may have been seen as such a wild and vigorous stock. Humfrey’s particular interest in the process of grafting is shown in his presentation copy of The Book of Husbandry: beside a description of various ways of grafting, there is a comment in the hand identical with the inscription ex libris in Humfrey’s books: ‘And yet what harm to try’.191 Arthur was arrested shortly after Humfrey, along with twenty-eight of the duke’s retainers, and charged at Deptford before Suffolk (who was not entitled to be a judge), with organizing a seditious meeting at Greenwich on 7 February aimed at fomenting a rebellion in Wales to secure the release of Gloucester and his wife Eleanor. Arthur (Artys) was sentenced to be drawn to Tyburn, hanged, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered. He was subsequently pardoned by Suffolk in an attempt to gain popular support for his clemency, along with the other retainers, but he was dead by the end of the year (probably murdered).192 Gloucester’s ambitions for his son, Arthur, and his devotion to St Alban, can be seen as an attempt to predate the Arthurian myth of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his account of Vortigern’s dream of the red and white dragons, by placing the symbolic heart of the nation in third century Verulanium (St Alban’s) instead of an elusive Camelot. Duke Humfrey would come to be regarded as a founder father of the House of York. His rehabilitation in the Parliament of 1456, sponsored by Richard Duke of York, who was claiming the protectorate, was accompanied by the translation at Clare Castle of Claudian’s Life of Stilicho (c. 400 AD). This was addressed to York, described as ‘the protector of England’ to establish the connection between York and the Roman consul, the last hero of Rome against the barbarians during a time when the empire was divided between the two sons of the emperor, Theodosius (one of whom, Honorarius, like Henry VI was disinterested in affairs of state), and also a connection between Stilicho, York and Humfrey duke of Gloucester, who, like Stilicho, upheld the disappearing Roman values and attempted to hold together a divided kingdom.193 Richard duke of York may have deliberately chosen St Albans, close to Gloucester’s chantry chapel, as the site of the first two battles in the Wars of the Roses against the house of Lancaster, and on 21 May 1455 he prayed for the mediation of ‘the glorious martyr St Alban’, lamenting that ‘the king will not be reformed at our beseeching or prayer’.194 Whethamstede, a Yorkist supporter, claimed the defensive shield (or pavis) of his and Humfrey’s protector, St Alban, against the ravages of this first battle.195 York’s son, Edward earl of March, would develop a more crudely political and effective use of the cult of Arthur and the alchemical image of the sun king, and when he became king, Edward and his court also endorsed the values of the literature of ancient Rome. Dante in The Divine Comedy saw the history of Rome as a progression from republicanism to emperor worship; Gloucester initially saw it the other way round, from emperor worship to republicanism, but ultimately Rome inspired 88

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a progression from the concept of empire to that of the nation, and this was one of the long-term consequences of the cult of St Alban. However, the politicizing of alchemy and the celebration of the cult of King Arthur under the kingship of Edward IV obscures some of the more complex and sophisticated aspects of alchemical science and cultural life in general in the circles of Humphrey duke of Gloucester and St Albans, where the assimilation of ancient Greek philosophy imbued the practice of alchemy, the cult of St Alban, and intellectual life in general, with a more abstract, spiritual dimension, symbolized by the identification of the white mercury with spirit as well as intellect, and it is with this mercurial spirit that the Greek heritage took fifteenth century readers of Dante into very different directions.

Figure 5  The sheepfold. The baptistry of San Giovanni Florence. © Leemage/Corbis Historical/ Getty Images

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CHAPTER 3 THE SUN (APOLLO): THE LEGACY OF ANCIENT GREECE

There are many forms of evil but only one form of good. – Aristotle, Ethics1 Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (I fear the Greeks even those bearing gifts). Virgil Aeneid2 O good Apollo, … Come into my breast and breathe there, as when you drew Marsyas forth from the sheath of his members. Dante, Paradiso3 For the joint inheritors of the palladium of old Troy (the Italians and the English) the Greeks or the Argives were the destroyers of their ancestral home, and they believed they did not share any lineage with them. Dante may have written in Convivio of the heavenly city as ‘the celestial Athens’,4 but ancient and contemporary Greece was much more mysterious to him, and to the English in the fifteenth century, than ancient Rome: few travellers ventured there, and even in the fifteenth century it remained a mountainous land of small villages, far removed from the urban world of North Italy, lacking the tangible connection that existed between Tuscany and the ancient Roman Empire that had metamorphosized into the Roman Catholic church. It became even more remote to Dante’s readers in the fifteenth century after the incursions of the Ottoman Turks into the Greek world with the Battle of Maritsa in 1371 and Kosovo in 1389, and by 1458 Athens itself had fallen to the Turks. Nevertheless, Dante, and English writers after 1370, shared an admiration for Greek mythology which was mediated through the Roman writers Ovid and Cicero, and the basic tenants of Greek ethical philosophy, transmitted through Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. Greek myths are just as important in The Divine Comedy as the Old Testament narratives, and these myths, and the axioms of Greek philosophers, also occupied an important place in the educational literature of the circles of Humfrey Duke of Gloucester and Sir John Fastolf. However, there was also a divergence in attitudes towards Greece, and this too was related to Dante’s faith; his conviction there was a material link between this world and the next, which would be undermined in the Latin translations of Plato’s Republic, commissioned by the duke of Gloucester, which had not been available to Dante, and which moved away from

Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England

literal depictions of the afterlife and a divinity manifested in light, towards abstract, philosophical speculations that turned away from the heavens towards logical, abstract philosophical meditations on the forms. Greek rationality, advocated in these new Latin translations of Aristotle and Plato, encouraged a move away from Roman models of authority, operating on obedience to the divine will, towards an endorsement by Gloucester and Whethamstede of the concept of the philosopher king, a rational head of the body politic, which had dangerous political implications for those concerned about the sanity of Henry VI. The abstractions of Greek philosophy, by their very immaterial nature, would reinforce in the communities of Plesaunce and St Alban’s the concept of spiritual alchemy, which involved a celebration in the cult of England’s protomartyr of a fusion of Greek intellect and spirituality with the passion of the British and pragmatism of the Romans; this constituted the Greek gift of philosophy and alchemy to the Trojan and British civilizations.

Greek mythology and philosophy in The Divine Comedy and in early Renaissance England Although Dante underpinned themes of exile and longing for home in The Divine Comedy with biblical motifs of the fall of Adam, banishment from Eden, the Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, and the exodus from Egypt to Jerusalem under Moses to the promised homeland, and although he also condemned the conflation of Greek myths with astrological religion and the worship of the planets as gods from the time of Plato,5 he would turn to these same pagan gods and heroes of Greek mythology to create the pilgrim’s persona of a divinely inspired poet and adventurous wanderer. Ancient Greece, via the Metamorphoses of Ovid, provided rich veins of mythology for the structure of Dante’s epic journey to the heavens. In his efforts to communicate the essence of the divine light of the Empyrean, he chose to identify with Apollo, the sun god and the lyre player who was patron of poets, rather than St Paul. In his journey to his heavenly home Dante saw himself as a sailor navigating unchartered seas, like Ulysses who fearlessly sailed across the Southern Ocean, and Jason, who took the Argonauts across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to capture the Golden Fleece, spurned on by the music of Orpheus, another of the pilgrim’s heroes. The myths of Greece were as equally important for Dante as those of the Old Testament in providing similes for this epic journey through the underworld, and he encounters there Arachne, Apollo, Vulcan, Theseus, Ariadne, Helen and Achilles, and he is taken into the last circle of Hell (presided over by the judge Minos) by the giant Anteus, who was killed by Hercules. When sleeping on the side of the mountain of Purgatory, St Lucia carries him up the slope, and the pilgrim compares his feelings emerging from sleep to those of Achilles waking after being carried by his mother, Thetis, from Chiron to Skyros.6 Throughout Inferno, conscious of his own susceptibility to pride and curiosity, he encounters the shades of ancient Greeks who over-reached themselves, including Phaeton, child of the sun ‘who still makes fathers cautious toward their sons’,7 and Icarus who flew too close to the sun. Greece for Dante 92

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represented boldness, the crossing of boundaries, with its seductive yet terrifying myths, exemplified in the fate of Ulysses with whom he so closely identified. Greek philosophy may have provided him with his ideas about the structure of Hell and the hierarchy of the blessed in Paradise, but it was Rome that supplied the discipline, the boundaries, the reins and bridles that schooled the pilgrim’s penitential journey and ensured his spiritual safety. Dante’s knowledge of Greek mythology was derived from Roman sources: from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and The Republic, and his adaptation of Plato’s myth of Er in the Republic, and from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The pilgrim enters Inferno well aware that he is handicapped by his lack of Greek, and when he meets Ulysses, Virgil acts as a translator. He has no knowledge of Homer’s Odyssey, although in Convivio he claimed that The Odyssey had never been translated into Latin, like other ‘writings we have of theirs’, because the rules of poetry do not permit the conveying of the sweetness and harmony of a native tongue into another language.8 This enthusiasm for Greek mythology, mediated by Latin authors, was shared in educated circles in England after 1370, for whom the land of Greece itself would have been an equally mysterious land of the imagination. The English nobility may have shared Dante’s belief in a connection with the Trojans and Romans, and they were beginning to regard Italy as a necessary destination for the discerning traveller, but few would venture over the Peloponnese mountains. So they too accessed Greek mythology from Latin sources. Chaucer borrowed extensively from Ovid, and members of Sir John Fastolf ’s household, such as William Worcester and Stephen Scrope, were well acquainted with Greek myths from Latin sources, often in French translations. One such source was Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea: the Greek myths in Scrope’s translation (which he dedicated in one copy to a high princess, possibly Eleanor Cobham,9 and in another perhaps to Gloucester himself),10 lack the epic, religious dimension achieved in The Divine Comedy, and instead they are used to aid a more secular pursuit of wisdom, confronting fate and irrational passion with reason: Pyramus’s suicide is condemned because he failed to obey his parents and surrendered to passion instead of objectively weighing evidence. William Worcester too was drawn to the Greek myths in Ovid, and he copied a French translation of the Metamorphoses into his handbook, accompanied with line drawings. Humfrey duke of Gloucester also possessed a manuscript of a French version of the Metamorphoses. Dante’s ignorance of the Greek language was more of a handicap to his understanding of Greek philosophy, for his access to the works of ancient Greek philosophers was confined to the few works available in Latin translation: William Moerbeke’s translation of Aristotle’s Politics and Robert Grosseteste’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics (although Dante may have known of these works of Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas’s commentaries). Aristotle’s Ethics provided the basis for the structure of Dante’s Inferno, which was not based on the Ten Commandments and Seven Deadly Sins. Instead the Aristotelian virtuous golden mean was used and opposites, such as avarice and prodigality, were paired together in Inferno. Dante also placed the less-serious sins of incontinence, motivated by passion, outside the city of Dis. Those without passion who are neither hot nor cold and who have never really lived are relegated to a Limbo where 93

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they run noisily in circles, stung by insects. They are scorned by both Compassion and Justice, for in Hell ‘the wicked have some glory over them’. Dante followed the Ethics in placing the more serious sins of consent to wickedness against Heaven, involving violence towards neighbours, self and God, within the walls of Dis, Satan’s city of Malizia. The operation of Purgatory was even more closely defined by optimistic Aristotelian views of natural human reason which were not undermined by the doctrine of original sin. In the traditional, Catholic conception of Purgatory sins are forgiven but still subject to temporal punishment, the repayment of debts of penitential satisfaction, but for Dante, inspired by Aristotle’s classical sense of discipline, penitents in Purgatory, still suffering the effects of sin, have their vices corrected in a disciplinary process suggested by images of training with falcons and horses, spurs, reins and bridles.11 Plato’s works were even more scarce: some of the basic elements of Neoplatonism were available in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, but the only work of Plato available in Latin was about half of Plato’s Timaeus in Calcidius’s fourth century translation, and this provided the inspiration for Dante’s account of Heaven. Plato argued in the Timaeus that each soul had a pre-existence in its star12 and would return there after a virtuous life, a concept presented in digested form by Boethius in his poem, O qui perpetua (Let It Be Perpetual) in his Consolation of Philosophy,13 and Dante, in Beatrice’s explanation for the appearance of the reflection of Piccarda on the surface of the moon, adapted this philosophy to explain how the souls of the blessed condescended to appear before the pilgrim, to compensate for his defective vision, by appearing as reflections on the planets that had exerted astrological influence on their behaviour while they were on the earth.14 The fifteenth century witnessed a further popularization of some of the basic tenants of Greek philosophy from non-Greek Latin sources. Thomas Walsingham (d. 1421) spent nearly all of his life in the abbey of St Albans. He was drawn to classical myths and history, and he wrote a life of Alexander, the Historia Alexandri and Ditis ditatus (Dictys Enriched), in which he traced the origins of the Trojan wars from a Greek perspective, observing the culture and societies of the ancients.15 He was interested in Latin poetry and prose for the Greek mythological content, interpreting and investigating the inner meaning of myths rather than reconciling them with the truths of Christianity. In De archana deorum (Secrets of the Gods), he was concerned with the historical realities beneath the fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.16 Whethamstede, in his encyclopaedic Chaff Store of the Poets, used the Metamorphoses and Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods, to make a major contribution towards knowledge of classical history and mythology, with entries on such topics as fasti or religious practices, metamorphoses, and the geography and rivers of the ancient world. Another in Gloucester’s circle interested in Greek mythology was Andrew Holes a New College fellow, 1414–20, and proctor at the papal court in Florence in 1440, Rome and Ferrara, who acquired from Gloucester a copy of Coluccio Salutati’s De Laboribus Hercules (The Labours of Hercules).17 This interest in Greek mythology and aphorisms was also shown by laymen. Stephen Scrope also translated for his stepfather Fastolf in 1450 a vernacular compilation: a collection of sententiae culled from classical writers circulating in florilegia that had acquired proverbial status, along with succinct biographies of such Greek philosophers 94

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as Socrates and Plato; this had originally been compiled in Damascus in 1053 by Abu’l Wefa Mubeschir ben Fatik of Damascus and translated into French at the end of the fourteenth century by Guillaume le Tignonville, provost of Paris (Whethamstede owned a copy).18 Scrope’s translation of 1450 was known as The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, and William Worcester ‘correctid and examined’ this translation before 1472 ‘for more open and ready understanding’; the work bears some relation to Brunetto Latini’s encyclopaedia Tresoro (Treasure), compiled ‘from the wonderful sayings of authors before our time who have treated of philosophy’ and which was circulated in England in the early fifteenth century.19 In working on this text Worcester was aware that he was contributing to the popularization of Greek philosophy: in 1432 a colleague of Leonardo Bruni, Ambrogio Traversari, one of the original students of Chrysorlas, completed a Latin translation of the most important secondary work on Plato, The Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD), and in 1433 Worcester referred to it in one of his notebooks.20 The central personality of Scrope and Worcester’s guide to ethics and morality was not Jesus of Nazareth but Socrates, whose death, witnessed by twelve disciples, is seen as a martyrdom, and if there is one overriding philosophy of this work it is Socrates’s concept, derived from his Phaedra, of the worthlessness of an unexamined life: ‘Knowledge is life and ignorance is death, and he that knows not is dead, for he understands nothing that he does.’21 The ancients were not studied in these circles for their style but for their wisdom. Worcester, who had in his notebook a copy of Plato’s Timaeus (taken from Cambridge University Library),22 openly expressed his admiration for Greek culture: in his correspondence with John Paston he cited Aristotle’s Ethics, which he also quoted in his long book and referred to his lending a copy to Thomas Yonge. He furthermore declared: ‘All eloquence, and every kind of study that shone with the light of wisdom, has derived from Greek sources and is practised in the tongue by Christians, and I see that in all the liberal arts they have followed the Greeks in their footsteps.’23 In the Oxford college of Magdalen, closely associated with Fastolf and Worcester, one of the fellows, John Gold, transcribed in 1472 Bruni’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and followed it with a transcription of Bruni’s translation of the Politics and presented both copies to the college.24 However, Englishmen were able to follow in the footsteps of the Greeks in the early fifteenth century in ways unimagined by the author of The Divine Comedy. Dante was as familiar as anyone with popular adaptations of Greek mythology and philosophy in works such as the Metamorphoses and De re republica, but unlike writers of the fifteenth century, he had no access to Latin translations of Greek works, with the exception of Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s De anima (On the Soul), which influenced his depiction of Paradiso. However, by the end of the fourteenth century Latin translations of the works of the ancient Greeks were becoming possible because of the arrival in Florence in 1397 of the Byzantine, Manuel Chrysoloras, to teach in that city’s studium at the invitation of Coluccio Salutati (d. 1404). These lectures were attended by Leonardo Bruni.25 Guarino da Verona (1373–1460), who studied Greek in Constantinople, established a studium at Ferrara in 1429 which attracted English students wishing to learn Greek and which established cooperative translation projects, bringing Latin versions of Plutarch into North European circles. By the 95

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1440s, English clergy and lay noblemen including William Grey (1444), Robert Fleming (1447), John Free (1450), John Tiptoft (1459) and John Gunthorpe (1459) travelled to Ferrara in their search for Greek teachers and books. John Doket, a Kings College scholar and nephew of Cardinal Bourchier, left England for Italy in 1464 and dedicated his commentary on Plato’s Phaedo to his uncle.26 The first Englishman to endorse the Chrysolorean revival of Plato was the Benedictine, John Whethamstede, who went to Italy in 1423–4 to attend the Council of Pavia and to witness the classical revival and purchase books for the library of St Albans. During his visit he went to Florence and met Leonardo Bruni. Whethamstede was so impressed by Bruni that he quoted him in his writings and included a biography of him in his series of famous men. When he returned to England he encouraged his friend, Humfrey duke of Gloucester, to employ Bruni as his personal secretary.27 Bruni refused Humfrey’s offer and Anthony Beccaria took up the post, noting in his Liber d’Amore that the duke energetically secured translations from Greece, sparing no expense: ‘a shining light in an age of darkness, recalling scholarship and literature from death to life’. Nevertheless, Humfrey clearly listened to Whethamstede and retained an interest in Bruni’s work, acquiring a copy of his 1416 translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and, in 1432, he was able to persuade Bruni to translate the Politics, Aristotle’s reply to Plato’s Republic (Politeia), which was completed in 1436.28 One of the aspects of Bruni’s work that interested Whethamstede was his knowledge of Plato: when he met him, Bruni was working on his translation of Plato’s Phaedrus, which Humfrey subsequently acquired and gave to Oxford University, while exercising his borrowing privileges by borrowing it again in 1446.29 Whethamstede brought back from Italy, as gifts for Humfrey, copies of three dialogues of Plato: the Latin translation of the Timaeus by Calcidius, with a commentary by Guillaume de Conches; the Phaedo, an account of Socrates last days; and Meno in the medieval translation by Henry Aristippus of Calabria (d. 1162).30 These texts constituted the kernel of the Platonic ascetic discipline of philosophy lost to the Middle Ages. Whethamstede’s continuing interest in Plato was shown in his providing information about the philosopher in his notebook, the Granary, and he wrote a discursive biography of Plato in the section containing an alphabetical dictionary of moral philosophy. He also included in this dictionary an entry on Socrates. The Dialogues that he gave to the duke in 1424 were the only Latin versions of Plato available at the time, and Whethamstede must have discussed with him the urgency of obtaining a translation of the Republic. Gloucester’s most influential contribution to the impact of Greek thought in England was his commissioning in 1439 Pietro Candido Decembrio, secretary to Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, to translate Plato’s Republic, which he completed in 1441. Zeno of Castiglione, bishop of Lisieux and Bayeaux, and chancellor of Henry VI’s foundation of the University of Caen,31 where Gloucester was closely associated with the government of northern France, acquired books for Gloucester from 1434 to 1443, and he was probably the intermediary between Gloucester and Decembrio who, in the dedication of his translation of the Republic to Gloucester, claimed that Zeno had made the dedicatee a household name in Italy.32 In his acknowledgement of the receipt of the Latin translation, Gloucester claimed to have read the Republic five times, and he gave thanks to the scholars 96

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of Italy for bringing to light ‘long forgotten philosophers of Greece and their invaluable maxims for good living’.33 An indication of his close reading is provided in a marginal drawing in his manuscript of an astonished face alongside Plato’s condemnation of drama: for the patron of Frulovisi, who wrote Latin classical plays in his household (a copy of Frulovisi’s comedies was owned by John Gunthorpe, warden of King’s Hall)34 this was perhaps going too far.35 Gloucester, in his letter to Decembrio, which he probably dictated to his secretary, Beccaria, proclaimed his love of Plato and antiquity: We have read and re-read these books; they are always kept at hand so that we may have something to give us pleasure. They never leave our side, whether at home or on military service. They are like companions to us, as Nestor to Agamemnon or Achilles to Aeneas. Nothing pleases us more than that which relates to the cult of Hellas. 36 Humfrey arranged for the transcription of a number of copies of the Republic and Phaedo at Greenwich and presented copies of both works to the University of Oxford,37 and these translations of Plato, together with the Latin translation of The Divine Comedy associated with the duke of Gloucester, were known at Wells Cathedral: Richard Nykke, a kinsman of Robert Stillington, the bishop of Bath and Wells and a vicar general of the bishop of Bath and Wells in 1497, studied at Ferrara in 1479 and later Bologna and owned a copy of Decembrio’s translation of the Republic and the correspondence between the translator and Duke Humfrey.38 By the second half of the fifteenth century there is evidence of wider reading of Latin translations of Plato’s Republic among university academics. John Shirwood, bishop of Durham who served in the Roman curia between 1474 and 1492, acquired, before his death in Rome in 1493, the 1492 Florence printed edition of Plato’s works in Latin to add to his collection of the works of Cicero, Aristotle and Plutarch;39 Robert Wodelarke of Clare Hall left, after 1481, a copy of Plato’s Policie (the original title of the Republic) to his foundation of Catherine’s Hall; John Lamberton of Pembroke Hall left his college in 1505 a Plato in Latin.40 Dante’s political philosophy at the time he was writing The Divine Comedy between 1300 and 1321 had been dominated by his admiration of Roman history. His imperial ideal and vision of a divinely ordained emperor, the sun that illuminates the lesser lights of the cosmos, outlined in Purgatorio, Paradiso, Convivo and Monarchia,41 show a fundamentally different view of antiquity from that held by educated men in the fifteenth century, who were becoming interested in the way Plato extolled the importance of reason and philosophy as sources of political authority. For Dante, the wisdom of antiquity had to be assimilated into a Christian, redemptive view of history, for which Rome was central and Greece superfluous. Rome’s conquest of the world prepared the way for the Incarnation of Christ,42 and the Greeks, or Argives, as opponents of Troy, stood in the way of this providential destiny, and they continued to oppose the ideal of a Roman Empire and church through their allegiance to the Greek orthodox church. Fifteenth century readers of Plato’s Republic and The Fall of Princes were tempted to endorse a more secular view of antiquity because these works warned against tendencies 97

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towards overreaching and tyranny in authority figures and maintained that the nation state should be based on the exercise of reason, without reference to a providential view of history. The limitations of the rational perspective of the ancient Greeks were demonstrated to Dante when he saw Homer, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, Euclid and ‘the master Aristotle’ all in the limbo of Inferno. The significance of their fate is explained to him by Virgil at the foot of Mount Purgatory: ‘He is mad who hopes that our reason can traverse the infinite way taken by one Substance in three Persons. Be content, human people, with the quia; … and you have seen those yearning fruitlessly whose desire would be stilled, which is given them eternally for their grief: I speak of Aristotle and Plato and many others’; and here he bent his brow and said no more, and remained troubled.43 Even Virgil, when he conducts Dante to the garden of the Earthly Paradise at the foot of the mountain, has to admit: The temporal fire and the eternal have you seen, my son, and you have come to a place where I by myself discern no further. I have drawn you here with wit and art; your own pleasure now take as leader.44 In the field of politics where the assertion of authority is necessary, Dante advocated unquestioning faith in the divine order represented by Rome, and the exercise of reason or abstract philosophy had no place in this order. For him God’s love and wisdom were apparent everywhere: in the physical universe, in the manifestations of actual light, whether in the stars or in sunlight, all of which he regarded as emanations of divine love from the Empyrean. The cultural, religious and emotional implications of this concept will be examined later, but in political terms Plato’s Republic presents a very different view of the universe and of political authority. Dante was specific in expressing his doubts about the role of philosophical wisdom to determine political authority. In Paradiso, in the sphere of the sun, Thomas Aquinas explains to him why Solomon asked for the wisdom to be a worthy, prudent king rather than to solve questions of theology and logic and not in order to know the number of the Movers up here. 45 98

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Aquinas encourages the pilgrim to regard this as a lesson against the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, Parmenides and Melissus of Samos, who fell into the error of presuming to know the mind of God, the perfect wisdom only possessed by Adam and Christ. However Plato, in Decembrio’s translation of the Republic, offered Humfrey a vision of kingship based on an opposite ideal: that a king should be versed in the sort of philosophical abstractions condemned by Dante as inappropriate. Plato modelled society on the human personality: ruled by the mind (the king), the rest of society (the body) was governed by passions and appetites. The passionate members were the military classes (the auxiliaries), who constituted the heart of the body; those governed by appetites were the merchants (the oligarchy), motivated by greed for money, and the labouring peasant classes, governed by simple bodily lusts and appetites, represented the limbs of the body.46 This tripartite division of society was given metallic analogies that contributed to the development of spiritual alchemy in the fifteenth century. The king was tested, pure gold, the metal of the aristocracy; the auxiliaries were composed of iron, and if they gained power they would form a timocracy; the merchants could, if they found their way to power, form an oligarchy; they were formed of copper, and the lower classes, who would form a democracy if they ever took power, were composed of bronze.47 Plato divided the state, through physiological analogy, into a trinity of mind, or reason; the soul, or passion; and the body, or appetites; and this corresponded neatly to fifteenth century perceptions of the alchemical trinity of mercury (head or spirit), gold (heart or soul) and sulphur (or body). Just as a wise, rational man had to govern the irrational impulses of passion, greed, appetite and lust, so the wise king needed to keep the passionate, greedy and lustful military, merchant and peasant classes under control. As a well-balanced individual controls his passions and appetites, so in the wider body politic it is possible to see the healthy results of the rule of a wise king in control of his passions and appetites, whose goodness is defined by his status as a philosopher.48 In such a hierarchical society ruled by the king there is a harmonious cooperation between the head, heart and body, with the knights confining themselves to military matters, merchants to trade, and peasants tilling the fields, an idealized picture of cooperation in a hierarchy that resembles Dante’s vision of citizenship in Paradise. However, the daily phenomenon of sleep demonstrates how fragile this peace can be: when the mind is not on guard these passions and desires can erupt in disturbing and anarchic dreams that overthrow the throne of reason.49 Likewise, if a king is not watchful, states can be overcome by their passions or appetites and degenerate from this perfect society into debased social systems, either the timocratic or military; the oligarchic or mercantile; or the democratic (the commons); in the same way an individual, if his conscious rational intelligence is not on guard, can be overcome by the same disordered passions. Potential disorder in the aristocratic society may come from the assertion of power from the military, represented by the overthrow of reason by the passions, and if there were to be a takeover by the merchant oligarchy or the peasantry, this would be seen as an overthrow of reason by the body or the appetites.50 Aristotle’s expectations in the Politics for a rational society with communal cooperation conflicted with the more traditional Augustinian view that the state needed firm even tyrannical control because of Adam’s 99

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original sin of disobedience; this was the position held by Petrarch who held Aristotle in contempt and who became an enthusiastic follower of Augustine’s teachings while serving the Visconti in Milan, where Augustine once held a position as professor of rhetoric.51

Plato and the concept of the philosopher king Plato’s fear of demagogy, the bestial instability of the commons, was reflected in Humfrey’s active suppression of popular unrest, whether Lollardy, or the rebellion of Jack Sharp in 1431, which was a plot to overthrow king and counsellors, and these prejudices were shared by Lydgate (whose monastery in 1381 had witnessed the decapitation of its prior by the peasants). In the Fall of Princes Lydgate excised Premierfait’s condemnation of mistreatment of agricultural labourers, directed at the Duke of Berry’s suppression of a peasant’s revolt, and replaced it with a categorization of churls, including Spartacus’s rising to power.52 Whethamstede shared Lydgate’s fears of demagogy, for his abbey had also been attacked by the peasant rebels in 1381, and it had witnessed the further unrest and resentment of peasants and burgesses towards their monastic overlords in 1424. In a Latin poem addressing the issue of popular and Lollard unrest at St Alban’s and delivered to a synod at the abbey but revised perhaps around 1440, after the appearance of Decembrini’s translation of the Republic and after he had resigned as abbot, Whethamstede applied Plato’s themes concerning an ordered social body, controlled by auxiliaries or guardians in a republic to English society, arguing that the commonweal depended on each class knowing its place, living in peace under the authority of God, a cooperation of church and state, so that the common folk would not cause trouble. The influence of the Republic in this address is suggested by Whethamstede’s use of a dozen or so Greek words, such as Orca or Pluto for the Lollards, and especially his use of the Greek term politeia (state) with ecclesia (church). Politeia was the Greek title of Plato’s Republic and Decembrini referred to the work by this title, as Bruni did in his dedication of his translation of Aristotle’s Politics to Humfrey duke of Gloucester.53 The worst form of government, according to Plato, was tyranny, which represented a complete surrender of an autocratic ruler to lust (irrational desires and fears), and the consequent enslavement of his people. Such a ruler, whether hereditary or a usurper, becomes a prisoner of irrational forces and, potentially insane, he subjects the body politic to a living nightmare.54 This psychological analysis of the relationship between the individual and society, more subtle than the commonweal maxims of Cicero popular among the soldiers and administrators in Fastolf ’s circle, focuses a lens on society on the eve of the Wars of the Roses through the inner life of a prince. Through his reading of the Republic, Humfrey had the opportunity to observe the way the realm was moving towards tyranny through the machinations of Beaufort and the occasional assertions of authority on the part of Henry VI, and yet the realm was also in danger of facing the potential threat of an oligarchic takeover from William de la Pole (a descendant of a merchant family in Hull), who by 1437 had become the king’s confidant and who, by 100

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1439, was able to shift the centre of policy making from the council to the court and to begin the process of isolating the duke of Gloucester by initiating investigations into the occult practices of his duchess. Humfrey also had the opportunity to observe the relationship between the environment and the body politic by consulting the reflections of Aristotle in the Politics on this issue. Aristotle (followed by Brunetto Latini and John Gower)55 divided the different regions of the world, and their humoral dispositions, according to their exposure to the sun, the planet equated with knowledge and intellectual insight in both the Politics and The Divine Comedy: the Asiatic nations were reputed to have well-developed intellectual and spiritual lives because of the warmth of the sun, but they were therefore militarily weak and liable to enslavement. The northern nations, including Britain, subjected to cold and damp, were passionate and therefore good warriors or auxiliaries, because they were less passive, but due to a lack of sunlight, their spiritual development and reasoning skills were seen to be poorly developed. They made good soldiers: their fame as fighters came to the attention of Petrarch after Poitiers in 1356, and England’s one export to Florence was the mercenary Sir John Hawkwood, whose portrait by Uccello was hung in the Duomo, but the British made poor philosophers, the state to which Humfrey aspired. The Hellenic races were regarded as the most fortunate, because they enjoyed a geographically middle position in relation to the sun, and therefore they had the best constitutions, enjoying a happy medium between two extremes: their intellectual and spiritual development was fostered by the Sun, midway between the two planetary extremes of the immature, mutable Moon and the aged, melancholy Saturn.56 Kymer diagnosed the rheumatic condition of Humfrey’s chest and daily cough, and in his Dietarium he advised him to avoid the north wind and to seek the influence of the warm, southern sun. This longing for the Hellenic sun is articulated in Humfrey’s Book of Husbandry, where the duke is advised to have his windows and gardens facing the south.57 The main theme running through the twelve months of the agricultural year is the husbandman engaged, like a physician, in a constant battle against the phlegmatic nature of his land: he has to preserve crops from rising waters by digging drains and ditches and he must protect structures from rising damp by attempting to attract the warm influence of the sun, facing his buildings and plants towards the south. The intimate relationship between the humoral make-up of the land and human body dictated that different humoral types would be drawn to different humoral environments, something understood by Chaucer, who located the Saturnine and melancholic reeve in a dark, isolated dwelling on the edge of a wood. England’s fate, to be ruled under a phlegmatic winter king, was therefore not surprising, but it was something to be resisted, a thought that must have passed through Humfrey’s mind as he contemplated the inspirational rule of Henry V, a choleric ruler in the mould of such conquerors of the South as Alexander the Great. One can see in the educational agenda that Humfrey followed, and his interest in Greek thought, as part of an attempt to aspire to a state of intellectual, spiritual development that would make him worthy to be a guardian of the realm. When he commissioned Bruni’s translation of the Politics (which was specifically concerned with the education of children),58 Humfrey was going to what was believed to be the pure, original source of all 101

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political wisdom (in the same way that another purportedly Aristotelian work, the Secret of Secrets, was believed to be the original source of alchemical wisdom), as the appropriate text for instructing the young king, Henry VI, on the theory and practice of kingship. For Aristotle, the only true polity was a society based on the power of the aristocracy, and its supreme manifestation was seen to be kingship. The ideal king should, according to Aristotle, embody a wisdom that placed him above the law, a god-like protector of the common good.59 However, by the 1440s it was becoming increasingly obvious, in the light of increasing doubts about Henry VI’s sanity, that there was something wrong with the head of the body politic, to the point where Humfrey, as sole heir to the throne, must have considered that his philosophical wisdom would be required to exert his suitability to be more than just a guardian of the realm, and this is where the Republic, in the context of the time in which it was translated for the duke, becomes politically significant. From this work Humfrey would derive a notion of political responsibility as something not sought through ambition for prestige and power, but as something forced on a philosopher who was needed by the republic to prevent government by a tyrant.60 Henry VI’s intermittent, but forceful, interventions into politics raised the spectre that this was a king in the throes of the tyranny of lust, that is the overthrow of reason, a ruler to be identified with the so-called tyrannical emperors of Roman history. Humfrey now no longer chose to identify himself with Julius Caesar; instead he chose as a role model a Roman follower of Greek philosophical wisdom, Cato the Younger, the gatekeeper to Dante’s Purgatory, who stood up to Caesar and was killed while reading a copy of Plato’s Phaedo. By 1439 this change in Humfrey’s outlook was being captured in The Fall of Princes’s depiction of the moment when Greek civilization fell from its zenith, the time when the schools of Socrates and Plato blossomed and Greek philosophers from the school of Athens shone The bright reverential lanterns To illumine this world through liberal sciences.61 This fall was brought about, according to Lydgate, by the conquests of Alexander the Great, and he conceptualized Plato and his master, Duke Humfrey’s ideal of the philosopher king when he asserted that, although princes may conquer in battle, these triumphs cannot be compared to the philosopher’s knowledge of the four elements, the revolutions of the nine heavenly spheres and the sparkling brightness of the stars.62 The collapse of Greek civilization, and its decline towards a more Roman style of tyranny, is defined with the arrest of the philosopher Callisthenes, who was nailed to a board and tortured for speaking the truth, for attempting to demonstrate through the use of reason that his master, Alexander, was no god but a mortal man. For Lydgate the treatment of Callisthenes, who had spent his youth in the academy of Socrates and Plato, and who was a historian of the ‘holy schools of Athens’,63 spelled the end of the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander (whom Dante placed in the river of boiling blood among the 102

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angry sinners of Hell), ending the age of Greek philosophy and ushering in the iron age of tyranny and blood that would result in the triumph of Rome after the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC, and cementing the reputation of Alexander as a tyrant: Alas, it was a great pity To be so slain because he said the truth Who with tyrants chose to put himself in the press To court their favour and violent acquaintance, He must court flattery and deceive doubtless And be double of heart.64 This is the background to the endorsement in the duke of Gloucester’s circle of Plato’s concept of the philosopher king, taught to the dissolute Dionysius I of Syracuse by his uncle Dion, a disciple of Plato,65 formulated by Boethius, and embodied in the stoic Greek meditations of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 121), who was known as the philosopher king.66 In Plato’s ideal republic, affairs of state were under the control of philosophers, a class of guardians (or protectors) responsible for the education of the ruling class from whose ranks one, the foremost of philosophers, would be king. Aristotle argued in his Politics for the superiority of science and philosophy above all other branches of learning and advocated that these disciplines should be the basis of political authority, even though leaders with these qualifications would always be reluctant to set aside the joys of philosophy to take upon themselves the burden of authority.67 Aristotle shared Plato’s belief in the superiority of the aristocratic polity, and his concept of a wise king, above the law, whose authority was determined by education. The metaphor Plato used to demonstrate this argument was that of the ship of state. The captain, the owner of the ship, is required to be a philosopher, an astronomer. The crew may not be able to understand why such an impractical man, with no understanding of the day-to-day realities of sailing, should be so revered. But it is exactly because his head is in the clouds, studying winds and weather patterns, prognosticating the future in the stars and using the lodestar as his guide, which makes him so suited to dealing with affairs of state.68 Worcester, in his Book of Nobility, similarly argued that princes should be learned in natural philosophy and be aware of the influence of the heavenly bodies.69 Admittedly this was just an ideal, but Plato had speculated that sometime in the future there may be such a man in line for the throne of a hereditary kingship who is also a philosopher. Humfrey may have considered himself to be such a man. Plato defined the ideal age for a guardian or a philosopher king to be around fifty years of age, the age of Humfrey, when he received the final copies of the translation of the first five books of the Republic in 1440. In acknowledging the receipt of the work, Gloucester expressed his admiration for its political philosophy and the way it defined the qualities of the philosopher king: ‘I cannot say to whom we owe most, to him (Plato) for drawing a prince of such wise statesmanship, or to you for labouring to bring to light this statesmanship hidden, and almost lost by our own negligence.’70 Humfrey’s claim that he had read Plato’s Republic five times was no idle boast; he knew it well. Plato defined the essential quality of a 103

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guardian or philosopher king as ‘broadness of vision’, and Humfrey, acknowledging the receipt of Candido’s letter accompanying his translation of the remaining books of the Republic, which arrived in May 1443 in a parcel of books also containing Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Politics, declared his desire was to ‘study the great and broad mind of Plato, which is like a heavenly constellation’.71 The humanists in Duke Humfrey’s household found examples of such rulers in antiquity to put before their patron. Around 1438, Lapo da Castiglionchio presented the duke, whom he described in the preface as not one of ‘ours’ (that is not Italian), with a Latin translation of Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes, in which he compared him to the Achaemenid emperor in terms of his military daring, suppression of revolt, and his having being weakened politically by his slavish devotion to the whims of women, claiming that none of the men of the present day, with the exception of the duke of Gloucester, compared with the great men of antiquity.72 In 1437 Gloucester’s position as tutor to the young king was recognized by another Italian humanist, the Florentine Lapo da Castiglionchio, who sent Gloucester a copy of his Comparatio inter rem militarem et studia litterarum; three translations of orations of the Athenian orator and teacher, Isocrates, one instructing a youth on the ways of virtue and another dealing with the relations between a prince and his subjects, which he maintained, in the covering letter, would all be useful to one in charge of a youthful king and busied in the government of a great kingdom.73 Beccaria, soon after his arrival in England before 1438, presented Humfrey with a translation of Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, with a preface alluding fulsomely to the philosopher king.74 It is possible that Gloucester’s gifts of works of Greek philosophy, and other humanist texts, to the university library of Oxford were an attempt to make the university a second Athens and an academy for the training of a class of guardians from whom a future philosopher king could emerge. The significance of this doctrine in Plato was also recognized by Whethamstede, who may have had Solomon’s dismissal of abstract philosophy in Dante’s Paradiso in mind when he wrote in one of his letters that Plato was as wise as Solomon.75 Whethamstede began his entry on Plato in his four-volume compendium of history and classical literature, the Granary of Famous Men, three volumes of which he presented to Humfrey in 1439,76 with a reference to the doctrine of the philosopher king.77 Whethamstede may have conceived the classical sections of the Granary, parts 2, 3 and 4, as an aid for these ambitions of Humfrey. A colophon to the second volume of the Granary is addressed to a prince, probably Humfrey, and aspires to nurture his scholarly and public mind and to be a rudder to the prince78 (the image of the philosophical prince, navigating and steering a ship’s path, recalls Plato’s comparison of the philosopher king to a ship’s captain). Whethamstede made a more specific allusion to the concept of the philosopher king in his biographical entry on Plato in his Granary: ‘The philosopher Plato: he was the expert who said that a state would be best if either its kings were wise men or its wise men were its rulers.’79 Similar expectations were expressed in Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae, a verse translation of English kings’ grants to Bury Abbey, commissioned by Abbot William Curteys, which emphasizes the prince’s duty to shine ‘like a clear lantern’ and to illuminate his subjects.80 Humfrey may have considered himself to be such a man, 104

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guided by wisdom of antiquity, one who was qualified to be a guardian, a member of the class that constituted gold in Plato’s hierarchy, proven in fire, and possibly even a king, given Henry VI’s increasing unsuitability to rule and the questions surrounding the legitimacy of his heir, Edward, the son of Margaret of Anjou. This would explain the ambiguity of Lydgate’s treatment of the fall of Caesar in The Serpent of Division back in 1422 as ‘an unforeseen stroke’, that was also a source of ‘plesaunce’. Fortune, he implies, when dealing blows, also presents opportunities if one is willing to embrace change. These issues concerning the education of a young king, about whom questions were arising concerning his mental health and suitability to rule, and the importance of Greek philosophy and spiritual alchemy in the education of a prince, were addressed in Lydgate’s translation for Henry VI of the Secreta secretorum, (The Secrets of Old Philosophers), undertaken at the desire of a great patron (probably Henry VI, or even Gloucester before 1447) that he was engaged on before his death in the autumn of 1449 and in which he described himself as ‘a humble servant of the king’.81 The background to this work are the classical interests of Lydgate’s Benedictine mentors, Thomas Walsingham and John Whethamstede, with Lydgate, in the prologue, adopting the role of Aristotle to Alexander, sent to the household of the prince to teach him about the power of philosophy; the moving of the stars; astrology, the ‘strange science of the seven planets and metals; geomancy and physiognomy, which he dare not divulge to any but the king’. The immediate context of this latest version of a mirror for a prince was Gloucester’s commissioning of the translation of Plato’s Republic, and Lydgate’s suggestion that philosophy, occult knowledge of the heavens and science, should be reserved for kings, scholars and universities,82 which is in tune with Plato’s concept of the philosopher king who, standing on the ship of state, must have his eyes directed to the movement of the planets and philosophical concerns beyond this material existence. These sentiments were expressed by Lydgate in his lament in The Fall of Princes over the fate of Callisthenes, when he maintained that princes who are not philosophers and mere conquerors only shine for a moment whereas, if they apply all their interests to know the course of the movement of the stars, sparkling in their bright revolutions of nine spheres, they will set no store by the doubleness of Fortune.83 The writing of Lydgate’s version of the Secret of Secrets shortly after 1446 was also relevant to the work of the alchemy commission of this year, called to address the issue of the health of Henry VI. Specific concerns about the need for humoral balance in a prince, anxieties about the build-up of phlegm in a ruler and consequent premature senility were expressed: Flourishing in freshness, not long to endure, Autumn follows, bringing us a figure Of Senectus, winter of crooked age, How all things pass.84 This resonated with current medical prognosis of the king’s condition, and the philosophies behind other texts in Gloucester’s circle, such as Kymer’s Dietarium 105

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which, with its emphasis on the non-naturals, the interface between the humours of the body and the environment, and their consequences for sleep, waking, motion, rest, exertion, retentions, dreams and the passions of the soul, shows, along with The Book of Husbandry, the close relationship between the body and the environment. In the case of the Dietarium, Kymer (who was called to the king’s bedside in June 1455) was engaged in designing a regimen for the kingdom and its head and he addressed his work to England’s protector.85

The martyrdom of England’s protector and would be philosopher king The Fall of Princes provided Humfrey with a number of role models as philosopher king, with many of whom he was explicitly compared, such as Julius Caesar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor 160 AD to 180 AD) and Alcibiades, who led the Athenian navy to victory against Sparta, a friend of Socrates who rejoiced in reading and memorizing the texts he read and who was described as ‘our protector our wall’.86 Humfrey was also provided with examples of philosophers who became martyrs to their vocation, victims of those in power who regarded them as threats, such as Socrates, Lycurgus, and those Roman admirers of Greek philosophy Seneca, Cato the Younger and Cicero, and Humfrey would have been aware of his own vulnerability, that his interest in Greek philosophy would not be regarded as an innocent pursuit of one living in otium (retirement). Shortly after Gloucester made his declaration against Beaufort over the cessation of Anjou, Enea Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II) wrote a letter praising Gloucester who ‘zealously receives polite learning into your country; he cultivates poets and venerates orators and thereby makes the English more eloquent’. The letter, unfortunately, was addressed to Adam Moleyns,87 who would become responsible for Humfrey’s arrest and murder. Greek themes of opposition to tyranny and concepts of tragedy were brought to bear in Humfrey’s passionate devotion to the memory of his dead brother and to the house of Lancaster that he embodied, the one constant belief in his life. This may have been ratified for him by Sophocles’s treatment of the theme of loyalty towards a brother in Antigone, a play Gloucester seems to have been aware of from one of the Greek scholars in his household. William Worcester too was interested in Greek tragedy, and he purchased seven plays of Sophocles and Euripides88 from the library of John Free of Bristol, who studied medicine at the university of Padua and acquired a knowledge of Greek.89 Worcester may have read these plays with the help of the Benedictine humanist scholar, William Selling.90 Gloucester was inspired to give his illegitimate daughter the unusual name of Antigone (Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes could hardly have been the source of this inspiration as Antigone merits only a one line reference),91 and Antigone, in turn, named her second child Humfrey, but after the death of her first husband, Henry Grey the earl of Tankerville, she chose to go to France in 1450, in defiance of a her deceased father’s policy, like Tancred’s daughter in the Decameron, to marry Jean D’Amany, an esquire of Charles VII’s horse in 1451.92 Sophocles dramatized in Antigone the debased 106

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forms of kingship outlined in Plato’s Republic through the character of King Cleon, a tyrant who forbids the burial of Antigone’s brother and orders her execution when she defies him. It is a drama about the cursed family of Oedipus and one member’s passionate loyalty towards this family in the form of Antigone’s devotion to her brother’s memory. Antigone is Humfrey: both are wedded to death in a stubborn loyalty to a sibling in the face of opposition from a tyrant who represents the state. In the 1440s Henry VI was, at times, a puppet in the hands of the de la Pole and Beaufort factions who were representatives of the state. Gloucester perceived himself to be the only true representative of the House of Lancaster, its cursed fate since the murder of Richard II shown by the encroaching insanity of the king. The most controversial lines in the play, those most relevant to Gloucester, are uttered by Antigone at the point of death in her brother’s tomb: Never I tell you If I had been the mother of children Or if my husband died, and exposed and rotting I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself.93 She defies Creon by burying her brother and choosing martyrdom by his tomb. At this moment of clarity, near death, she is saying she would do for her brother what she would not do for husband or children, who are replaceable. Near the end of his life this was all Gloucester had, the memory of his brother. Many doubt that these lines are by Sophocles, but Aristotle claimed they were genuine in his Politics, which was owned by Gloucester. What is missing in the play is the concept of philosophic wisdom appropriate for a wise king, which is urged by the chorus and Tiresias. Antigone is too impetuous and passionate, and so too perhaps was Gloucester, although he certainly aspired to attain this state of detached wisdom. The works of Greek philosophy circulating in the circle of the duke of Gloucester at Plesaunce and St Albans Abbey posited an outlook on life markedly different from the one entertained by the ancient Romans, one that stressed the spiritual reality underlying the material, social and political worlds, a spiritual reality that was not transcendent but which could be found through alchemical experimentation in the earth and through abstract intellectual endeavour in the minds of men and this would have obvious implications for attitudes towards the natural world, love and the afterlife, which will be dealt with in subsequent chapters. However, there were political implications for the arrival in this country of Greek philosophy, especially the concept of the philosopher king, that were played out in the fate of the foremost patron of the translation of Greek texts in fifteenth century England and in the cult of his patron saint. The near inevitability of martyrdom for the philosopher of the forms was eloquently expressed by Plato in his brilliant metaphor of the cave and the ideas or forms. Most of humanity sits in a cave with their backs to a fire (the sun), looking at a wall, on which 107

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are cast shadows of people walking behind a wall beyond the fire, carrying objects. If these inhabitants of the cave would turn towards the fire (the light of the sun), they would see the actual objects instead of insubstantial images, which can represent the shadows of morality, such as the corrupting contact of law courts. However, it takes a rare human being, a philosopher, to take this step and to proceed further by ascending the slope, beyond the fire and the wall outside the cave, into the actual sunlight which in Christian terms equates with the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the Trinity to which Humfrey was dedicated), a goodness that is the ultra-real reality of the forms, a pure spirit that can only be perceived by abstract thought.94 However, anyone who has undergone this quest (understood in Gloucester’s circle as spiritual alchemy) must inevitably make his way back into the cave to share his wisdom with humanity. This is the definition of a good man, a Socrates, a Jesus of Nazareth or a Prince Myshkin, returning from the retort or sanatorium to the world, and anyone who makes the journey back into the cave risks being considered mad and will possibly be sacrificed, like Socrates or Jesus. Whethamstede certainly saw the parallels between these two dominant figures of the classical and Christian worlds. In his entry on Socrates in his dictionary of moral philosophy he writes: ‘The famous philosopher Socrates, about whom Coluccio (Salutati) the Chancellor of Florence, in his On Fate and Fortune Book ii chapter viii, writes as follows: “If Christ had not come to teach us the meaning of true bliss and glory certainly Socrates would have been the chief of all our martyrs for all future time”’.95 The martyrdom of Humfrey duke of Gloucester, the aspirant philosopher king, began in February 1447 when he arrived at Bury St Edmunds to attend Parliament and see the king, hoping to secure the release of his duchess. The circumstances were as ominous for him as they had been for Julius Caesar. Bury St Edmunds was in the heart of the duke of Suffolk’s territory; on his way to attend the king, he was intercepted by a group of his peers, headed by Edmund Beaufort the marquis of Somerset, and told to go to his lodgings because of the extreme cold; he passed a street called Dead Man’s Lane. Like Socrates he did not resist his fate. While dining at St Salvatoris, he was arrested by the duke of Buckingham, primarily because of his objection to the release of Charles of Orleans.96 The official story was he fell into a coma and died three days later. On Sunday the abbot of St Albans celebrated a Requiem Mass, and his body was placed in the ‘fair’ tomb in a crypt prepared for him during his lifetime. Not many believed the official version of his death. Foreign chroniclers, with one voice, proclaimed he had been murdered. In June 1447, the yeoman keeper of Gloucester Castle was indicted for claiming the duke was murdered and that he would have made a better king than Henry, sentiments echoed by John Whethamstede, who put a speech into Gloucester’s mouth in which he compared his relationship with Henry VI to that of David and Saul. The Kentish rebels in 1450 demanded an investigation into his murder, and one London chronicler claimed he was suffocated. Suffolk exhibited the body to show that there were no signs of physical violence and that Humfrey died in captivity of natural causes (circumstances reminiscent of Plutarch’s account of the displaying of the suffocated body of Scipio the younger), but this only served to reinforce the rumours that he had suffered 108

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the same painful martyr’s death as Edward II, not because he was a passive homosexual, but to ensure there were no obvious marks on his body. Another London chronicle claimed he was stuffed between two feather beds and killed with a hot poker through the anus. George Chastellain, in his Le Temple de Boccace, a supplement to Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men adding contemporary lives, and dedicated to Margaret of Anjou in 1465, elaborated by writing that a red hot spit, guided by a cow’s horn, was thrust through his anus until it pierced his heart and then his naked body was placed between his bedsheets.97 During those last days, the martyr Humfrey would have had most on his mind was St Alban, his fellow protector, a term used by Aristotle in the Politics to describe the philosopher king. It was the Greek concept of the philosopher king that introduced into the Romano/British foundation myth of St Alban, endorsed by Duke Humfrey, a new element that would be missing in the House of York’s celebration of Duke Humfrey’s cult and its enthusiastic endorsement of Roman values and the alchemical kingship of Edward IV, and this is the spiritual, intellectual dimension to Greek thought, what in alchemical terms was defined as the spirit of mercury, the Greek element that was perceived to be missing from Roman culture and for which Whethamstede, a moving force behind the cult of St Alban, expressed admiration in his biographical entry on Socrates. This is the spirit manifested in Christ’s Passion and in Alban’s martyrdom, in both cases the divine spirit becomes flesh a paradox that is inherent in the very earth, the paradox forming the Cross on which Christ was crucified, the reconciliation of the conflict between spirit and flesh that forms the still centre of the revolving wheel of Fortune. This was also the central principle of spiritual alchemy: the marriage of mercury and sulphur, spirit and flesh, the foundation of a scientific rationalization of the integration of the active and contemplative lives in the concept of the mixed life. Lydgate’s depiction of Alban’s martyrdom was not therefore simply a case of adding Roman political wisdom to British blood and passion; it was also a resolution of intellect or spirit (mercury) with body and soul (sulphur) and the key to this alchemical marriage was mercury. It was this concept of mercury that provided a scientific rationalization for the concept of the Incarnation in the fourteenth century when Petrus Bonus (Peter the Good) and John Dastin argued that the divinity of Christ, the manifestation of the divine made flesh, was a natural phenomenon that could be scientifically observed in the appearance of the divine substance of mercury, the equivalent of the Holy Ghost, within the earth or corruptible sulphur. The belief that the divinity, or silver mercury, could be empirically investigated in matter was a powerful ideological weapon with which Christians could combat the threat of Muslim civilization, a way of asserting the scientific and rational validity of the central concept of Christianity, the Incarnation, and therefore the superiority of a civilization based on reason.98 Echoes of these alchemical images occur in the funerary epitaph of Humfrey Duke of Gloucester who was buried next to St Alban a fellow Roman Briton and protector of the realm of Albion who, like the protomartyr, understood and died for the significance of the Incarnation, the mercurial spirit of Greek philosophy. The epitaph showing Humfrey to be a follower of Christ meditates on the process of transmutation as the duke’s flesh is distilled into spirit.99 109

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The cult of St Alban and the gift of the Greeks It is this alchemical dimension to Lydgate’s Life of St Alban that transforms the whole concept of the cult of Christian saints. The Romans, for all their achievements in working for the common good in administration and maintaining an empire, were perceived to be, in their persecution of Alban and his followers, guilty of superstition in their blindness to the significance of the Incarnation and the working of the divine presence of mercury through Jesus and St Alban. It is why Theodosius, another protector praying to his protector, Jesus, is celebrated in The Fall of Princes for his destruction of Delphi and the temple of Apollo, because it was motivated by his hatred of idolatry.100 Alban is beheaded because he refuses to worship the pagans’ statues and idols, described as crude, material objects made of stone, wood and paint, representing Jupiter, Apollo and Venus, which by the fifteenth century were beginning to be studied under the light of reason as sources of mythological truth: A man who has memory and reason Whom God has made in his own image Is foully blinded in his discernment To kneel to false idols or to do homage.101 On 5 October 1764, Edward Gibbon conceived his epic analysis of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while standing at the top of the steps of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, the Basilica of St Mary of the Altar of Heaven on the summit of the Capitoline Hill, overlooking the valley of the Roman Forum across to the Palatine of the emperors. Hearing the Franciscans within the basilica, which housed the relics of St Helena, begin the chanting of one of the Divine Offices which echoed over the ruins, he thought of the way Christianity had destroyed the free thought of Socrates, Plato and Cicero, symbolized by the closing of the Academy of Aristotle in 529 AD, as the polytheism of the more simple Romans seamlessly transitioned to the cult of saints.102 Ironically, The Life of St Alban points to an opposite conclusion, the emergence of what was claimed to be a superior Christian civilization out of Roman irrationality, through a saint’s cult that asserts a Greek metaphysical truth, one that not only poses a criticism of Roman pragmatism, but also the conventions of medieval worship of saints. Lydgate’s comment on the pagan idols, Forged idols of stone and metal … Dumb as a tree, void of all intelligence A fool is he among fools all That kneels to a blind stump as if it had sight And so too is he who for strength calls Unto him who has no power and no might, And can not discern between darkness and light. Large lipped but words have they none; Mute of tongue and dull as trunk or stone.103 110

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reflects his confidence that these statues and images were unable to bring the dead to life, to make the sick well, a conviction that could equally be applied to medieval images of saints and to Becket's shrine, to which Chaucer's pilgrims were riding. Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, would invert this concept of the irrationality of Roman religion to suggest that the Roman’s conversion to Christianity resulted in the superstitious worship of saints and the undermining of their civilization. However, the Romans in Lydgate’s Life of St Alban, in their idolatry of pagan statues, are shown to be focusing, like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, on the illusionary images (Plato in the Republic is dismissive of all visual arts as crudely materialistic) and of being blind to the reality of the sun (the forms or Christ). In alchemical terms this is the mercurial, divine substance in nature, a vital element in the philosophical outlook of Humfrey’s Plesaunce, inspired by a reading of Greek philosophy and interest in alchemy. This distinguishes Humfrey and his immediate circle from Dante’s idealistic admiration for the Roman Empire, and the more pragmatic admiration for the Romans shared by Sir John Fastolf and his household. Alchemy, in the form of reflections on regenerative cycles of nature found in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and in the Secret of Secrets, focused on actual incidents of transformation. The cult of St Alban demonstrates the spiritual dimension of the natural world, enshrining a metaphysical truth that amounts to an endorsement of Greek philosophy. While Whethamstede and possibly Humfrey duke of Gloucester were commissioning The Life of St Alban, they were organizing the translation and dissemination of Plato’s Republic which, through the exercise of reason, attempts to demonstrate the supra reality of the spiritual dimension of the world of forms. This elusive spirit, or mercury, was believed to be logically and scientifically demonstrable through abstract reasoning and the practice of alchemy (both Gloucester and Whethamstede were reputed to be practitioners)104 and it was also believed that the earliest text imparting the secrets of alchemical science was Greek and written by Aristotle, who had encouraged this myth in his Politics by dividing society into different metallic types, from the aristocracy, who constituted gold, to the labouring classes, who represented bronze and iron. Lydgate, before his death in 1449, undertook one of the many translations of the Secret of Secrets, the theme of which was the divine within nature, the quintessence, found in the harmony between the four elements, which was the goal of medical practitioners and protectors of the realm concerned with the health and equilibrium of the body politic. Lydgate, Whethamstede and Gloucester encouraged educated followers of St Alban to reconcile the saint’s cult with the learning of Greece and a scientific outlook towards the individual, his society and the natural world in general, in short a Renaissance outlook. Gloucester, in doing so, may have seen himself as a paradigm of reason, consciously setting himself in opposition to the more credulous piety of Henry VI. A miracle at St Alban’s shrine, attributed to the duke of Gloucester, certainly suggests this. The duke and Henry VI were at the shrine of St Alban at a time when rumours were circulating around the town about a pauper, blind since birth, whose sight was restored by the saint. Gloucester asked to see the man who, when brought before him, was asked if he had really been blind since birth, and when the reply was in the affirmative, he was asked 111

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to describe the colour of the duke’s gown. The beggar readily described the different colours of his interlocutor’s attire and was asked how he could distinguish these different colours if he had always been blind, and instead of receiving alms he was wiped around the town.105 This anecdote reinforces Gloucester’s reputation as a prince of reason, in the tradition of Solomon, as one who was prepared to defend his patron saint against chicanery and credulous superstition. Troy fell through the craft of the Greeks, the gift of the Trojan horse introduced through the city gates, opened by the Trojan, Atenor, after whom Dante named Antenora, the second subdivision of the icy realm of Cocytus reserved for traitors to nation, but the subsequent opening of the city gates led to the dispersal of the Trojans and the emergence of Rome: ‘the gateway through which emerged the noble stock of the Romans’.106 It is possible to detect in The Life of St Alban a belief that it was Greek alchemy, the science practised in the iron athanor, that was the Greek gift that destroyed Roman Britain. The Life of St Alban describes a civil war ‘with a great slaughter’ between the pagans and the Christians, after the saint’s death, and the author comments: ‘Such lamenting had not been seen since the burning of Troy.’ He then recounts how the nation was invaded by Pagan Saxons, but he suggests that the long-term consequence of Alban’s martyrdom was the emergence of a new Troy, a civilization tracing its origins in Troy and Rome, that would, through its adoption of Greek philosophy and alchemy, have claims to be superior to both. The first history of Troy from a Greek perspective, Dictys Enriched, an expansion of the fourth century Roman Ephemeris belli troiani (Chronicle of the Trojan War), attributed to Dictys the Cretan, was written by the abbot of St Albans, Thomas Walsingham,107 and a nationalistic ideology of the cult of St Alban developed in the fifteenth century (the date of his martyrdom was recorded by Worcester in his Itineraries). The cult was concerned not just with Alban’s identity but that of a nation. The figurehead for the fruition of this vision of a nation, reconciling the two poles of antiquity and Christianity, was that other protector of the realm, Humfrey duke of Gloucester, and from the civil war described in The Life of St Alban it is implied there will emerge a new civilization, the vision of the duke of Gloucester. The Divine Comedy consistently referred authority and the health of the social body to divine providence, but Greek philosophy and pseudo Greek alchemy maintained that the health of the body politic and the individual was contingent on the exercise of reason, the higher wisdom that came from abstract philosophy and alchemical distillation which had no reference to another world. Gloucester was instrumental in introducing the wooden horse of Greek philosophy into British culture and he may have paid the heavy price of martyrdom for the consequent innovations in political outlook, but ironically, for one known for his defence of the faith in persecuting Lollards, the changes in attitudes towards the natural world and in religious outlook brought about by Greek philosophy and alchemical science (the subjects of following chapters) came through the walls of New Troy without any controversy.

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Figure 6  Giovanni di Paolo’s c. 1450 depiction of the Argo showing the long shadow of Greek mythology. © Album/Alamy Stock Photo

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Adrian’s father managed to breed from some bizarre culture, … I will never forget the sight. The crystallisation vessel in which this transpired was filled to three-quarters with a slightly viscous liquid, … and from the sandy bottom rose a grotesque miniature landscape of different coloured growths – a muddle of vegetation, sprouting blue, green and brown and reminiscent of algae, fungi, rooted polyps, of mosses too, but also of mussels, fleshy flower spikes, tiny trees or twigs, and here and there even of human limbs, remarkable not so much because of their very odd and perplexing appearance, however, but because of their deeply melancholy nature … He showed us, you see, that these miserable imitators of life were eager for light, or ‘heliotropic’, as science says of life forms …. ‘Even though they’re dead’, Jonathan said, and tears came to his eyes – whereas Adrian I could see, was shaking with suppressed laughter. – Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus1 Dante’s relationship with English intellectual life was more conflicted and ambiguous when it came to the investigation of the natural world. His faith in the afterlife and his belief in the immanent presence of Heaven was compromised by one aspect of his thought that has not been sufficiently recognized, his fascination with the daemonic in nature; this conflict between nature and the spirit is summed up in his account of the fate of the soul of the condottiere Buonconte da Montefeltro in the wake of the disappearance of his body in a storm. His soul ascends to Heaven because he has summoned the name of Maria with dying breath, while the thwarted Devil, prince of the powers of the air, summons wind, vapours and fog, so that the body is washed away into the River Arno. As a man of science and an artist, he shared with alchemical practitioners and writers of the late fourteenth and fifteenth century a fascination with all the forms of transmutation that he imagined in Hell, and he identified with the damned, adventurous explorers who crossed boundaries and defied God. The very basis of his art, the vernacular, was a language based on the laws of nature, change, sensuality and deception. However he also regarded nature and change with a fascinated horror and asserted his faith in a safe, enclosed view of an ordered cosmos in which nature was subservient to the artistic control of the creator, whose universe was an intricate and ordered system governed by the heavenly spheres and the light of God’s love. This vision was directly contradicted by Chaucer, who concentrated on the earth and the natural forces of procreation and change, and writers in Gloucester’s circle that followed him, including Lydgate and the author of The Book of Husbandry, who also emphasized the power of nature and shared

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a fascination with natural cycles and processes of change and transmutation. The focus of their aspirations was not the skies but the earth and its natural laws.

Deception, fraud and obedience in The Divine Comedy The circle of Hell that probably had the most personal significance for Dante was the eighth circle or Malebolge, reserved for fraud, and to enter it he has to descend into the depths of the self by lowering the knotted chord that he intended to use to trap the leopard, representing deception,2 that barred his way in the dark wood; this is the one beast that does not frighten him, rather: ‘I took good reason to have hope in that beast with its gaily painted hide’;3 and therefore it is appropriate that he is required to use this compromising chord to lure Geryon, the gaudily coloured monster with a human head, bestial paws, and serpentine tail, a travesty of the Trinity, from the depths. This is Dante’s most disturbing evocation of the seductive power of evil in which he himself was heavily implicated. The colourful, gaudy Geryon is not a personified, allegorical creature. Dante swears ‘by the notes of this comedy’ on that which is most sacred to him (his divine poem) that he saw this creature: Always to the truth which has the face of falsehood one should close one’s lips as long as one can, for without any guilt it brings shame; but here I cannot conceal it, and by the notes of this comedy, reader, I swear to you, so may they not fail to find long favour, that I saw, through the thick dark air, a figure come swimming upward.4 With the beaching of this serpent with the face of a just man on the bank, the reader, directly addressed by Dante, is made to realize the arid artificiality of such personified allegories as those occurring in the Romance of the Rose, and Christine de Pisan was inspired by this passage to engage in a series of criticisms of Jean de Melun’s allegorical approach.5 This stomach of Hell presents stark choices: what does the beauty of a face or a line of poetry reveal or hide? The belly of the gifted wooden horse, swollen with soldiers, destroyed a civilization; the false florins bearing the fair lily, contaminated with liquid dross from the belly of a furnace, destroy the economy of Florence, and all this has disturbing implications for the fair words of counsellors and poets, for Dante of course has deceived us: Virgil has predicted he will merely imagine or dream (sogna) the monster, and in adorning Geryon’s skin with knots and little wheels (like the concentric circles of Hell) of varied patterns and hues never worked in oriental cloths, Dante is displaying the same overreaching skill and deception as Ariadne, who spun images to deceive the gods. Abandoning the viewpoint of the pilgrim for that of the omniscient author, Dante is escorted through ten valleys or concentric circles of the Malebolge, and the ditch or pouch that most attracts him is the one containing the counsellors of fraud. Standing 116

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on a bridge he sees the souls of those who have misused their intellects, shining in the darkness like the fireflies seen by a Tuscan peasant at dusk on summer’s evening down in the valley where he harvests and ploughs. The beauty of the scene, in which the darkness of Hell is illuminated by the lights of intellects, ‘with so many flames the eighth pocket was all shining’,6 entrances him, and he reflects on his own genius, bestowed by the divine light of stars of the Gemini twins which, in the circle of the sodomites in Hell, his former teacher, Brunetto Latini, encouraged him to follow: If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.7 and his own struggle to curb his talent and confine it within the limits set by God: Then I grieved, and now I grieve again, when I consider what I saw, and I rein in my genius more than is my custom, that it may not run without virtue guiding it, so that, if a good star, or something better has given me what is good, I may not deprive myself of it.8 Nevertheless, the temptation of these lights is so strong that he has to grab hold of a projection on the bridge to prevent his falling into the ditch. The incident is an important prelude to his meeting with his alter ego, the equivalent of his Gemini twin, Ulysses. They are both counsellors and sailors: Dante, sailing in the wooden bark of his poem into the unknown, would die on the way back from a diplomatic mission to Venice, of a malarial quartan fever, the symptoms of which, shivering fever and pale finger nails, he prophetically outlined when he fearfully mounted the back of the brilliantly coloured beast of fraud, Geryon,9 and Ulysses, counsellor to Agamemnon, perished on an ocean voyage and was confined to this pouch because he has abused his intellect in giving fraudulent counsel to present the Trojans, as consolation for the theft of the Palladium, with the gift of the wooden horse that led to the destruction of the city. Ulysses, who is himself twinned with fellow counsellor and inhabitant of the horse, Diomede (both burning with the fires of deceitful intellect), speaks through a flame to which Dante is so drawn that he begs Virgil: That you refuse not to wait until the horned flame comes here; see that I bend toward it with desire!10 Ulysses, responding to Virgil’s request (for the pilgrim speaks no Greek) recounts his last voyage from Troy, when he resisted the calls of his father and his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, to travel and experience the world, the vices and worth of men, in a voyage of exploration, sailing always to the left through the Pillars of Hercules. The false counsellor, accustomed to bewitching and enflaming men with his words, recites the stirring speech he gave to his men: 117

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‘O brothers’, I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains, do not deny the experience, following the sun, of the world without people. Consider your sowing: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.’11 They then set off toward morning: Of our oars we made wings for the mad flight, always gaining on the left side,12 until they lost sight of the Pole Star and saw the stars of the other pole, and they came upon the dark mountain, where Adam fell by crossing a boundary, to perish in a whirlwind when the seas closed over them.13 This powerful warning about the excitement and perils of intellectual curiosity and turning away from the human family resonated with Dante, and he confessed his intellectual doubts and eager curiosity concerning God’s justice and his restless eager curiosity to Beatrice, in the sphere of the moon: Thus doubt is born like a burgeoning at the foot of truth, and it is our nature that drives us toward the summit from peak to peak.14 This confession, occurring in the context of a discussion about obedience to conventual vows, highlights the fact that for Dante, writing at the conclusion of a period of monastic innovation with the growth of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, the universe itself was a form of enclosed convent. The heavenly spheres are associated with the structure of monastic life: the sphere of the sun is dominated by the founders of the Franciscan and Dominican orders and at the two colder extremes of the planetary heavens there are, in the moon, the Poor Clares in their ‘sweet cloister’, under the ‘shadow of a sacred veil’, and in Saturn there are Peter Damiani and Benedict of Nursia, who built monastic houses in high places. Saturn encloses the planetary heavens, which in turn are bounded by the primum mobile and Empyrean, and at the centre of this system, in the sphere of Mars, Cacciaguida describes the pilgrim’s natal town, governed by the bells of Badia Fiorentina, the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria. Therefore, perhaps reluctantly, Dante expressed his conviction that men had to obey the restrictions placed on them by God concerning the investigation into the mysteries of the natural world. He may have identified with the fiery, vaulting ambition of the child of the sun, Phaeton, but he also believed that the sun ‘the father of every mortal life’,15 the planet ‘that leads us straight on every path’,16 laid down in his ecliptic a ‘straight way’ which Phaeton failed to negotiate and which he had also lost but had found on his pilgrimage. 118

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Dante’s world was circumscribed and finite, created by ‘he who revolved the compasses about the limit of the world’,17 and he described himself as a needle drawn to the Pole Star.18 Beyond the fixed stars he imagined no dark outer space, just the radiance of God’s light and love. Around the fixed point of the Earth and the Pole Star that Ulysses so recklessly turned away from and lost, revolved the seven planets, turning at progressively faster speeds, with the fixed stars above them revolving around the Earth slowly in one direction, and beyond are the nine angelic spheres of the transparent primum mobile, turning successively more slowly from the innermost seraphim that loves the most, in mirror reflection of the movement of planetary spheres, and finally, in the tenth realm of the heavens,19 the Empyrean, nine angelic spheres turn, in reverse order to the primum mobile, around a point of light, each one faster than the last. In answer to the pilgrim’s questioning why the primum mobile, invisible from the Earth, and the visible heavens do not provide a pattern and a copy, Beatrice explains that it is a knot that can only be untied by subtle fingers; that there is a ‘marvellous correspondence’ between these two structures involving a ‘turning inside out’ at that point in the pilgrim’s journey where the fundamental principles of the visible world, extension in space and time, are replaced by intension, a principle of concentration, where God is not extended but is an intense, non-spatial infinite point of light at the centre of the seraphim’s orbit, radiating power, knowledge and love, the origin of all space and time.20 When the pilgrim contemplates outer space in the mirror of Beatrice’s eyes he is confronting the sort of paradoxes that twentieth century cosmologists would see in studying black holes, the source of all matter. This was an intricate system of moving, harmonizing parts, like the cogs and wheels of the recently invented mechanical clock (Dante had described the garland of lights surrounding Beatrice in the realm of the sun as a glorious wheel moving harmoniously like the parts of a clock). Nature, in Dante’s universe, is a divine agent like her sister Fortune, a rational work of art, harmonious and beautiful, like his poem, comprised in the form of the Trinity of three books, each of thirty-three or thirty-four cantos (the age of Christ when he died) in three-line stanzas, the sum of which makes a total of ninety-nine, with an additional tenth canto to correspond to the Empyrean, all written in terza rima in imitation of the threefold Trinitarian structure of the universe. The tercet, three yet one, is a manifestation of the plurality and oneness that constitutes Paradise, the universe, and human consciousness: the forward-moving pilgrim and the backwards understanding narrator, and in his ‘divine poem’ Dante was aspiring to imitate his creator.21 The universe pulses with a tender harmony and rhythm: the diurnal rhythms of day and night; the circular motions of the planets echoed in the round of church bells in Dante’s Florence on the banks ‘where the lovely Arno flows’;22 the motions of the town clocks; the opening and closing of lovers’ eyes in unison; the pealing of the last bells of Compline ringing the approach of night, at 6 p.m., nostalgically evoked at the antechamber of Purgatory: It was already the hour that pierces the new pilgrim with love, if he hears a bell far off that seems to mourn the dying day.23 119

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The night and death are faced with equanimity because, in Dante’s universe beyond Hell, there is no real darkness, just the shadow cast by the earth and his own body. Beyond this shadow there is light, and this is not just the light from neighbouring stars, but the light of Heaven which irradiates the stars and the daytime, the love of God. This is why he identifies with Marsyas, writing towards midnight in Italy about the approach of noon on Purgatory, anticipating the moment when the lantern of the world will swallow up time, and he asks Apollo (the sun) to enter into him and release the light or spirit within him from his flesh. He is promised by Beatrice that the fiery nature of his mind will ensure that, like this element, he will naturally ascend from this mountain into the heavens unless he is pulled down by misplaced love, like lightning falling unnaturally towards the earth and darkness, following the passage of the damned.24 It is why the dead in Inferno all remember light in the world above with such poignant longing and proclaim to the living pilgrim their longing for the light; in the third circle of sodomites a group of Florentine noblemen ask him to remember them in the world of the living: Therefore, if you escape these dark places and go back to see the beautiful stars, when it will be pleasant to say, ‘I was’,25 and the father of Dante’s best friend Guido Cavalcanti asks him in the circle of the heretics: Is he no longer alive? Does the sweet light no longer strike his eyes.26 Sunlight, as a manifestation of divine love, is a constant reference point for the passing of the hours and the emotions. The pilgrim, once he arrives on the shores of Purgatory, is constantly marking the sun’s passage and is informed by the troubadour poet, Sordello, that progress up the mountain can only be made with the grace of God’s sunlight, because the night implicates the will, represented by the pilgrim’s left leg that drags behind him.27 Behind this sense of the beauty of the harmony of natural rhythms is the awareness of the operation of the heavenly spheres above. The spirits who approach Dante in the antechamber of Purgatory, at the approach of dusk, sing the traditional Easter Compline hymn (that which ends): ‘Te lucis ante (to you before the end of the light) – with such sweet tones that it rapt me from awareness of myself ’. Throughout the hymn ‘their eyes turned toward the supernal wheels’.28 On Purgatory’s second terrace of the envious, as the pilgrim looks sideways, instead of forwards and upwards to the lure that recalls the falcon to its master, God, Virgil rebukes him: ‘The heavens call and wheel about you, showing you their eternal beauties, and your eye still gazes on the earth,’29 and this concludes a series of images from falconry as Virgil’s pupil is urged to look up into the sky, like the falcon who craves the food offered by the falconer who calls him by swinging a ball in circles in imitation of the revolving heavenly spheres. 120

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Chaucer and the laws of nature By 1382 Chaucer, who had been reading Dante since 1373 and perhaps since 1368, presented a much more earth-bound perspective, opposing Dante’s transcendental vision of a world illuminated and motivated by the light of divine love, with a vision of a world where natural processes are dominant. The House of Fame mirrors the threefold structure of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and Chaucer even describes the cosmos as a threefold universe, a phrase taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that underlines the Trinitarian structure of Dante’s poem. However, the resemblances end here. Chaucer’s pilgrim, a simple man of the earth, is taken up into the heavens by an eagle who is less interested in their super-terrestrial destination than he is in pointing out the villages and fields on the Earth below them, and even when he points out the Milky Way (the first known reference to the galaxy in English), the scorch mark left by Phaeton30 and widely believed to be the road to Heaven, he says: See yonder, behold the Galaxy Which men call the Milky Way For it is white (and some in faith Call it Watling Street).31 Chaucer subsequently wrote a treatise on the astrolabe which presents the astral bodies as things to be measured, reducing the immensity of space, a vast unknown devoid of religious significance, into a hand-held object, using lines of longitude and the movement of astral bodies to pin down a particular locale, mapping, measuring and capturing stars as things useful for everyday life, rather than lifting the soul out of mundane life.32 Lydgate seems to have realized this essential difference between Dante and Chaucer, one traversing the heavens and the other concerned with plotting and navigation of the earth when, in The Fall of Princes described Dante as the clearest sun, day star and sovereign light Of our city, which is called Florence,33 and in his Troy Book he wrote of Chaucer: ‘Of our language he was the lodestar’.34 Chaucer’s pilgrim does not share Dante’s love of the heavens. He refuses to look at the stars and does not want to know what the constellations mean: ‘No matter’, said I There is no need I believe as well, so God me speed Those that write of this matter As though I saw the places clear, 121

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And also they shine here so bright They would ruin all my sight to look on them.35 It is as if Chaucer is heeding Dante’s warning to his readers, before he sets out for Paradise, not to emulate his genius by sailing into the unchartered waters: O you who in little barks, desirous of listening, have followed after my ship that sails onward singing: turn back to see your shores again, do not put out on the deep sea, for perhaps, losing me, you would be lost; the waters that I enter have never before been crossed.36 The parallels with the doomed Ulysses and Icarus are close and were apparently heeded by Chaucer, who remains rooted to the earth and connected common humanity. The scope of his art is bound by irony and self-deprecation and he therefore merely aspires to kiss the stump of Apollo’s laurel tree, an act of earthy self-abasement that anticipates Absolon’s kissing of Allison’s arse in the Miller’s Tale, and which is a direct repost to Dante’s poetic ambitions; indeed it subjects Dante’s sublimity to the spirit of carnival, the turning upside down of the earthly and spiritual.37 The two artists are at opposite ends of a spectrum. Dante aspired to communicate the ineffable, that part of his experience that he can remember, to capture the essence of the light of the Empyrean: In the heaven that receives most of his light have I been, and I have seen things that one who comes down from there cannot remember and cannot utter,38 and he calls on Apollo god of the sun for inspiration: You will see me come to the foot of your beloved tree, and crown myself with the leaves.39 The reason Dante is so exhilarating is because he sails so close to the wind and flies so close to the sun; his self-exaltation, his egotism and intoxication with his own genius are at times close to madness (the reason he was loved by modernists such as James Joyce), and Chaucer’s response reveals his fascination with this artist. He pays homage to his genius and yet expresses his awareness of its dangers. It is an aspect of Chaucer’s earth-bound perspective that he pays much closer attention to the laws of the natural world, thereby challenging Dante’s more transcendental view of reality. In his dream visions he contemplates the fundamental premise that governs the 122

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universe: the principle of change. The House of Fame stands on a rock of ice: on the south side, facing the sun, the letters commemorating famous people have melted away; on the north side, the names of the famous are still preserved in the shade. Sunlight for Chaucer was merely an aspect of the natural processes, an agent of change, and his negative image of snow melting in the sun alludes to, and directly contradicts, climactic moments in The Divine Comedy when the ice around the pilgrim’s heart melts, like snow liquifying on the back of Italy as ‘it trickles into itself as soon as the land that loses shadow breathes’,40 and in an attempt to capture the dissipating vision of the light of eternity in the Empyrean, the failure of sense memory and reason,41 to translate memory into temporal terms, Dante compares the fragmentary impressions remaining in his memory to ‘the snow unsealed by the sun’, like the precious leaves of the Sybil’s oracle scattered in the wind.42 In the laws of Dante’s cosmos sunlight, or God’s love, demonstrates the eternity of spirit; the growth of the pilgrim’s understanding as he journeys through the heavens is expressed in terms of sunlight-melting snow, the sunlight that never enters Hell to melt the ice at its heart. Chaucer’s first implicit contradiction of Dante’s views on nature occurs in his Book of the Duchess, the only long poem not directly inspired by Italian literature, written for a widow, possibly John of Gaunt in mourning for Blanche the duchess of Lancaster, who died of plague on 12 September 1368, like her father Henry Grosmont the first duke (all ancestors of Humphrey duke of Gloucester). The Black Knight is urged to forget his deceased white lady because perpetual grief is unnatural and does not conform to changeable nature’s laws: the earth forgets.43 More explicit contradictions of Dante’s views on nature occur in The Parliament of Fowls. In this dream vision, Chaucer draws on the same source used by Dante, the dream of Scipio Aemilianus, from the sixth book of Cicero’s Republic,44 but when Chaucer’s pilgrim approaches a garden resembling Dante’s Earthly Paradise on the top of Mount Purgatory, it soon becomes apparent that these gardens are governed by very different laws. Beyond the three steps leading from the antechamber to the terraces of Purgatory nothing happens naturally: in the garden of the Earthly Paradise at the top of the mountain, created for Adam and Eve, there are no natural cycles of reproduction, birth, death, decay and regeneration, and throughout the mountain above the gate of St Peter beyond the abode of Satan the prince of the air, there are no weather disturbances: the atmosphere is moved in circles by the moon, and plants are not engendered from seeds, although they send forth their seeds out into the Northern Hemisphere. Water does not come from springs, or rivers and clouds in a cyclical process of renewal, but from a pure fountain, from the will of God. The garden has been empty since the fall of Adam and Eve, who had been given, and had abused, the gift of free will. It is the will of God that moves everything in this garden, nothing occurs by sexual reproduction, and the wills of the inhabitants were intended to be free from the compunctions of nature. When the restored pilgrim, a new Adam crosses the river Euonie into the garden and greets his Gemini twin, Matelda, the flower gathering, blameless Eve, in ‘this nest of human nature’, he is purged of all compulsions and guilt: the sexuality implied in the comparisons of Matelda to Proserpine, gathering flowers, and to Leander on the other side of the Hellespont, is subsumed in song and innocent play as the pilgrim is restored to the state of innocence of a prepubescent nine-year-old child,45 a state suggested when he first entered the divine 123

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forest and gazed at ‘the great variety of the fresh May branches’,46 the blossom that would have accompanied his first sight of Beatrice at the May Day festival of her father in 1274. By contrast, the concept of free will seems little more than a theological abstraction in Chaucer’s garden. The pilgrim is brought there by Scipio to confront a gate, like the gate at the entrance to Dante’s Inferno. But while the inscription over the gate to Hell emphasizes that those entering this doleful place exercised their free will and spurned God’s justice and love: Justice moved my high maker; Divine Power made me, Highest wisdom and primal love,47 the mossy gate in the wall surrounding the park in The Parliament of Fowls is not eternal and is subject to the natural processes of decay; it offers no consolation of divine love or freedom of the will: those passing through it are faced with the arbitrary force of nature, they may find happiness or misery, regardless of what they do, and the ambiguous inscription provides no guidance: Through me men go into that blissful place Of heart’s health and deadly wounds cure through me men go unto the well of grace, There green and lusty May shall ever endure. This is the way to all good adventure. Be glad, thou reader, and thy sorrow off cast; All open I am- pass in, and speed thee fast Through me men go, then spoke that other side, Unto the mortal strokes of the spear Which Disdain and haughtiness do guide Here trees shall never fruit nor leaves bear. This stream leadeth you to the sorrowful weir48 Where fish, as in prison, are left to dry; To eschew is the only remedy. 49 Faced with such arbitrary possibilities, Chaucer’s pilgrim is powerless to decide, unlike Dante, who is encouraged to pass through the entrance of Inferno by Virgil; he is stuck between two equal magnetic forces: ‘Just as, between adamantine magnets two.’ Scipio, however, intervenes and thrusts the pilgrim through the gate: Afraid was I, that knew not which was best, to enter or leave, until Africanus, my guide, Me seized, and shoved in through the gates wide.50 124

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The pilgrim coming into this park may be entering a world superficially similar to Dante’s Earthly Paradise: in both there is a harmony of gentle breezes, rustling leaves and birds singing, but Dante’s garden is asexual, the wild wood at the foot of mountain in Inferno is replaced by an ordered forest where there is no procreation, for plants take root ‘without visible seed’; but in Chaucer’s garden there are constant reminders that its beauty is transient and contingent on procreative urges: Venus presides with her burning altars of lust, and desire works hand in hand with death; the wood of the trees in the garden will be used for coffins. The pilgrim may encounter spring (plesaunce), or winter, joy or sorrow: both are dependent on the vagaries of the procreative urges that are the most powerful and fundamental forces of nature negating free will and ideas of personal destiny. The pattern of one’s life is dictated purely by the choice of a mate, and this is demonstrated when the pilgrim witnesses the gathering of birds of every kind before the goddess Nature, who sits on a hill of flowers presiding over them all as they determine their futures by following their sexual instincts: Nor was there any foul that she engenders that was not pressed into her presence, For this was on Saint Valentine’s day, When every foul cometh there to choose his mate.51 They pair off and fly away to mate, an annual, circular ritual like the seasons. Salvation, grace and damnation are, in this work, purely secular concepts, determined by the consequences of a choice of breeding partner. The tercel eagles engage in a competition, professing their love for the female eagle before the goddess. There are many types of bird at this parliament from the eagle to the goose, symbolizing different classes and different types of love, taking many forms (like the tidings in The House of Fame), but at root these are procreative urges. It is an anticipation of Chaucer’s vision in The Canterbury Tales of a society of pilgrims competing in telling stories of love and lust, all motivated by the same primal urge in springtime to go on a journey.

Dante and metamorphoses Change both horrified and fascinated Dante. He lamented the natural, organic growth of his native Florence in the fourteenth century into a flourishing, relativist, self-regulating economic system, a monetized urban market, and there is a link between this expansionist and relativist view of economics and an art like Chaucer’s that embraces change and relativity. Chaucer’s world expands and has no centre; Dante’s revolves around Jerusalem and Rome, and he instinctively tried to hold things together: his idea of space itself was restricted, and his support for the concept of an emperor was an attempt to hold together states and cities that were expanding.52 The city walls of Florence symbolized this need: new walls were built from 1284 beyond the circle of city walls of his childhood (erected between 1172 and 1258): 125

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Florence within the ancient circle from which she still takes both tierce and nones.53 This area, defined by the bells marking out the liturgical hours from the Benedictine abbey adjacent to the ancient walls, south of the old eastern San Piero gate, facing the rising sun and Paradise, the baptistry and the Arno, and described as the sheepfold, was swallowed up by the large mercantile and banking city whose expansion was lamented by Dante’s greatgreat-grandfather Cacciaguida in the sphere of Mars in Paradiso.54 In fact enclosed circles, whether walls or the restraints of the liturgical hours, were always a source of solace to Dante; especially consoling were the diurnal rhythms of nature that he projected onto his relationship with his surrogate father, Virgil. As they approach the bridge linking the sixth and seventh ditch of thieves and metamorphosis, which was destroyed by earthquake at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, he sees Virgil’s troubled face, like hoar frost on the ground in late winter, and feels like a frustrated shepherd unable to tend his flock, retreating inside grumbling, but then he sees the face of his master lighten under the warming sun: Seeing the face of the world has changed in a short time; and he takes his crook and drives the little sheep forth to pasture.55 These are the regular rhythmic changes in nature that correspond to the fluctuating moods of the beloved one, and time, facilitated by the phenomenon of memory, operates not in a straight line but a reassuring circle linking present to the past. However, as Dante approaches the end of his descent into Hell, into the eighth circle, before the pit of Cocytus, he encounters various forms of transmutation or metamorphosis that constitute a hallucinatory, disturbing and erotic nightmare that repels and fascinates him. Dante’s complicity in these transmutations is suggested when he challenges his main source of inspiration for this section of the poem, Ovid, to a duel in depicting the process of metamorphosis. He has already been compromised in the circle of thieves: his natal planet Mercury is the patron of communication long-distance travel and thieves, for what is an artist with his copious borrowings if not a thief? Ovid described the metamorphosis of the naiad Salmacis and the boy Hermaphroditos, with whom she fell in love, into one androgynous form. In the seventh pouch of Inferno, Dante describes the embrace of a serpent with six feet, a metamorphosed Florentine politician, Cianfa Donati, embracing Agnello dei Brunelleschi, a proud nobleman, to form a new hybrid creature, and this is followed by a process of metamorphosis never attempted by Ovid: For never two natures face to face did he transmute so that both forms were ready to exchange their matter.56 Dante then proceeds to describe the transformation of a small serpent, Francesco de’ Cavalcanti, into another thief, Puccio Sciancato Galigai, who had a reputation for 126

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changing from the Ghibbelines to the Guelphs; thieves indifferent to distinctions between thine and mine were punished by loss of and exchange of selfhood.57 It is certainly true that Dante, on the edge of the deepest pit in Hell, confronts, in his vision of the metamorphoses of nature, his own darkest fears and desires. Here he sees the grotesque transformations that can accompany excessive emotion: Hecuba, barking like a dog over the grief of her slaughtered children; Procne transformed through her anger into a nightingale. In the tenth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell, after witnessing a series of surreal transformations of fraudsters and coiners into pigs and lutes, he is transfixed and describes his inertia in terms of a grotesque nightmare: Like one who dreams of harm, and, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming, so that he yearns for what is as if it were not, so I became, unable to speak.58 The horror and fascination he feels at the multiple metamorphoses he has witnessed, and been involved in through his art, causes him great shame and is the occasion of the most serious rift with Virgil, whose patience runs out in the tenth bolgia, just before the pit of Cocytus, and he rebukes his charge: Now keep looking, for I am not far from quarrelling with you! When I heard him speak to me angrily, I turned toward him with such shame that it still dizzies me in memory.59 These transformations occur in the form of depraved and hypnotic sexual unions under a sinister and seductive smoke screen, as serpents, in scenes reminiscent of the tormenting reptiles in the mosaics of the baptistry of San Giovanni, transfix and hypnotize the partners with whom they will ultimately exchange forms: The one transfixed gazed at it but said nothing; rather, standing still, he yawned as if sleep or fever assailed him. He was gazing at the serpent, and the serpent at him; one through his wound and the other through its mouth was sending forth smoke, and the smoke met.60 Transmutations in nature are met with such fascination and ambiguous feelings because they touch on natural impulses, especially of a homosexual nature, that challenge Dante’s binary depiction of nature’s laws to disclose a view of nature’s incomprehensible plurality that is more akin to Ovid’s visions of metamorphosis and couplings; and this enables the pilgrim to describe the transferral of Bishop Andrea dei Mozzi from Florence to Vicenza 127

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as a punishment of the sin of for sodomy as a transmutation the flowing of the River Arno into the Bacchiglione.61 The crossing of boundaries implied by metamorphoses was not just sexual. Scenes of dismemberment and bloodshed among the sowers of discord in the ninth bolgia arouse latent sadism in the pilgrim: The multitude of people and their strange wounds had so inebriated my eyes that they longed to stay and weep. which does not go unnoticed by the ever perceptive Virgil: Why do you still stare? Why does your sight still dwell on those wretched mutilated shades down there?62 Dante’s encounter in the depths of Hell with these transmutations of living flesh constitute a compelling and seductive portrayal of evil that is at the heart of a natural world of constant change when operating outside the harmony of divine law. These parodies of natural and human life cycles, generation and corruption, are nature’s attempts at immortality, not for the individual but the species; failed attempts to escape the destructive effects of time; which would be captured in Proust’s depiction of the silver and white mutations occurring on the faces and bodies of his friends in the abyss of time in the afternoon reception of the Duchess de Guermantes. The incessant mutations that are vain efforts to evade the all-seeing sun of justice who offers the only true form of immortality through the Resurrection of Christ.63 It is a vision that anticipates that of the representative Faustian genius of the nightmarish first half of the twentieth century, Adrian Leverkuhn, composer of the symphony of the Marvels of the Universe, who succumbed to a demonic vision of a universe of constantly changing monstrosities after descending in a diving bell into the depths of the ocean, his inferno, to witness the vulgar curiosity shown by these obscure creatures of the abyss as they crowded around the house of their guests had been indescribable.… amid the blur of flitting forms scurrying past the gondola’s windows, had been the mad grotesqueries, organic nature’s secret faces: predatory mouths, shameless teeth, telescopic eyes; paper nautiluses, hatchetfish with goggles aimed upward, heteropods, and sea butterflies up to six feet long ….perhaps one should call good the flower of evil … your homo Dei is really a piece of grotesque nature with a not exactly generously allowed amount of potential for spiritualisation …. It is popularly believed that humanism is friendly to science; but that cannot be, for one cannot regard the subjects of science as the Devil’s work without regarding science in the same light. That is the Middle Ages.64 128

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Dante was also a man of science, and he was most conflicted and implicated in the sins of Hell when confronted by intelligent practitioners of all forms of deception and manipulation of nature. Ulysses was therefore the most important and disturbing of these encounters, but alchemists and practitioners of the occult also fascinated and disturbed him. In the fourth bolgia, when he sees the heads of astrologers, magicians and diviners turn backwards because they tried to see into the future he is moved to exclaim: ‘how could I keep my face dry – I leaned against a rock and wept,’65 Perhaps his excess of emotion was due to his own involvement in prophecy and his attempts to influence the future. According to Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary, Dante had such a reputation for taking pleasure in astrology, and also necromancy, that Matteo Visconti, wanting to kill Pope John XXII by sorcery, expressed an interest in May 1320 in summoning magister Dante Alighieri of Florence to Piacenza.66 Dante’s conviction that he was marked out for special gifts and insight did have a darker, daemonic side that surfaced in his ambiguous attitude towards his falling sickness that was possibly of epileptic origin, and which he could have viewed as either demonic or divine in origin. In the ninth bolgia he compares the reduction of the violent White Guelph, Vanni Fucci, responsible for murder in 1293, to ashes after being bitten by a serpent and his subsequent restoration to human form to an occlusion, or gathering of humours, clouding the brain and a daemonic possession: And like one who falls, he knows not how, by the force of a demon that pulls him to the earth or of some other occlusion that can bind a man.67 Dante’s interest in medical matters is suggested by his membership of the apothecaries guild, and Boccaccio describes him frequenting apothecaries premises in Siena. The pilgrim’s fixation in the ninth bolgia on the punishments of those who attempted to steal or exchange identities by theft or impersonation, and of those who attempted to change substances through the practice of alchemy, also suggests a degree of personal fascination. They all suffer forms of transmutation of their appearance. He watches lepers frantically scratching the scabs off one another, as if they were scaling fish, like patients in the hospitals of Tuscany;68 they are the alchemists Griffolino, burned at the stake in Siena before 1272 and sentenced by Minos to dwell in the tenth ditch for practising alchemy, and Capocchio, a Florentine who may have studied natural science with Dante, who was a member of the Guild of Physicians and Pharmacists and who was burned at the stake in Siena in 1293 for falsifying metals through alchemy. Capocchio is attacked and dragged off by a rabid tusked boar, identified by a trembling Griffolino as Gianni Schicchi (d. 1295) who impersonated his uncle Buoso Donati to dictate a will.69 Dante may well have witnessed the burnings of these alchemists (in the seventh terrace of Purgatory, on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise where he has to pass through the flames, he watches the fire and remembers seeing bodies burn).70 Seduced and beguiled as he may have been by these visions of transmutation that involved subverting the laws of nature, Dante was able to reconcile his fascination with 129

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change in his conviction that there were divinely sanctioned forms of metamorphosis occurring in nature, illustrating the creation of the rational soul and the Resurrection: Charles Martel, despite his premature eclipse, rejoices in the heaven of Venus as the light radiates around him, hiding him: ‘like an animal wrapped in its silk’;71 the heat of the sun on the liquid in grapes produces Tuscan wine or spirit in the same way that the first mover breathes new spirit into a soul after conception,72 and then there are butterflies, those harbingers of the Resurrection which are inexorably drawn towards light: Do you not perceive that we are as worms born to form the angelic butterfly that flies to justice without a shield.73 The entire pilgrimage is a process of metamorphosis as the old soul is destroyed and a new one emerges. Dante’s implication in the processes of metamorphoses is apparent in the virtuosity he displays in mimicking the transmutations in the malebolge through changes in register where high and low styles, classical, mock heroic and colloquial, are fused to form a hybrid language that undergoes the same copulations and transformations as the souls and serpents whose substances and forms are changed and would inspire James Joyce. In this Dante was emulating Ulysses, crossing boundaries as he challenges the static laws of Latin, the language in which he wrote his theoretical, philosophical works, On Vernacular Eloquence and Monarchia, and which he considered to be an artificial construction, the product of rules rather than nature, and therefore immutable and unchanging, conforming to the original Hebrew language given by God to Adam.74 By the time he was writing The Divine Comedy, when he describes his encounter with Adam himself on the threshold of Paradise, he is informed by this first speaker of words that Hebrew is a later development and that languages are invented by men and evolve naturally; our inability to understand them is the punishment for the building of the tower of Babel, not the proliferation of languages themselves. Chaucer would begin his second book of Troilus and Criseyde by echoing Dante’s reflections in Convivio on the way languages change over the course of a thousand years.75 Dante excluded Latin from this judgment, precisely because he thought of it as an artificial unnatural language, a locutio secondaria, constructed in response to the natural laws of change that governed the evolution of languages to preserve history, culture and the sayings of great men. He was unaware that medieval Latin was a fossilized version of the living vernacular spoken by Virgil, a view first expressed by Poggio Bracciolini in the fifteenth century.76 It was of course the language of the church, theology and the Bible, and its perceived qualities of artificiality and permanence meant that, in some ways, it was considered pure, removed from the corruption and decay associated with the natural forces which Dante viewed with such fascination horror in Inferno. However, this conflict takes us into the heart of the beguiling, seductive and diabolical appeal of the circle of fraudsters in the eight circle of Hell. The legacy of Dante’s visit to this circle is his decision to write his sacred poem in the tongue he learned at a woman’s breast: ‘da lingua che chiami mamma o babbo’77 (a 130

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tongue that calls mummy or daddy) – the vernacular language that is seductive. Dante, in Convivio, celebrated the tongue that brought his parents together and ‘contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being’,78 as earthy, colourful and alive; in contrast to the inherently noble and pure Latin: ‘Because of its nobility Latin is eternal and incorruptible, while the vernacular is unstable and corruptible.’79 This language of his parents is described by Beatrice as a blazing desire from the mind, imprinting the soul’s thought and desire like the hammer of the matrix stamped on a gold coin: ‘let it come forth well signed with your internal stamp’.80 When he is in Paradise, attempting to convey his vision of the Trinity and his deep joy, beyond the powers of memory and expression, he thinks of the inarticulate and unremembered joy of the infant learning its first words at the mother’s breast (favella or speech rhymes with mammella or breast, and lingua, or tongue, can refer to language and the organ of speech and taste): Henceforth my speech itself will be briefer, even about what I remember, than that of a child that still bathes his tongue at the breast. 81 Only the original Italian can convey the vivid sensuousness of this experience as ‘la lingua a la mammella’ forces the reader to imitate the sucking at the breast and the movement of tongue and lips.82 This is language that is passionate, sensual, amoral (Adam was given speech to proclaim God’s glory and gloria; the first word of Paradiso or gioia was also the term for sexual enjoyment in Italian love lyrics): this vernacular changes and transmutes; it is the opposite of the permanent, ascetic, and rule bound language of the church, believed to have been used by Dante’s mentor Virgil. We are witnessing the birth of the language that will, in sixteenth century Florence, become the music of opera, the voice of a twentieth century Medea, Maria Callas, also betrayed by a Greek sailor.83 It is no wonder Dante was so mesmerized in this circle, and identified so closely with these two seafarers, Jason who navigated to Colchis and was confined in Inferno’s eight circle of fraud,84 and Ulysses, who sailed to Satan’s final resting place in the Southern Ocean under a strange sky. Dante’s art too was founded on similar qualities: boldness, curiosity, cunning and deception. The sins of this circle are the sins of the tongue, and the shades speak, none more so than Ulysses, in the forms of flickering, serpentine tongues of fire, licking and probing; the pilgrim may have been making his way up to Paradise learning the rules, schooling the will, but his legacy will be an alchemical art formed from a pact with the forces of Nature in her language, a pact that he must have conceived to be in some ways daemonic. It is no coincidence that Thomas Mann, who articulated this theory of the daemonic, creative process, began his Doctor Faustus with a quote from the opening lines of Inferno.

Alchemy at Plesaunce: The metamorphoses and cycles of nature Dante’s conflicted attitude towards issues of scientific curiosity and transmutation surfaces in his conflict with Virgil over his absorption in a quarrel between two counterfeiters: Adam the Englishman was burnt at the stake in 1281 for minting 131

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counterfeit gold florins of 21 instead of 24 carats in the castle in the Romagna of the Guidi brothers; Adam promised the pilgrim they would be joining him in Hell (Dante’s revenge for the Guidi’s refusal to give him financial help in 1304),85 and Simon the Greek pretended to change sides and persuaded the Trojans to let the wooden horse into Troy. The wooden horse is crucial, and the lute shaped, dropsical Adam taunts Simon: “‘remember, perjurer, the Horse”. replied he of the Swollen liver, “and let it be bitter to you that the Whole world knows of it”’86 Alchemy was believed to have been a gift of the Greeks in the form of the Arabic Secret of Secrets, widely and erroneously thought to have been written by Aristotle in his old age (in the fourteenth century there were discussions about the authenticity of this work, but Bradwardine thought it was by Aristotle and categorized as apart of a series of hermetic texts deriving from Hermes Trismegistus that included the works of Plato and Aristotle. the Secret of Secrets was possibly originally derived from Greek sources in Alexandria and probably came to be identified in the circles of Humfrey duke of Gloucester and Abbot John Whethamstede as the equivalent of the wooden horse introduced into Troy by Antenor. Crucially the man behind the wooden horse was the arch deceiver himself, Ulysses, the one inhabitant of Inferno with whom Dante most closely identified. Changing attitudes in England towards science and the practice of alchemy in the fifteenth century, an acceptance of the principles of change and transmutation in nature as a basis for alchemical science and medicine may have been understood in the light of this mythical explanation of the origins of alchemy in Britain and British identity itself, founded on Ulysses deception and cunning. Chaucer’s portrayal of the practice of alchemy behind the walls of London, which had been besieged and invaded by the peasant army of 1381, and its its identification as New Troy, which was confirmed when Richard II prayed at the shrine of St Erkenwald in 1392 to commemorate his reconciliation with the city, occurs against a background of deception and betrayal that echoes the alchemical distortions and forgeries in the eighth bolgia of Dante’s Inferno.87 The canon’s yeoman, by proposing to save London by betraying his master’s secrets and bringing the threat of economic disaster to the city through false alchemical coin, recalls the false Simon who delivered Troy to the Greeks, and the malpractices of his companion, Adam the Englishman, the falsifiers of gold coins.88 By the third decade of the fifteenth century alchemy, in theory and practice, was something that was of interest to readers of Dante including Humfrey duke of Gloucester and members of his circle at Plesaunce and at St Alban’s abbey. Both Gloucester and Whethamstede are included in A Looking Glass for Illiterate Alchemists, a sixteenth century list of practising alchemists in England.89 Also in this list is Gilbert Kymer, an independent medical practitioner, who treated Humfrey by 1433 and who was part of a network of astrologers and alchemists operating in the duke’s household and associated with Eleanor Cobham. Kymer wrote a Dietarium for the duke in 1425,90 and he was described by the alchemist, Thomas Norton, author of The Ordinal of Alchemy in 1477, as an alchemist who unsuccessfully sought the philosopher’s stone and as an author of a tract on the subject.91 Kymer also worked on recipes for distilled blood.92 William Worcester combined his 132

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interests in Italian poetry with the practice of alchemical medicine. He spent thirty years travelling around the country, copying recipes and extracts from alchemical and medical works in various libraries and meeting physicians, such as the Cambridge physician, Fr John Wells, from whom he obtained in 1468 a recipe for aqua vitae; John Grene a Bristol physician from whom he also obtained a recipe for aqua vitae; and the king’s physician John Somerset.93 Around the time of the alchemy commission, summoned to treat Henry VI, he was copying into his medical notebook (shaped to fit in his saddle bag as he travelled around England) extracts from Roger Bacon’s Book of Wisdom on the influence of the planets on the humours, a table of eclipses he copied in 1438 from John Somer; prescriptions from barber surgeons; recipes for a medicinal water for canker and ulcers of the mouth made from pure alum (gold) combined with juices of woodbine, fennel and sage that he obtained from an apothecary in 1465; remedies for a fever suffered by Fastolf; medical recipes from Stephen Scrope; a copy of the astrological Alfonsine tables, 1438–9, executed for Fastolf;94 notes on the astrolabe; and he even wrote a memorandum concerning a conversation with John Wey at Bristol concerning a still made by a Cistercian monk of Buckfast abbey.95 Also in this long notebook, in a similar but different hand, was Kymer’s Regimen sanitatis (Rule of Health) which, with its advice on maintaining humoral balance in the prince, was applicable to the duke of Gloucester but also to Worcester’s master, Sir John Fastolf.96 Worcester also transcribed extracts from the medical writings of Arnold of Villanova and copied Albert Magnus’s The Virtues of Precious Stones.97 Bury and St Alban’s abbey, like most monasteries, would have possessed distillation equipment, and John Lydgate’s interest in alchemy was galvanized by the crisis in Henry VI’s health, which encouraged him to apply a stoic, classical philosophy and a humoral approach to the study of nature. He even couched his appeal for more money from his patron, Gloucester in The Fall of Princes in terms of alchemical imagery of aurum potabile (drinkable gold) and sol and luna. However, implicit in his writings on nature in the Secrets of Philosophers and in the alchemical imagery of his Life of St Alban is an interest in the deeper, mystical principles underlying the natural world, the spirit of the philosopher’s mercury inherent in all things. This was certainly perceived by George Ripley, or one of Ripley’s followers, in the nine-rhyme royal verse additions in the form of the stanzas of Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy, and illustrations reminiscent of the images on the Ripley Scroll, which were added after 1450 to Lydgate’s moralizing beast fable, The Churl and the Bird.98 In the original tale a peasant traps a bird in a cage and threatens to eat it. The bird promises him three wise truths if he sets her free to sing in the garden: not to believe every tale, not to desire things beyond one’s reach and not to grieve over lost treasure. Once free the bird reveals the peasant was a fool to believe her, that within her is a precious, citron-coloured stone that can provide unlimited wealth and power beyond the understanding of the churl, who immediately forgets the third lesson and bewails his loss.99 Much of this is in accord with satirical condemnations of the greed and delusions of fraudulent alchemists from Chaucer to Ripley, and Lydgate’s moralizing in the Secrets of Philosophers, which describes a citron-coloured philosopher’s stone and suggests that the result of Alexander’s acquisition of alchemical wisdom was his conquests.100 However, the additions elaborate on the nature of this stone, identifying it with the bird of Hermes, a term used by Roger Bacon to represent the philosopher’s 133

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mercury which is the transformative redemptive and divine power within nature. Lydgate’s association of alchemical wisdom with Alexander the Great’s conquests is also made explicit in identifying the citron stone with the jewel that Alexander obtained at the gates of Paradise and wore on his helmet, and Lydgate in the original poem developed Boccaccio’s definition of poetry as a veil of fiction clothing a naked truth to suggest that poetry itself is a type of alchemy hiding a precious stone in the black earth: Poets write wonderful likenesses And under cover keep themselves very close.101 The later verse additions and illustrations to Lydgate’s more stoical meditations are associated with the colourful beast allegories of George Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy and the Ripley Scroll of the latter half of the fifteenth century.102 But there is some continuity with the allegorical approach of fourteenth century alchemists such as John Dastin and the white hart symbolism of the Wilton Diptych. There are also indications that Lydgate himself was aware of the symbolic significance of the mercurial principle behind natural forces. What all these texts have in common, in stark contrast to Dante’s attempts to nullify the forces of nature, is an acceptance of, and fascination with, natural cycles. In Lydgate’s Secrets of Old Philosophers, true knowledge and insight into the secrets of nature celebrate the endless cycles of death and regeneration, fuelled by the marriage of sulphur and mercury, symbolized throughout the work by references to the red and the white stone. In spring this is manifested by the sun’s entry into the sign of Aries, accompanied by the blowing of soft winds, the melting of white snows, the swelling of rivers and the exhalation of moisture in the earth and on trees. Under the influence of the sun’s steadily growing power, buds are generated and flowers open as the earth receives its garments from its spouse.103 In his version of the Secret of Secrets, Lydgate demonstrates the intimate relationship between the individual and his environment, in which nature assumes the same goddess-like status she achieves in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, with the new life in the spring, contingent on the procreative urges: When every foul comes there to choose his mate … As Nature does them so incline. 104 This celebration of the endless cycles, whereby spring emerges from the death of winter, is depicted in allegorical terms as the dragon or ouroboros constantly renewing itself. For the alchemist nothing is ever lost in a constant process of change or transmutation. In such a philosophy there is no such thing as that fundamental premise of The Divine Comedy, the division between good and evil, spirit and flesh; they are ultimately one and the same. In The Fall of Princes, Lydgate begins with a description of Paradise that could not be more different than Dante’s Earthly Paradise. He describes three rivers of quicksilver or mercury making a sweet sound of plesaunce. As they wind their way through Eden:

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Like quicksilver bubbling up on the plain In which there runs the true crystalline Which from a well, heavenly divine springs up and then cascades down With plesaunce it gave so sweet a sound.105 The rivers form the shape of an ‘S’, like the serpent, the fomenter of division in Lydgate’s earlier work, The Serpent of Division, to remind the duke that quicksilver, or spirit, could never exist in this world without its opposite, sulphur, that agent of chaos and death that brings about for Adam and Eve their ‘desolate exile from Plesaunce’ and ‘their unhappy transmutation’. The fact that even in Paradise, mercury and sulphur were seen to be one and the same, life and death, spirit and flesh, demonstrated the impossibility of escaping the forces of decay and division that appeared so prominent in the fifteenth century with the Papal schism; peasants’ revolts; Lollardy, the division between Eastern and Western Christendom which started in 1054; and the conflict between the Christian West and Muslim East. Lydgate suggests, in The Fall of Princes, that all disturbances within the self and in the body politic reflect the natural principles of change, echoes of the earth’s primeval origins in formlessness, and the conflict between the four elements. If the Secret of Secrets came to be regarded in this period as the fundamental Greek text on alchemy, written as the result of a conversion in Aristotle’s old age to an alchemical philosophy of life, it was inevitable that the Greek myths themselves would be harnessed to illustrate and explain this philosophy, and this could lead, paradoxically, to a much more literal and accurate appreciation by readers in Gloucester’s circle of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, celebrated by Dante as the authority on transgression and transmutation and praised in Caxton’s 1486 translation for conveying the wisdom of the Greeks in their fables and myths to the Latins and which had previously been heavily allegorized by Christian commentators. Gloucester himself acquired Chretien de Troyes translation of the Metamorphoses from the earl of Warwick and Worcester included it in his notebook. For Gloucester, Lydgate and presumably Whethamstede, who cited it frequently in his encyclopaedias, these myths could be read as an exploration of the constant state of flux and change in nature, a departure from Dante’s horrified and voyeuristic reaction to transmutations that he regarded as inherently evil. The link between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and alchemical transmutation had been explicitly recognized by Pietro Boni in the 1330s in his Pretiosa margarita novelle (the New Pearl of Great Price). Boni saw alchemical truths embedded in the Geek myths, and by the sixteenth century, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was accepted as a major alchemical text by the German physician and alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1662) who saw Ovid as divinely inspired. The alchemical significance of many of Ovid’s tales of transmutation – such as Jason’s winning of the Golden Fleece from the dragon (or sulphur) by yoking the fire breathing bulls; the craft of Daedalus: So then to unimagined arts He set his mind and altered nature’s laws;106 135

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and the elixir used by Medea to revive Jason’s father, an exhausted king107 – are so obvious that it would be condescending to assume that their alchemical content was not perceived by fifteenth century readers. Alchemical philosophy enabled a reading of Ovid’s accounts of early Greek myths as alchemical meditations on early forms of life, from the time of chaos when the elements were compressed together in a raw, undifferentiated leaden mass when there was no sun and moon, to the time when everything was fluid – a world of the unconscious where men had just been newly formed and shared with beasts and plants a commonality, changing shapes and forms in an endless process of transmutation. It was perceived to be a time before the formality and order of the Roman world was established, when the laws of nature were not fixed, and men and women were caught between incestuous desires, between the freedom of nature and the laws of men, which were new but still binding, a conflict expressed by Byblis who fell in love with her brother: ‘And yet we have not learned what is allowed, think everything is allowed and follow the examples of the gods.’108 The text of the Metamorphoses, without the overlay of Christian allegories, demonstrates that although the earth and human societies had become settled into more stable forms, the fundamental law of nature was still constant change; reminders of the primordial, formless world were observed in the activity of volcanoes and hot springs, and it was noted that there was still no permanence: sea shells can be found on high ground; plains become valleys; floods wash away mountains; rivers change their course, and man is inextricably part of this constantly changing natural world. In The Fall of Princes Lydgate, who unlike his sources, cites Ovid directly fifteen times, suggests that all disturbances within the self or the body politic reflect this principle of change, echoing as they do the earth’s primeval origins in formlessness immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve who endured also much mortal strife Of heat and cold, right strange passions Of the elements sudden mutations, Wind, hail and rain fearfully falling.109 Despite Humfrey’s instructions to Lydgate to provide moral exempla to conclude the twelve books of The Fall of Princes, rationalizing the demise of the great, and despite his author’s claim that his rhetorical colours (appropriate for a Benedictine monk) were black and white,110 there is little evidence of moralizing in his work; he read Ovid without a commentary and was happy to write The Fall of Princes without envoys, which was Duke Humfrey’s idea. Lydgate employs alchemical language to suggest that prince’s attempts to stabilize fortune: To make stable her domination With iron chains that will last long, Locked in rocks of adamant strong,111 are as vain as alchemists’ attempts to fix mercury. 136

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This fascination with nature and change had practical ramifications for Duke Humfrey as a landowner, and this can be seen in his commissioning the vernacular translation of Palladius’s Book of Husbandry, a Virgilian pastoral meditation on the principles of good husbandry.112 This was a project that the classicist John Whethamstede would have approved: every day Whethamstede would walk past the lights on the north side of St Alban’s abbey church showing Aeneas, Ulysses, Titus Lucretius Carus and other various pagan philosophers, to which he added a stained glass window of Palladius. Whethamstede gave his classical dictionary an agricultural title, the Granary, and in addressing it to the duke he described his reference work as a farm with grains to nurture the prince’s mind (perhaps in an allusion to Gloucester’s estate management text, the Book of Husbandry).113 The most likely candidate as translator of a work with which the duke was so closely associated in terms of its structure, appearance and metre is the Bristol MP, Thomas Norton, who is referred to three times in Whethamstede’s register as Gloucester’s chaplain and as a student of John Whethamstede. A grandfather of the alchemist, Thomas Norton,114 Norton’s identity is revealed in an obvious acrostic highlighted by two vertical lines on stanza xiv: He is wise and diligent (Gloucester) to teach Alle ignorant and y am non of tho.115 The words all ignorant reveal the name Tho Norton, taught by Gloucester. A similar acrostic device would be used by Norton’s grandson, Thomas Norton, to reveal his identity as the author of The Ordinal of Alchemy in 1477. Norton’s translation is full of alchemical themes: diseased soil and plants, invasions of adders, caterpillars and worms are treated with sulphur or brimstone and tiriac. Fifteen years before the alchemy commission, the link between the prince (the husbandman) and his land was recognized, and Humfrey, frustrated as he was in attempting to redress the ills of the wider body politic, was free on his estate to practise in his husbandry a form of alchemical medicine, to exert the sort of philosophical guardianship of his land that he was unable to exert in the kingdom. The Book of Husbandry features, in its monthly accounts of the labours of the estate, a preoccupation with the processes of distillation, decay and regeneration. The land was regarded as a living organism, and like people, it had different humoral types: there was dry, choleric land; phlegmatic land; sanguine, warm and moist land; and cold, dry and melancholy land.116 Drains were dug to carry off excess humours: Dig deep the ditch that humours out may leek The humour shall pass and thus thy land be saved.117 Ploughing, like blood-letting, released pent-up phlegm. There is a constant fight against phlegmatic humours in an attempt to attract the warm, sanguine influence of the southern sun. Although The Book of Husbandry is an adaptation of a Mediterranean classical work for English conditions, it conveys (like the Ode to Autumn of John Keats, where wine presses are replaced with cider presses to remind the reader that he is in 137

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the colder North) a longing for the warm South: ‘the blissful hippocrene’. There is also a corporeal, fleshly quality to the author’s conception of the land: it can be fatty, sweet, wet and phlegmatic, dry, fiery and choleric, or cold and melancholy,118 and water, as it does in humans, conveys all the humours of the land through rivers and springs, which are like veins in the body. The build-up of humours, as in the treatment of humans, must be avoided: ‘Avoid languor in your land’. In tapping springs and digging wells sometimes, as with humans, noxious humours can be released and healthy humours reunited: And behold if the place is pestilent there is another way to go: On either side a pit must descend Until your fluids find their level And springs feed into one another and find their level For good humour hath multiplication.119 Plants too have humours to be released in sap. In all activities the householder must be aware of the interplay of these humours and engage in ploughing, manuring, planting and grafting when the moon waxes;120 harvesting, gleaning and felling of trees when it is on the wane, planting on sloping land so the humours of plants do not stagnate: ‘Their humours may from them slide away’. The same principles of paying attention to the seasons and the interplay of the humours and conserving moisture and heat were applied in Kymer’s Dietarium to Duke Humfrey’s attempts to sexually propagate himself. The Book of Husbandry is a hymn to the endless process of transmutation in nature: humours rise to produce fruit, seeds metamorphose into plants and flowers and fruit, all succeed one another: Where there are humours there is also earth and warm air, So that fruit succeeds fruit, step by step Like children after their parents Fruits lead to budding and seeding flowers. thus they make from their fertility In aid of nature a fair eternity.121 These are the germinative processes which are dispelled from the asexual Earthly Paradise of Dante’s Purgatorio. Humfrey in The Book of Husbandry presides, like Adam, over his Eden but, unlike Dante’s Eden, his Plesaunce is a garden in which the husbandman gives constant praise to the generative powers of nature; it is a relationship in which there is a marriage of husbandry and nature of the procreative powers within the four elements and art: Earth, air, fire, water, with vertu (vigour) in the soil forms flowers, fruit, grain, and trees, thanking you for your grace As he succours them. Your prince himself 138

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Shall labour to increase your fertility. Now the scents spread out in gardens and meadows. How white and red flowers breed and multiply. For now art shall attend on nature Now life, the quintessence, and wit shall come to the aid Of the creator of every creature.122 Circularity in The Book of Husbandry produces change not eternity. This is a hymn to nature and its endless transmutations, whether distillation of grapes into wine and vinegar; the making of cheeses;123 the activities of bees in producing honey; plants ‘thick humours weep’124 engendering fruit; the eternal process of decay and rebirth that are echoes of the early primal fluid state of the earth described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This acceptance of the organic processes of nature, ratified in Greek mythology, was also endorsed in Greek philosophy (Aristotle claimed nature to be the principle of movement and change),125 and it was made available in Gloucester’s circle through the translation of Plato’s Republic, where there is a recognition that spirit (in alchemical terms the philosophical mercury) must be reconciled with the flesh, the world, in a drama enacted in the martyrdom of the philosopher king who returns into the cave (or for the fifteenth century Christian the Passion of Christ, where the divine returns to the flesh on the cross where flesh intersects with spirit). An acceptance of the divine in nature is implied in the fifteenth century translations of the Secret of Secrets, and in all alchemical experimentation where matter is broken down to reveal the inner spirit of mercury that preceded creation. This involved a recognition that man is part of the natural world, a breaking down of the artificial barriers between the self and the material, natural world that do not exist in the myths of Ovid. Henry VI, England’s Fisher King and adherent of the fourteenth century school of asceticism, hated nature: he said of his kinsman Edward the earl of March, ‘He is forever thrusting himself into the world.’ The recognition of the divine principle of mercury within matter is fundamental to this radical dimension to the outlook of the duke of Gloucester and his circle, a fascination with the laws of nature, an interest shared by many English intellectuals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries such as Thomas Dumbleton of Merton (1338) the natural philosopher; Wiliam Rede of Merton, the mathematician and astronomer who owned copies of Euclid’s Geometry, Plato’s Timaeus, Albertus Magnus’s On Indestructible Generation and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; Thomas Rotherham (Kings Hall 1443) who donated to the university Aristotle’s On the Soul, Metaphysics, On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption; Richard Kilvington, a theologian in the employ of Richard Bury and author of Problems of Generation and Corruption; and fellows of Cambridge colleges, Robert Wodelarke (Clare Hall 1440), Thomas Westhaugh (Pembroke 1438), Gavin Blenkynsop (Peterhouse 1459) and Thomas Anlaby (Pembroke Hall 1438), who left the works of Aristotle and Ovid to their college libraries.126 This forensic interest in the laws of nature can be characterized as an early Renaissance outlook in contrast to the more ‘Medieval’ outlook of Dante which viewed the volatility of nature with alarm. The difference in outlooks is summed up in a medieval penitential 139

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case incorporated by Thomas Mann in a lecture given by a satanic acolyte, the clubfooted Schlepfuss, which encourages Adrian in his dark, medieval outlook on nature. A girl confesses to her priest to using witchcraft and salves to prevent her lover performing with any other (as Eleanor Cobham appears to have done for Duke Humfrey). The Renaissance or humanist interpretation, given by the narrator, is that it was the girl’s love and personality that held the young man, preventing him from straying, but the voice of Venus, of Nature who presides in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, dictates that a man should be capable of performing sexually with any woman; it is a procreative imperative and has nothing to do with love or sentiment. In the more medieval outlook of Dante nature could be inherently evil, as it was for Thomas Mann’s Faust, Adrian Leverkuhn, and its power was such that the desires it elicited, whether for wealth, food or sex, symbolized by the avaricious wolf blocking the pilgrims way up the mountain, could lead to the sensual obliteration of the self and a sense of being possessed that would, as we shall see, contribute towards Dante’s conflicted attitudes towards women and love, and it is this power of nature that gives the eighth circle of Inferno its dark beauty. However there is one aspect of the fundamental law of natural change that the detached and scientific onlooker, however fascinated he may be by transmutation, would find it challenging to appreciate, and this was the machinations of Dame Fortune.

Figure 7  The Mosaic of Satan on the ceiling of San Giovanni Baptistry, Florence by Coppo di Marcovaldo 1225, which influenced Dante’s depiction of Hell © Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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CHAPTER 5 THE FIXED STARS: FORTUNE

But Fortune, the revolver of our counsels and the foe of all human stability, though she kept him for some years at the summit of her wheel, in glorious supremacy, yet she furnished him with an end very different from his beginning, just when he trusted her beyond measure. – Boccaccio, In Trattatello in laude di Dante (1357)1 E’n la sua volontade e nostra pace (In his will is our peace) Dante, Paradiso2 The dominant symbol for the uncertainty of human life from the time of Boethius in the sixth century was the wheel of Fortune, and while Dante saw himself in his exile as a victim of Fortune, in tune with the commonplace laments about Fortune’s caprices in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century, he nevertheless described Fortune as a sphere rather than a wheel3 and accepted that Fortune operated in harmony with all the spheres of Heaven and that, like time itself, she was a product of the primum mobile ensuring the fulfilment of God’s designs, the dissemination of light throughout the universe for the good of society and the realization of individual and collective destinies. There was no place for the concept of fate or misfortune in such a view of creation in which everything could be explained in terms of the operation of divine justice or contrapasso, visible manifestations of which could be seen in London pillories where malefactors were reunited with the instruments of their crimes as prefigurements of their eternal punishments. However, writers in England from Chaucer to Lydgate directly contradicted Dante’s views on Fortune, seeing it as a chaotic force of nature in which there was no justice or order, merely the remorseless march of time and the inevitability of death. The figure of Satan, the devourer of sinners and dispenser of God’s contrapasso, was replaced by the monstrous image of Dame Fortune who destroys everything.

Fortune and destiny in Dante’s cosmos When the pilgrim entered the first sphere of the heavens, that of the Moon, whose journey around the Earth is the shortest and slowest, and who represents inconstancy and change, he saw reflected on the diaphanous surface of the planet, transparent as a glass of water, the face of Domina Piccarda Donati, traced weakly like a pearl on a white foreground (in Paradise the bodies of the blessed are hidden and they make themselves

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known to the living man in expressive gestures and movements of light). Beatrice explains that although, like all the blessed, she dwells in the Empyrean, she appears before him in the lowest of the heavenly spheres because, as one ruled by the moon, she was unable to fulfil her vows as a nun of the Franciscan Order of Poor Clares in the convent of Santa Maria di Monticelli near Florence. Dante recognizes her voice; she will be inextricably bound up with his own destiny. He asks her why she does not occupy a higher place in Heaven, and she replies that her brother, Corso Donati, arranged for her to be forcibly married to Rosselino della Tosa in a political alliance, and she fell ill and died shortly after the marriage: Later, men more used to evil than to good tore me out of the sweet cloister: God alone knows what my life was after that.4 Her questioner is puzzled by her radiant happy smile and she explains: Brother, our will is quieted by the power of charity, which causes us to desire only that we have and does not make us thirst for anything else …. And in his will is our peace: he is that sea to which all moves that his will creates or Nature makes.5 The blessedness of Piccarda apparent misfortune, and indeed the workings of nature, the passage of time and death and decay itself, is demonstrated when Dante begins his ascent to the primum mobile, the source of all matter, of time itself and night and day, all generated from this vast circle of revolving spheres, the fastest of which turns around the slowest-moving circle in Heaven, the realm of the fixed stars, which moves once around the Earth every 36,000 years. The order of the universe is generated by the revolution of the nine spheres in the primum mobile in a harmonious symmetry that is the product of a loving God whose wisdom, as Beatrice explains, is beyond comprehension: And this other Heaven has no other where than the mind of God, in which is kindled the love that turns it and the power that it rains down. Light and love enclose it with one sphere, as this does all the others, and that girding only he who girds it understands … and how time keeps its roots in this flowerpot, and its foliage in the others, can now be manifest to you.6

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Time, so often seen as the enemy of men’s hopes, an adjunct of misfortune, is shown in the Ninth Heaven to be part of an intricate and harmonious mechanism, as nine numinous circles move in a revolving hierarchy, the inner circle which moves fastest, generates time, where and when, ubi et quando, as time and space converge. It is a harmony difficult to perceive in the terrestrial world: If the world were arranged with the order that I see in those wheels, what is set before me would have satisfied me.7 However, when the pilgrim enters the fourth sphere of the Sun, beyond the shadows of the Earth, during the vernal equinox with the Sun in its elliptic directly above the equator at the moment the turning of the sphere of the fixed stars and the circulation of the Sun intersect at the celestial equator to form a cross (the moment the son of God took his place on the Cross, the balance that weighs out the ransom for mankind), he focuses, with the reader on his bench, on these extreme circumferences and this intersecting cross to reflect on the harmony of creation, which is possible to see if you focus on the heavens and not the Earth: Lift therefore your gaze to the high wheels with me, reader, straight to the place where the one and the other motion strike each other, and there begin to marvel at the art of that Master who within himself loves it so much that he never moves his eye away from it.8 The mechanical clock had recently been invented (Dante may have seen an early example at St Eustorgio, Milan, built 1306 or 1309 while meeting Henry VII in 1411)9: a series of multiple, circular clogs moving with the sun from left to right, it served as more than a metaphor for this intricate harmony and balance between the heavens and the diurnal rhythms of the earth: the series of moving circular parts of the clock, each pulling and drawing, was an actual model of the universe and the passage of the sun: Whose one part pulls and the other pushes, sounding tin tin with so sweet a note that a welldisposed spirit swells with love.10 This ‘dawn song to the Bridegroom that he may love her’, with its erotic undertones: 'so sweet a note that a well-disposed spirit swells (turge) with love',11 marked out the canonical hours for the Franciscan convent of oblate Florentine noblewomen attached to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova founded by Beatrice's father, Folco Portinari, calling the souls of the saved to lauds; and it is appropriate that this acceptance of the blessedness

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of time, punctuated by the daily liturgy, occurs in the realm of the sun, the medium of light, God’s love, which is the measurement of time: Now stay there, reader, on your bench, thinking back on your foretaste here, if you wish; to rejoice long before you tire; … The greatest minister of Nature, which stamps the world with the power of the heavens and measures time to us with its light.12 In Convivio Dante described the Sun circling around the world like a millstone, rising upwards like the screw of a press, revolving and returning to its starting place around the globe on which we dwell so that every place receives an equal time of light and darkness.13 With such craftsmanship and love, there is no room for error or random chance: the melancholy associations of the grinding and turning of the wheels of a mill, so prevalent in fifteenth century English literature, should therefore have no place for the reader sitting on his bench looking up at the sun in Heaven, the circles of theologians, where ‘the holy millstone began to turn’.14 The reconciliation of time, and the griefs it brings, with this vision of heavenly love, justice and harmony, is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp on this pilgrimage. Even Beatrice, as she escorts Dante into the primum mobile, the generator of time, laments the passage of the years that destroys the innocence of young children and leads to greed: O cupidity, you so submerge mortals that none has the power to raise his eyes above your waves! True the desire still blooms in men, but your continual rain converts the healthy plums into blasted ones.15 This cupidity is the result of the inevitable process of time and ageing, which causes change and decay, and is part of the natural cycle, but this is the product of the mind of God: the love that burns and the power that rains down. Fortune is the unfolding of God’s unfathomable will and intellect, described in the heaven of Jupiter as mysterious and inexplicable as a melody, and Dante visualizes the working of this intellect in the primum mobile. Fortune, as an agent of time, is one of the revolving heavenly spheres that move in opposite motion to the seraphim in the Empyrean, the tenth sphere and the mind of God. Dante would come face to face with a visual image of the interrelationship between the mind of God in the Empyrean and the turning of Fortune’s wheel in Verona. Dante’s first stay here commenced in May 1303, while he was on a diplomatic mission for the White Guelph/Ghibbeline coalition to the court of Bartholomeo 1 della Scala to persuade the ‘great Lombard’ to join the anti-Florentine alliance. Although he was 144

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unsuccessful in his mission he stayed for ten months, drawn by one of Europe’s finest libraries, the Biblioteca Capitolare, which gave him access to a collection of classical texts unavailable in Florence and revived his interest in study and writing. However he gave an unflattering portrait of Bartholomeo because he appointed his illegitimate son Giuseppe, to the prosperous Benedictine abbey of San Zeno, an error condemned by abbot Gerrard (d. 1187) on the terrace of sloth in Purgarory, and by 1316, after the death of his patron, Moroello Malaspina; the expulsion of another patron, Uguccione della Faggiuola, the chief magistrate of Pisa; and his refusal to take up Florence’s 1315 offer of a pardon, Dante found his position in Tuscany untenable and therefore crossed the Appenines to the last Ghibbeline stronghold of Verona. With an introduction from Uguccione (to whom he presented a gift of Inferno in 1315) and other Ghibbeline exiles, he set about flattering in Paradiso Bartholomeo’s son, Can Grande, della Scala, whom he had met as a thirteen-year-old in 1303 and who had just repeated his father’s sin by appointing the son of his half-brother, Giuseppe, who died in 1313, to the same position of abbot of the abbey. The pilgrim’s ancestor, Cacciaguida, promising him a poetic destiny, had predicted: Your first refuge and first shelter will be the courtesy of the great Lombard who atop the ladder bears the holy eagle.16 This referred to Bartholomeo della Scala, and Can Grande was mentioned as one born under Mars who will became known for his military exploits and is possibly the greyhound in Virgil’s prophecy that would defeat the papal wolf of avarice (in 1317 Can Grande defied the Avignon pope John XXII by taking the post of imperial vicar) (the office of emperor remained vacant for the rest of Dante's life); and although Can Grande was excommunicated he would have been fortified by Dante’s assertions in the Monarchia that the pope had no authority over the emperor or his representative.17 Dante, while staying with Can Grande, would have regularly seen the Brioletto rose window of the Basilica of St Zeno, adjacent to the Benedictine Abbey, while he was writing ‘the sublime cantica Paradiso’ from 1316 to 1318 which he dedicated to Can Grande.18 The outside of the window, facing the world, shows the wheel of Fortune, indicated by an inscription, representing time and mortality, but the inside reveals the rose of the Empyrean, the divine sun, flooding the chancel with the light of God’s love, casting a petalled rose on the interior walls of the church; and it is also the rose of the blessed Virgin: the turning of Fortune’s wheel is also an instrument of divine grace.19 The mutable world of time, governed by Fortune, is a reverse mirror image of the divine universe, and still part of God’s order, a copy of the divine pattern. For this reason, Virgil can explain to the pilgrim the sanctity of Fortune’s work as she, from time to time, transfers good from one person to another, from one nation to another, according to her judgement. Fortune is herself an angelic creature, an intelligence assigned to a sphere, and although represented as unstable, she is still a divine agent who can teach men to have confidence in God’s rational order, a misunderstood and maligned Christianized, 145

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pagan deity and, appropriately, it is Virgil in Inferno, in the fourth circle of the avaricious and prodigal, who demonstrates to Dante, in a passage translated into Latin by a grieving Coluccio Salutatti in 1396: This is she who is so crucified even by those who should give her praise, wrongly blaming and speaking ill of her; But she is blessed in herself and does not listen: with the other first creatures, she gladly turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness.20 In such a universe there is no room for fate or misfortune, because man has the gift of free will: ‘The greatest gift that ever in his bountifulness God gave in creating’.21 The heavens and the planets may determine a person’s character, his gifts and vices, but the intellect is free of their influences, and the exercise of free will is manifested in resistance to the negative effects of planetary influence.22 When the pilgrim enters Hell he meets friends, neighbours, and famous men and women from history and mythology, none of whom feel self-pity or lament their fates, because they have chosen to be there by rejecting the possibility of change and progress offered in Purgatory and instead they apply their wills to fulfilling the predispositions bestowed on them by their respective planets and astrological houses, which take the form of misdirected love contrary to the divine will. This conviction that there is art and symmetry behind even the most random events, and the autonomy of the will, gives Dante a sense of individual and collective destiny, enabling him to respond to his former teacher, Brunetto Latini’s prophecy in the circle of sodomites of his exile: ‘I am ready for Fortune whatever she will – let Fortune turn her wheel as she pleases and the peasant his hoe.’23 Beatrice, despite the desertion of Rome by the popes in 1309 and the imperial rulers with the death of Henry VII in August 1313, could give a prophecy of a time when the ships of the Roman imperial fleet in Ravenna would all face the same direction and the empire restored.24 Beatrice had also prepared Dante for a realization of his individual destiny as a poet by explaining, in the sphere of the moon, the origins of differentiation in the realm of the fixed stars as the angelic movers of the spheres generated different intensities of light on the faces of the Eighth Heaven and how an immaculate conception of Dante’s personality took place as light from the stars of ‘Gemini, as if penetrating water’, infiltrated his body at birth: Because of the happy nature from which it derives the mixed power shines through the body.25 In the third sphere of Venus, Dante comes to a realization of his individual destiny when he meets Carlo Martello (Charles Martel), son of King Charles II of Naples and Hungary, and heir to Sicily and Provence, a sun prematurely eclipsed by the earth of death at the age of twenty-five (an appropriately premature death for one who 146

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inhabited the realm of Venus) and with whom Dante claimed a friendship, cemented in March 1394 when he took part in an embassy to Siena to welcome Charles and to escort him to Florence for the festivities celebrating the Angevin triumph, which lasted twenty days culminating in the arrival of King Charles II from Provence.26 In the heaven of Venus the pilgrim asks Charles how such a sweet plant as himself came from the sour seed of Charles I, expelled from Sicily because of his avarice. Charles explains to him God’s providential design, transmitted to the constellations of the eighth sphere of fixed stars and the six planets: And not only the beings are foreseen in the Mind that is perfect in itself, but they and their wellbeing, too, so that whatever this bow shoots forth, falls, being ordered to a goal foreseen, like an arrow directed to its target. If that were not the case, the effects of the heavens you are traversing would not be art, but ruins.27 Charles teaches the pilgrim that an acceptance of this artistic intelligence behind the working of Fortune involves adherence to the concept of destiny. A healthy society, as Aristotle taught in the Politics, depends on individuals contributing their own particular gifts bestowed on them by their natal planets, so that fathers do not turn out to be just like their sons. As the single light of God’s power descends on the fixed stars (‘so many are the stars that spread across the heavens … so many are their natures and their powers brought together and under one single substance’)28 there occurs the first step in the derivation of multiplicity from a single point of light, and as the light from the Sun falls obliquely on the Earth and on the planets, it twists in a way that ensures their different qualities and divergence in the world,29 and this light, reflected from the planets and fixed stars, falls indiscriminately on different households exerting a strong force on the developing foetus and overriding hereditary influences. These heavenly bodies, the ‘circling nature and seal of your nature’, are the direct instruments of God’s artistic government of the world, ensuring the diversity of human society and the pursuit of individual destiny. Nature cannot be flawed but men can, and unless they follow their own predispositions, bestowed on them by their birth star, they may follow a path that is of little use to society, and in this way priests can become soldiers, or a king can act as if he is ‘a lover of sermons’ (the fate of England under Henry VI).30 Martello’s words complete the lesson given to the pilgrim in the sphere of the moon by Beatrice, when he is disturbed by the dark spots on the moon and Piccarda’s fate, which suggest to him imperfection in the heavens. God’s influence, through undifferentiated light, is conveyed by its rapid movement from the primum mobile to the fixed stars and planets which analyse and complicate within their specific influences in differing degrees of intensity of light that ultimately fall onto the Moon and the Earth (hence the 147

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dark spots on the moon), and this light is at its most potent in the pupil of Beatrice’s eyes (she is an angel, an intermediary with Heaven and ‘the affect’ in her eyes of the holy fires is so great that the whole soul is seized by it).31 Certain people, like Beatrice, are so full of love that when the light from Heaven reaches them, the rays are reflected and intensified as if they were gold or precious jewels luminously multiplying the sunlight that falls upon them,32 and the implication is that Dante too, as a poetic genius who will unfold Heaven’s mysteries, is a recipient of this greater intensity of light, through his birth in May or June under the sign of Gemini, and this is recognized when he enters ‘the little star’ of Mercury, the house of his natal planet of communication and worldly ambition, and he is greeted by souls proclaiming: ‘Behold one who will increase our loves.’33 It is in this realm of fixed stars, when he sees his birth sign of Gemini, ‘Leda’s lovely nest’, that Dante comes to realize the full import of Piccarda’s reassuring words: ‘in his will is our peace’: they have a shared destiny of apparent misfortune which is a blessing; Piccarda was a Donati, a third cousin of Gemma, Dante’s wife, the sister of Dante’s close friend and fellow poet, Forese Donati (d. 1291), whom he met on the terrace of gluttony in Purgatory, and the sister of Corso Donati, with whom Dante had a complicated relationship. Corso was the leader of the exiled Black Guelphs in Rome who, with the backing of Boniface VIII and Charles of Valois, captured Florence in November 1301, removed the White Guelph priors, including Dante, and ensured his expulsion and exile from Florence in 1302. Nevertheless Dante retained hopes that Corso would be able to secure his readmission into the city, and only after Corso’s death at the hands of his enemies outside the walls of Florence 1308, did Dante venture to indirectly blame him for the civil wars in the city through the voice of Corso’s brother, Forese, who described him being dragged to Hell by his horse.34 All the threads of Dante’s life – family ties, friendship, poetry and exile – are connected with this family, and when, in the sphere of Saturn, he ascends the golden ladder to the sphere of the fixed stars to return to his original home, where the sun (the father of every mortal life) rose and set at his birth in the constellation of the Gemini twins,35 he is reminded of the prophecy of his ancestor Cacciaguida, who predicted that in Verona, far from home, he would feel the bitterness of mounting and descending the stairs of his host Can Grande: You will leave behind everything beloved most dearly, and this is the arrow that the bow of exile first lets fly. You will experience how salty tastes the bread of another, and what a hard path it is to descend And mount by another’s stairs.36 Petrarch, between 1330 and 1334, would comment on the isolation felt by his ‘fellow Florentine citizen’ at the Verona court, where he initially found favour until his ‘rather more insolent manners and freer speech’ became less pleasing to a prince’s delicate ears. When Can Grande taunted Dante by expressing surprise that for all his wisdom he 148

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was less popular than the vain buffoons at his court, his guest replied: ‘You would not find it surprising if you consider it is identity of manners and singularity of character that fosters friendship.’37 Despite his suffering, Dante comes to realize that the turning of Fortune’s wheel is also holy; in her wisdom she has decreed that his path through exile will lead him, not to solitude like Ulysses, but to the fulfilment of his destiny: his reconciliation with Beatrice, his return home to Paradise and the creation of a work of art that mirrors the intricate harmony of God’s creation: O glorious stars, O light pregnant with great power, from which I acknowledge that all my genius comes, whatever it may be, with you was being born and with you was setting he that is father of every mortal life, when I first felt the Tuscan air, and then, when grace was extended to me to enter the high wheel that turns you, your region was allotted to me.38 This is the teleological overarching plot of divine destiny at work as the poet imposes on his poem a retrospective, hermeneutic blessing on his life that will enable him, at the request of some Florentine nobles in the circle of the sodomites, to escape these dark places and go back to see the beautiful stars, when it will be pleasant to say I was.39 However, showing how free will actually operates through the depiction of parallel lives diverging on split second decisions reveals possible alternative story lines that impose tensions on this teleological narrative.40 One such set of parallel lives is that of the father and son, Guido da Montefeltro and Buonconte da Montefeltro: Guido’s repentance occurred prior to a papal absolution assuring him of salvation and his son repented with dying breath. The fate of their souls was debated between St Francis and a demon, and an angel and a demon. Dante’s interest in the analysis of these elusive moments at a moral crossroads, when a soul’s progress could go either way, had a personal dimension in the case of the parallel lives of two officials unjustly accused of barratry like Dante himself. Romeo di Villanova minister of Raymund Berger V, a Guelph count of Bravo, was another of the poet’s alter egos who, according to legend, went into exile after being accused of dishonesty and ended up in Paradise, but Pier delle Vigne, a chancellor of Frederick II, killed himself to avoid humiliation and ended up recounting his story to the pilgrim in the wood of the suicides.41 Free will means the present is always alive with multiple futures or possibilities: the terrible gift of potential freedom.42 Operating in the time and space of our earthly existence which is encompassed and dominated by the three other worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise that hem in earthly history in a 149

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narrow cleft, where, according to Aquinas, dramatic decisions are made that determine everything that happens in the next life, for the choices and decisions made modify the substance of a man: every exertion of the will leaves its trace, modifying the soul and contributing to its habitus, the realization of one’s essence, which God’s judgement has disclosed and fixated to that it becomes one’s destiny in the next life.43

Chaucer’s incomprehensible universe In The Divine Comedy Fortune is the working out of destiny on collective and individual levels, and it is in the depiction of Fortune that we can see the greatest gap between Dante’s perceptions and those of the writers following him towards the end of the fourteenth century. Chaucer, in particular, sets out to satirize gently Dante’s insistence on destiny in his House of Fame. The eagle, who finds Chaucer on a desert like the wasteland where Virgil meets Dante, is a humorous version of Virgil; it speaks with a man’s voice saying: ‘look around I am your friend’44 and like Virgil he tells the dreamer not to be afraid; he is able to read the pilgrim’s thoughts and takes him into the heavens complaining about his heavy weight,45 perhaps a tacit compliment to the superior lightness and brilliance of Dante’s Tuscan verse, while at the same time mocking Dante’s egocentric pretensions. The persona Chaucer adopts is a very different and self-effacing one, an unlikely follower of Aeneas, St Paul and Dante, a simple man, a bewildered Sancho Panza, who is afraid that, as he approaches the heavens, he will be ‘stellefied’ and converted into one of the constellations. Chaucer’s art is similarly lacking in grandiose ambition. His narrators in The Canterbury Tales are ordinary men and women, unreliable, often simple and earthbound, and their stories are frequently unfinished and go nowhere, defying notions of a single truth or of a poetic and divine inspiration; they celebrate the incoherence and randomness of life. This is a world view in which inconstant Fortune or fate rules. For Lydgate, this is a cause for lament; Chaucer turns it into art. In Chaucer’s most philosophical work, Troilus and Criseyde, dedicated to his friend, the Merton natural philosopher Ralph Strode c. 1386 (himself the reputed author of a ‘librum elegiacum vocatum Fantasma’)46 and John Gower, the lives of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde are not ultimately dominated by the force of their passions and their willpower, unlike the inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno; instead they are dictated by Fortune and the forces of history. When Criseyde is being entertained by her uncle Pandarus, who is endeavouring to act as go-between between her and Troilus, who is hidden in a closet, she prepares to leave when a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter causes a torrential rain, forcing her to spend the night at her uncle’s. This prompts the narrator’s reflection on the role of Fortune as an executor of incomprehensible fate: But, O Fortune executrix of the wyrds O the influences of these heavens high! True it is that under God you are our herdsman Although to we beasts you the causes deny.47 150

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The impending arrival of the day when Criseyde must join the Greek camp in the hostage exchange is similarly described as being in the hands of fate: Then approached the fatal destiny That Jove has in his disposition And to you angry Parcae, sisters three, Is committed its execution.48 Criseyde’s betrayal of Troilus prompts a lament about Fortune who, in contrast to Dante’s depiction of an impersonal agent of Divine Wisdom and Love, is personified as a wilful and malicious woman: But all too short a time (alas the while) Lasts such joy, thanks be to Fortune, Who seems truest when she will beguile And can to fools so her song attune That she catches and blinds them, traitor to all! And when a person is from her wheel thrown, Then laughs she, and makes him groan. From Troilus she began her bright face Away to turn, and took of him no heed, But cast him clean out of his lady’s grace, And on her wheel she set up Diomede; For which my heart right now begins to bleed.49 Troilus’s understanding of his situation is that Fortune, the most mighty of all the gods who is anthropomorphized into a hostile being, has become his enemy and, envious of his joy, has taken what is most dear to him: Fortune, alas the while! What have I done? What is then my guilt? How can you for pity me beguile? Is there no grace, and shall I thus be spilt? Shall Criseyde be sent away, because it you will? Alas, how can you it in your heart find To be so cruel to me and unkind? Have I not honoured you all my life, As you well know, above the gods all? Why will you thus from me joy deprive?50 There is little recognition in this tragic love story of the role of the will and a resigned acceptance that everything in nature, including human feelings, is in a state of constant flux. It is the reason why the gate to the Garden of Love in The Parliament of Fowls does 151

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not allow freedom of choice or exercise of the will. The gate can lead to joy or sorrow, depending on the lottery of a choice of mate, and Troilus’s absolute dependence on Criseyde’s decisions and moods anticipates the growing tendency in the fifteenth century to personify Fortune as a woman. This is in marked contrast to Dante’s vision of Fortune and the human will. Women like Piccarda and Beatrice strengthen resolve and will rather than undermining it. Dante’s pilgrim, unlike Chaucer’s, enters the gate of Hell of his own free will because it will lead to Beatrice, and at the end of his journey, on the threshold of Paradise, when he will be reunited with her, he is promised by the soon-to-be departing Virgil that this will result in a perfect accord between Heaven’s will and his own: Until the lovely eyes arrive in their gladness which weeping made me come to you, you can sit and you can walk among them. No longer await any word or sign from me: free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be a fault not to act according to its intent. Therefore you over yourself I crown and mitre.51 However, the strongest impression of a collision between two worlds in relation to attitudes to Fortune occurs when Chaucer attempts to retell Dante’s account of the fate of Ugolino della Gherardesca, count of Donoratico. On 1 July 1288 (when Dante was in his twenties) the count was imprisoned in the Torre de Gualandi in Pisa by archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, along with his two sons, Gherardo and Uguccione. A large ransom was demanded from Ugolino’s family and when the money ran out the prisoners were left to die of hunger, and their corpses were finally removed from the tower on 18 March 1289.52 Dante encounters them in the ninth circle of Cocytus in the second division of Antenora, reserved for those who betray nation, city or party. He had been told the story by Ugolino’s grandson, Nino Visconti (addressed in Purgatory in the friendly address of ‘tu’) who was connected with Dante’s patron Moroello Malaspina; and Dante, in turn, would read his heart-rending version of the tale from Inferno to Moroello, and to Ugolino’s daughter, Gherardesca, while he was a guest of her and her husband Guido Batifolle at Popli Castle in 1311.53 Count Ugolino, from an old Ghibbeline family, was sympathetic to the Guelphs and Florence and attempted to gain control of Pisa with their help. When the Pisan Ghibbelines gained control of the city, under the leadership of Ruggieri, Ugolino negotiated with them, but he was lured into the city by the archbishop and arrested for his treasonable association with the Guelphs and imprisoned. However there was more going on than just betrayal in the punishment of these two men. Dante encounters them together in a frozen hole in the ice: Ugolino is frantically gnawing at the brains in the skull of Ruggieri in a grotesque parody of the Communion of Christ’s flesh, wiping his lips on the hair of the skull from which he is feeding as he tells his tale. The frozen ice in the cold heart of Hell, the desperate meal of a grieving and vengeful father, is an appropriate fate for one who bit his hands in anger at his tormentor but could not respond emotionally to his suffering children; in describing 152

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the starvation of his children he condemns any who, after hearing of their plight, are unable, like him, to weep: And I heard them nailing up the door at the base of the horrible tower, hence I looked into the faces of my sons without a word. I was not weeping, I so turned to stone within: they were weeping; and my Anselmuccio said: ‘You have such a look, father! what is it?’ Therefore I did not shed tears, nor did I reply all that day or the night after.54 Instead of comforting his children, who compassionately offer their flesh to him as a redemptive communion in an echo of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, hinting at the need for compassion and forgiveness to dispel the smoke of anger, he can only bite his hand in rage and remain mute, while his child Gaddo dies at his feet, in a parody of the Crucifixion, crying: ‘Father, why do you not help me?’55 Ugolino is unable to entertain his children’s compassion and forgiveness; if only, when he looked into their eyes, he could see Christ’s reflection he would be saved, but instead he turns to stone as if he has looked at the face of Medusa.56 His fate in Hell, embedded in the ice that surrounded his heart, unable to weep because the cold in Coctyx freezes sinners’ tears, eternally grinding his teeth in revenge and hatred, and perhaps in feelings of guilt over cannibalizing the flesh of his children, is a poetically just instance of contrapasso, where the punishment fits the sin.57 There is a savage beauty in the fates of Dante’s damned, eternally acting out their compulsions, following their distorted and perverted wills, in ‘the sea of twisted love’.58 Laments about unjust Fortune would be entirely inappropriate in the face of such justice. Chaucer went further than his immediate source, Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men, by using this story in his Monk’s Tale to express his scepticism about the wisdom of attempting to express historical, political truths in vernacular poetry. He used the figure of Fortune to suppress the role of virtue, free will and providence in the fall of a prince, and in his hands the narration of the fate of Ugolino becomes a sentimental lament about cruel and unjust Fortune: Alas, Fortune! It was great cruelty Such birds to put in such a cage!59 All of Dante’s allusions to a redemptive God, a higher justice and the need to transcend human grief and suffering through faith are expunged. Although the infants eventually offer themselves to their father as sustenance, they do not show the same level of compassion and empathy as Dante’s children, and there are no echoes of the Sermon on the Mount or the Passion, as the roles in Dante’s poem are reversed and the children complain about their hunger, and Ugolino reacts by weeping: 153

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‘Alas’ said he, ‘Alas that I was wrought!’ Therewith the tears filled from his eyes His young son, that was just three years of age, Unto him said, ‘Father, why do you weep?’60 When the child dies the father, with no hint of Ugolino’s rage and desire for revenge or his possible cannibalism, directs his anger only towards Fortune: And when this woeful father dead him saw For woe his arms two he began to bite, And said, ‘Alas, Fortune! and woe o woe! Thy false wheel I can blame for all my woe.’61 Dante’s ferocious tale about the implacability of human emotions and human willpower confronting divine justice becomes a sentimental story about the suffering of innocent children, with no hope of redemption or justice, a lament about the cruelty of Fortune that anticipates many of the tales in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. Perhaps this is a deliberate reflection of the inadequacies of the teller of the tale, a worldly, self-indulgent monk who lacks the religious insight of a layman such as Dante, and who has no more understanding of the workings of divine love and justice than the prioress, who weeps over her dead or injured pets. Nevertheless, Chaucer’s tragic victims are shallower and more inconstant than the inhabitants of Inferno, victims of a vast, impersonal forces of nature, or Fortune, a world that is more irrational and incomprehensible than the savage and cruel universe of Dante that is also transcendentally beautiful, because people are capable of great loyalty, compassion and hatred, and they follow their destinies, which lead them to where they want to be, where they are meant to be, pursuing their wills and compulsions, whether of hate, anger or lust, eager to cross the Acheron: ‘What instinct makes them seem so ready to cross over’;62 and Fortune, far from being cruel or wilful, is merely God’s agent in the working out of this contrapasso. Dante’s world may sometimes be less realistic than Chaucer’s, but it is more compelling.

Lydgate and the games of Fortune The next generation of writers, followers of Dante and Chaucer in the circle of Humfrey duke of Gloucester, adopted Chaucer’s pessimistic view of the workings of Fortune in the sublunary world. Lydgate’s preoccupation with Fortune and time was not just inspired by his reflections on history; it was a more immediate concern in his activities as a monk of Bury, entrusted by Abbot William Curteys with translating the Bury Abbey Cartulary into English, which he competed in 1440, around the same time as he finished The Fall of Princes.63 Into this record of attacks on the abbey’s privileges during the Peasant’s Revolt, and examples of royal patronage, Lydgate inserts the same sort of reflections on the uncertainties of nature and the future that would provide the theme to the 154

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Fall of Princes: ‘In many places in holy scripture it is remembered by contemplatives how worldly things are variable and unsure. And there can be no certainty nor no felicity and no perfect glory in worldly things that are transitory.’64 The monks needed to preserve the stability and continuity of monastic life by emphasizing princes’ obligations to the monastery, its time honoured privileges and rights in the face of nature and time, and popular unrest, in the same way that the lay aristocracy, towards the end of the fourteenth century, attempted to assert the stability and continuity of their lineages in the heraldic Scrope Grosvenor dispute.65 However, reflections on the perversity of Fortune and the chaos of history would influence the most extreme reaction to Dante’s providential view of history and personal destiny which occurs in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. The hub of Dante’s attitude to the lives and follies of the great in The Divine Comedy is the central cantos of Paradiso, where the pilgrim meets his crusader ancestor, Cacciaguida, as he ascends to Mars, and he is reminded of the sky reddening at sunset. Cacciaguida, martyred at the age of fifty-seven (Dante’s age when he died) in Palestine in 1148 on the Second Crusade in the service of the emperor Conrad III and, bearing the crusader’s cross, is among the shining, ruddy lights of the blessed, ranked like soldiers as befitted the status of their natal planet and forming a galaxy like the Milky Way. Cacciaguida traverses the arm of a Greek cross descending down to its foot like a meteorite, circumscribed by the outline of the red planet, a scene perhaps inspired by a mosaic of the transfigured Christ in a jewelled cross hanging over the apostles in the Basilica of Saint Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna.66 This cross serves as a fulcrum for the entire canticle occurring as it does on the central ‘stella forte’ (mighty planet).67 Cacciaguida, replacing Virgil as the pilgrim’s mentor, instils in the pilgrim a conviction that, in writing truthfully about the faults of the great, he must arm himself like a knight with foresight and be prepared for the blows that follow, taking up the crusader’s cross and using his pen as a sword: This cry of yours will be like a wind that strikes hardest the highest peaks.68 By exposing the sins and virtues of the great in Hell, Purgatory and Heaven the pilgrim will be fulfilling a providential design: For this reason have been shown to you in these wheels, on the mountain, and in the sorrowing valley, only the souls who are known to fame.69 This sense of the divine providence governing the fates and posthumous reputation of the inhabitants of the House of Fame, in which Dante saw himself as God's spokesman, could not be further from the perverse and playful Dame Fortune that dominates Lydgate’s writings, and who is derived from the Roman personification of the goddess of luck and chance. The first known reference to her wheel was made by Seneca in 55 BC in his tragedy, Agamemnon. In The Fall of Princes she becomes the dice player: 155

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Like hazarders my dice I do throw One throw brings weal another accuses My play is double.70 She is a mermaid with an angelic face and serpent’s tail like Dante’s Geryon: A monstrous beast departed in ways manifold A sliding serpent, turning and unstable, Slippery to grip; on whom there is no hold.71 It is foolish, she says, to find a remedy for her game. The laws of the philosophers are powerless against the endless revolutions of her wheel.72 Lydgate, in his Fall of Princes, a continuation and amplification of The Monk’s Tale, follows Chaucer in closely identifying Fortune with the natural forces of nature: flowers and princes fade; she is as changeable as the sea; the green of spring soon fades; and joy too (or plesaunce) will, like the autumn, sink back into the roots of the earth:73 Who should then debar me from being double, Since doubtless it belongs to me of right? Now fresh with summer, now with winter trouble, Now blind of look, dark as the cloudy night.74 However, Lydgate also applies this fundamental principle of nature to the study of history, recent and classical, which becomes a lament for the victims of Fortune, in which the exercise of free will and the operation of divine justice played little or no part.75 When Dante follows the bowed heads of the penitents on the first terrace of pride, he compares the ascent up the mountain to the climb up the stairway to the church of San Miniato del Monte above Florence; he is able to survey history from the fall of Satan, Nimrod, and Cyrus the Great to the destruction of Troy, as illustrations of punishment for the sin of pride, serenely displayed on the pavement below his feet as if they were the tomb slabs of the church ‘that dominates’ Florence.76 Lydgate’s survey of the unhappy fates of princes from the time of Adam to that of King John of France in 1361 may resemble Dante’s journey into Inferno, but the suffering and the punishments meted out by Fortune occur in this life, and for which there is no contrapasso, no rational explanation beyond pure chance. Lydgate’s world is one where the only consistent truths are the omnipresence of Fortune and the inevitability of death. Nothing can stop the turning of Fortune’s wheel or the march of time and decay: Mithridates VI, king of Pontus and Armenia Minor in Northern Anatolia on the Black Sea (120–63 BC), went to extreme measures to try to defeat Fortune: Of manly force and hearty assurance Defying Fortune with all her variances.77

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This involved his attempting to avoid what he perceived to be the almost inevitable fate of assassination and to exert control over his fate by taking small doses of poison to boost his immunity, spending seven years in hiding, planning his own death, but after poisoning his wives and taking poison, he found that it did not work because of all the antidotes he had taken. He eventually went mad, broken on Fortune’s wheel like King Lear.78 Lydgate offers no prospect of escaping the wheel of Fortune and no prospect of a transcendent resurrection: instead he proffers the hope of a stoic acceptance of fate. This grim and pragmatic acceptance of reality is conveyed in a portrait that constitutes the heart of his epic journey through human history. Marcus Atilius Regulus, a consul of the Roman republic in 267 BC and 256 BC, rode in his youth through Africa armed in bright steel, winning the never-fading laurel of conquest, but Fortune and time catch up with him: But O, alas! when he was fallen into age The fickle goddess, among her changes all, Against this prince her favour did appall.79 Marcus is taken prisoner by the Carthaginians in Tunis and offered as part of a hostage exchange with some young Carthaginian prisoners held in Rome. This public-spirited consul refuses to take part in the exchange; released on parole he addresses the Roman Senate: You know yourselves I am now waxing old, And Fortune is to me contrary … Now through Fortune’s mutability Made unhappy and desolate of cheer.80 The natural, inevitable and alchemical process of transmutation into sick, old age means he is about to be thrown off Fortune’s wheel. Realizing that the young prisoners are more valuable than he, he chooses to embrace the turning of the Fortune’s wheel, the principle of change and decay, and instead of trying to stop the turning of the spokes, like Mithridates, he accelerates them and chooses martyrdom. Obeying the terms of his parole, he returns to Carthage where, in a prefigurement of Christ’s Passion, he is tortured, placed on a bed of nails and executed by the Carthaginians. In dying for the state, he demonstrates that individuals perish but communities live on. Dante had claimed that Marcus Regulus, Cincinattus and Seneca were instruments with which divine providence realized the evolution of the Roman Empire,81 but Lydgate presents a more secular (or socialist) view of salvation. By becoming the wheel, Marcus achieves the poise of permanence, the still centre of the wheel, finding in his martyrdom a fate that solves the dilemma that humans face when confronted with the harsh realities of Fortune, the inevitability of death, and the consequent conflict between flesh and spirit. Marcus is followed in The Fall of Princes by other Romans, such as Seneca, and Cato the

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younger, who chose martyrdom in the increasingly militaristic tyranny of a civilization drifting away from the philosophical ideals of the Greeks and who, like Marcus Regulus, defeated Fortune by focusing on the common good: I have more cheer through true faith without variance In the profit of your community, and Marcus can think of nothing better than to ‘die to increase the weal of the community’.82 The equilibrium, the philosophical detachment of such men, was a state that Humfrey duke of Gloucester could aspire to while reading this work, meditating with detachment on the manifold turnings of the wheel of Fortune in human history, a state of mind its author defined as ‘plesaunce’. Duke Humfrey’s interest in the revolving of Fortune’s wheel is suggested by his acquisition from Nicholas Baldirston, a friend of Poggio, of a manuscript of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies against Fortune) along with a copy of Seneca’s letters.83 Humfrey issued instructions to Lydgate to provide moral exempla for each of the twelve books of The Fall of Princes, rationalizing the demise of the great, but there is little evidence of morality in many of these tales; that is the twisted talent of Lydgate, rebelling against the moral restraints of his monastic vocation, and embracing instead the stoic classicism of the Roman authors read by Whethamstede; there is no more stability or form in his view of history than there was in Ovid’s vision of the origins of human society and laws. The influence of Ovid (cited fifteen times by Lydgate, when he is not directly mentioned by either Boccaccio or Premierfait) is apparent in the Bury monk’s affective rendering of the crimes and suffering of Medea. After she is reunited with Jason, there is no judgement or sense of heavenly justice, just passion and pain: ‘Thus always is sorrow mingled with gladness.’84 Lydgate’s portrayal of Fortune as a wilful, autonomous agent is a direct contradiction of his immediate source: Premierfait, in his dedicatory letter to Jean Duke de Berry, written before the duke’s death in 1418, claims Fortune takes her orders from God as his chamberlain.85 Nowhere is this lack of moral causality more apparent than in Lydgate’s portrayal of the Greek tyrant, Agathocles of Syracuse, the self-styled king of Sicily from 304 to 289 BC, who would be cited by Machiavelli as an example of a criminal tyrant whose success was due to his ability to commit his crimes quickly and ruthlessly,86 and who, according to Lydgate, was responsible for the slaughter of ten thousand people. At the height of his power: He thought he had the power to bind and abide Fortune’s wheel to make her stable Which is a thing contrary to her kind.87 158

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As the son of a potter, he rose high, but his fall was natural and inevitable, like filthy smoke from a blacksmith’s forge he ascended into the sky only to be washed down again in the next rain: Out of a forge from the fire that smiths make By clear experience it is full often said that these infernal ugly smokes black Transcend the tops of many great mountains; But oftentimes by a full sudden rain All such ascensions, by a rage of a wind up blown with an unaware turn be reversed and brought low.88 His life ended as it began in darkness; he was wretched, enfeebled and consumptive, forsaken by all his friends with all his treasure gone: As he began in poverty and distress, So he made an end in wretchedness.89 But there is no moral justice here: Agothocles died in old age; his suffering and loneliness are something shared by all humanity at the end of a life’s span. Dante’s main teleological narrative suggests the end determines the meaning, and Aristotle suggested the question of happiness could only be determined at the end of a life’s span. We all are victims of Fortune and nature in this sense sharing a common end; everyone gets thrown off the wheel to end up back in the earth from which they came; this is the moral of the riddle solved by Oedipus: All came from earth, and all to earth shall; against nature there is no protection.90 This is the final end for all humanity, not just tyrants. The tale of Agothocles has no moral viewpoint about overreaching; instead there is an acceptance of a scientific principle of nature, a bleak, dispassionate vision of the goddess Fortune, who is herself bound by nature’s laws to correct an imbalance: as one goes up another must come down. The image of Fortune as the perverse goddess playing with human lives is combined with the realization that she works in unison with nature to ensure that nothing ever lasts, happiness soon sinks back into the earth, and within joy there is always Fortune’s bait cast in the ‘hook (anglis) of plesaunce’, and the loyalty of the people for their princes is just as fickle as Fortune’s: Now up, now down, as Fortune casts her chance For they as is their custom have joy and plesaunce In desires unsteady and untrue, to see each day a change of princes new.91 159

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The shift in sensibility, by which Fortune and nature are seen as implacable, amoral forces, was conveyed by Fyodor Dostoyevski in Prince Myshkin’s reaction to Holbein the Younger’s painting of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22): His body on the Cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature … looking at that picture you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable and dark beast, or, … as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized and cut to pieces, and swallowed up impassively and unfeelingly … a great and priceless being. The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinate.92 The recurring oxymoron of plesaunce, which, like Fortune itself, can signify the uncertainty of happiness, suggests that these meditations on the inevitability of human bereavement were directed at the duke of Gloucester, who, as much as anyone, had learned to reflect on the role of misfortune in his life and its implications for the welfare of the body politic. The grief he felt at the sudden death of his oldest brother, England’s charismatic king, Henry V, who at the Battle of Agincourt had faced the enemy, straddling the supine body of his youngest brother, wounded in the groin in a conflict with the duke of Alencon, and dragging him to safety,93 was not Humfrey’s alone. There was a sense of collective loss in the kingdom in the second decade of the fifteenth century, and it was captured by Lydgate in 1422 in the work commissioned by the duke for his ‘plesaunce’. In The Serpent of Division, Lydgate compares the death of Henry V to that of Julius Caesar, whose assassination he describes as ‘an unaware stroke’, a phrase coined by Chaucer in his translation of Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, and which Lydgate also applied to the killing of the first empire builder, Cyrus the Great, lord of Asia. In The Divine Comedy, the imperial ambitions of Caesar and his fall have little to do with the workings of Fortune; it is the unfolding of the divine destiny of the empire and church, and Caesar’s assassination, like the crucifixion of Christ, will not ultimately impede the divine will. Caesar, in The Serpent of Division, is merely Fortune’s knight, motivated by pride and a sense of his honour and right; he ignores prophecies and omens, maintaining his right and title and his affinity ‘to boundless goddess Fortune in the high enterprise’. Confronting the Rubicorn, Caesar leaves behind all old alliances of Rome to ‘only follow the traces of Fortune’. He is an adventurer and overreacher, like Dante’s Ulysses, and significantly, after defeating Pompey, he journeys, like Ulysses, to the Pillars of Hercules, at the edge of the known world, to visit the temple of Hercules. Nevertheless he does have a dream of imperial destiny to unite a fragmented world,94 and although guilty of the sin of pride, the real source of the undermining of Rome’s greatness is Pompey’s envy, the sin of Satan, and Caesar, like Henry V, offered, through ambition and strong rule, hope in a resolution of internal division. However these two great princes were shown by Lydgate to be the dupes of Fortune: ‘with these two princes Fortune chose to play’ and Caesar, like Henry V, became just another conqueror unable to defeat death, which had undermined the greatest conqueror of all, Alexander the Great. Lydgate’s account of the disintegration of Alexander’s achievements after his premature demise emphasizes how, in the classical world, everything was on a vaster, 160

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unimaginable scale, from the size of the Macedonian empire stretching to India, to the scale of the subsequent bloodshed orchestrated by Olympia, Cassander and Antipater, which wiped out all of Alexander’s descendants and provided a salutary exemplum on the perils of princely ambition.95 There is, however, no dwelling on Christian humility, just a scientific demonstration of the way Fortune operates to provide a check and balance on megalomaniacal overreachers who, despite their delusions, are mere mortals, subject to the laws of nature. There is a sense in The Fall of Princes and The Serpent of Division that events bringing the downfall of the great are tragedies for which there is no explanation other than the turning of Fortune’s wheel. Rome itself is treated by Lydgate as if the city too were a character, like all the princes who are victims of Fortune. In an envoy on the fate of the city, the loss of its temples and empire, he appears to be giving Humfrey a monk’s moralistic diatribe on the pride of Rome’s tyrants and their worship of false idols, but it is not convincing.96 It is more an elegy about the way Fortune merges into time, the great destroyer, underscored by the refrains: ‘O noble princes see in this world there is no abiding’ and: ‘all by process of time brought to ruin’.97 Lydgate suggests that Fortune hovers over Rome’s greatest triumphs by emphasizing that in Caesar’s triumphant entry into Rome, a deformed wretch would ride on the back of his chariot, smiting him, and saying ‘know thyself ’, to demonstrate that there was no earthly glory without a change of someone’s fortune. The same laments were applied to Rome’s mythical ancestor, Troy, and the fourth book of Lydgate’s Troy Book is a meditation on the ruinous effect of time and Fortune on human grandeur: But all the world ought to rue The piteous waste of the mighty walls;98 a ruin and a loss profoundly meaningful in its lack of meaning. Lydgate’s secular interest in Fortune’s volatility was shared by a wide circle of monks and university academics who were reading Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. John Steke, a Brigettine monk, left his copy of Boethius together with Pliny’s Natural History and Euclid’s Geometry to the monastery of Syon, and the confessor of the monastery Thomas Westhaugh left his copy of Boethius to his college of Pembroke Hall.99 John Blacman, the Carthusian monk who was spiritual companion of Henry VI between 1446 and 1461, left a copy of Boethius to his charterhouse of Witham.100 Ownership of Boethius’s meditations on Fortune and Petrarch’s Remedies against Fortune was widespread among university academics, especially at Peterhouse college, Cambridge: Edward Kirketon, a fellow in 1384 left a Boethius with Trevet’s commentary to the college library; John Oteringham, a Peterhouse fellow in 1400 left a copy of Petrarch’s Remedies against Fortune to another fellow, Robert Alne, and other copies of this work were left to the college by John Neuton, the York treasurer and student of the works of Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton.101 Clare Hall fellows who donated copies of Boethius to the college library included Thomas Lexham (d. 1382) and William Wymble, chancellor of Cambridge in 1426.102 Interest in Fortune among university academics extended to vernacular meditations on the subject: John Bury an Austin friar of the London convent 161

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gave Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to Sheen Charterhouse; another copy of this translation was given to the Cambridge University library by John Crowcher a Gonville Hall fellow in 1407; Thomas Cyrcetur of Merton left Salisbury Cathedral a copy, and Robert Wodelark of Clare Hall in 1444 gave his foundation of Catherine’s Hall a copy of an English version of Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men (presumably Lydgate’s Fall of Princes).103 Musings on the turning of Fortune’s wheel were given a more dramatic, public focus in the ceremonial re-enactments of the transience of earthly glory in the disguisings104 or mummings (dumb shows accompanied by verses presented before court and civic audiences) that Lydgate helped to stage in London and Hertford. The London mumming, written by Lydgate in 1429, two years before he began work on The Fall of Princes, also draws on Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men; it was a stationary pageant to mark the Christmas festivities of 1430, subsequent to the coronation of Henry VI, whose father, Henry V, is presented, after Hector of Troy, as one who ‘put Fortune under foot’;105 his death at her hands would have been uppermost in the minds of the spectators, especially considering that the pageant begins on a bridge with a description of Fortune’s deceitfulness and changeability: Lady of mutability Who is called Fortune. for seldom in one form does she continue For she has a double face, Just so every hour and space She changes her conditions, And is always full of transmutations.106 Although the pageant displays the marshalling of the four cardinal virtues against Fortune’s disruptive games, invoking the stoicism of Seneca, Diogenes, Plato and Socrates (all heroic figures of philosophical detachment in The Fall of Princes) the most powerful and disturbing scene in the pageant remains the evocation of Fortune herself, with the accounts of her double nature, evoking the contrasting faces of nature, her changing seasons, and her destructive power, the natural forces of time and oblivion that sweep aside all lives including those of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar: She has her dwelling in the sea clinging to a barren rock … A little mountain like an isle; On which land some while There grows fresh flowers new Wondrously lusty of their hue … But suddenly there doth assail … branch and bough of every tree She robs them of their beauty … 162

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A raging flood that mansion It overflows and down … And as her house is always unstable Just so she herself is deceitful The proudest she can give a fall: She made Alexander win all, Than no man to withstand him would dare, And cast him down, before he was aware, So did she Caesar Julius.107 The earnest displays of the cardinal virtues can do little against such destructive natural forces: the pageant may end with them singing of their struggles against the goddess, but it means little because it is all just a game and Fortune will continue to play and win: And you all four shall now sing Will all your whole hearts entire Some new song around the fire, Such a one as you like the best; Let Fortune go play where she please.108 The same sense of inevitable defeat at the hands of Fortune is even portrayed in the comic Hertford mumming, written by Lydgate at the request of the controller of the royal household, John Bryg, and played before Henry V’s court at Hertford Castle at New Year’s Eve Vigil, 1427 or 1428, before Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, who gave the king a gift, according to the account book of John Merston.109 Husbands and wives complain about each other in a mock trial before an absent king: it is an uncertain and dangerous time when a child is on the throne and a grieving nation is orphaned: ‘He with his rebec may sing full often alas.’110 But no decision or arbitration can be reached and the court ‘seeing the peril of hasty judgment, decides in this continual strife, to give no definitive sentence’, because a child rules, and the matter is deferred for a year.111

Fortune warfare and princes: The nightmare of history One of the arenas where Fortune was seen to be most rampant was warfare. Gloucester’s generation had been shaped by their experiences of the war with France, and this gave added focus to their preoccupation with the vicissitudes of Fortune. The sons of William 6th Lord Roos, Sir Robert Roos of More End (c. 1394–1448) and his younger brother Sir Richard Roos (1410–81) who served with Talbot in France and were knighted in the field had their share of bereavement from conflict: they were still children when one older brother died at the Battle of Bauge in 1421 and another, Thomas the 8th Lord Roos, was drowned after the siege of Paris in 1430. Robert Roos received from Gloucester a French translation of Aegidius Romanus’s On the Government of Rulers and Vegetius’s 163

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Concerning Military Matters; John Tiptoft, the earl of Worcester owned a copy of The Fall of Princes that mirrored his own violent life: as Lord High Constable (1462) he presided over attainders and brutal executions of Lancastrians before his own beheading at the Tower in 1470.112 Another aristocratic author who saw himself buffeted by the winds of Fortune was Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, the jouster and pilgrim, bearer of a scallop shell badge, who translated from French the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers explaining, in his introduction, his reaction to the vicissitudes of Fortune; he also wrote a ballad on the unsteadfastness of Fortune.113 Woodville was a reader of Boethius and Seneca, which influenced his aspiration for a state of stoic detachment.114 The duke of Orleans and William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk expressed a war weariness and longing for peace that contrasts with the nostalgia for the glory years of Henry V’s conquests expressed by the writers associated with Gloucester and Fastolf. Charles, reflecting on his experiences of war, proclaimed peace as ‘a treasure that cannot be prized too highly … pray for peace Virgin Mary, turn towards your son, banish war which ruins everything’.115 He and Suffolk, seen by Chastellian in his continuation of The Fall of Princes, written for Margaret of Anjou, as contemporary victims of the turning of Fortune’s wheel,116 had been friends since June 1429 when Suffolk was captured at Jargeau by Charles’s halfbrother, Jean de Bois, the Bastard of Orleans, and Charles, a prisoner of the English since Agincourt, arranged his ransom. Suffolk succeeded in securing custody of Charles from July 1432 to 1436; in 1433 Charles dined with Suffolk and the duke of Burgundy’s ambassador, Hues de Connoy, at Suffolk’s London house to discuss peace proposals,117 and in the following year Suffolk arranged for him to travel to Dover to confer with the dukes of Bourbon and Brittany.118 However Suffolk lost control of Charles when his confinement was transferred to Gloucester’s father-in-law, Sir Reginald Cobham, and he remained a prisoner in more solitary circumstances in various English castles until 1440 when he was released upon payment of a ransom of 100,000 marks. Both men wrote poems in the language of their captors reflecting, like their mentor and fellow prisoner, Boethius, on the impact of the turning of the wheel of Fortune on their lives. When he was thirteen in 1407, Charles was informed of the murder of his father, Louis of Orleans, brother of the French king on the orders of John the Fearless, the duke of Burgundy; his wife, Isabella, whom he married as a ten-year-old died in childbirth in September 1409 aged nineteen and he never saw their daughter again after his capture at Agincourt, when she was only six years old. He used prison imagery to express his unhappiness as he stared at the walls of the various castles of his confinement. He called for a manuscript of Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men to be sent to him so he could read it while a captive of the English. In 1433, he met the French embassy and declared he was wasting the best years of his life as a prisoner. Inevitably he identified with Boethius, a fellow prisoner, and took with him on his release three copies of the Consolation of Philosophy, but he never attained the degree of detachment accompanying contemplation of Fortune that was encouraged by Boethius or Dante’s acceptance of Fortune’s higher wisdom. Indeed he found Fortune to be an unpredictable torment: ‘O Fortune once let me have peace. I pray thee heartily let me be at peace.’ Lady Fortune turning her wheel represented for him the ocean that he saw off the coast of Dover, separating him from his homeland.119 Charles, 164

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like Dante’s pilgrim, feels in his imprisonment that he is lost in a dark wood, a vast forest, reminiscent of the forest near Orleans, in which his path is obscured by trees felled by a great wind caused by Fortune.120 But there is no Beatrice, no heavenly intercessor to lead him out of the darkness. Like Dante’s pilgrim, he has a dream which draws on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and also Chaucer’s dream visions; it occurs during the Papal Jubilee of Martin V in 1423, which parallels Dante’s vision occurring during the Papal Jubilee, proclaimed by Boniface VIII in Rome on 22 February 1300. He had been asked to compose a ballad on his suffering, while celebrating masses for his dead wife Isabella, and he falls into a dream while sitting on a bench on a knoll overlooking the ocean that separates him from his home. Like Dante in Vita Nuova, he makes many references to the god of love, and Venus, identified with Fortune and his dead mother Valentina, comes to him from across the sea in the form of a naked lady with a crown of doves. Charles tells her about his lady’s death, and Venus’s advice diverges sharply from the advice given by Virgil to Dante. She scolds him for living like an anchorite and for his excessive grief, which she judges to be masochistic, and at this point the dream moves in the direction of Chaucer’s dream visions. The influence of The Book of the Duchess can be seen in Venus’s advice to Charles to leave mourning, to let go of the past, and to remarry. She takes him up into the air to meet Fortune, whose identity merges with hers, and he is moved to exclaim that nothing since the death of his lady has moved him so much as this vision, and he declares his love for Fortune.121 She has taken Isabella from him, but, like Lydgate’s ‘unaware stroke’ she presents possibilities. The roar of the ocean on the pebbles of Dover Beach does not communicate to Charles, sitting on his bench, the inscrutable mysterious justice of the divine will that Dante and his reader contemplate on their benches, but the future does hold possibilities for Charles if he is prepared to let go of the past, his ideals and self-image. It is ultimately a pragmatic and realistic acceptance of the principles of change in nature rather than of courtly love and otherworldly religious conventions, an approach to love and bereavement that is in accord with Chaucer’s vision, a humanist, Renaissance outlook. That profound twentieth century reader of Dante, James Joyce, pronounced: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake,’ and fifteenth century readers of The Divine Comedy, much closer to his the poet’s time, were also beginning to see history as something of a nightmare that approached the horrors of Dante’s view of Hell, without his reassuring sense of contrapasso and destiny. The Fall of Princes is nothing more than a journey through a hell on earth, where most of the protagonists, such as Brumhilde, queen of the Franks 543–613, and Andronikos I Komneos (c. 1118–1185) the Byzantine emperor, end their lives in torture, mutilation and despair. In one of his envoys, which were supposed to make some moral sense out of the tragedies of the great, Lydgate asserted: Virtue on Fortune shows defiance For Fortune has no domination When noble princes are governed by reason.122 But he is also forced to consider, in another of his envoys addressed to the duke of Gloucester, that princes, no matter how much they may wish to be governed by reason, 165

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are themselves the products of nature and the principles of alchemical change that dominate nature; they are therefore unstable, volatile and prey to their emotions, and whatever Fortune throws in the path of the prince becomes a treacle that tempers and transmutes his heart and mind, so that he becomes an instrument of Fortune and one of the most fearful manifestations of the changeable and destructive powers of nature. Princes, like the psychopathic Pyrrhus, may seem to be dispensers of Fortune, but they all become her instruments: Princes, Princesses, see how deceptive Be all these worldly revolutions, And how Fortune reclining in her couch, With her treacle tempers false poisons So marvellous be her confections,… But of all the changes, the change most to be dreaded, And most fearful is that variance, When princes who can the people lead, Be found unstable in their governance.123 It is for this reason that Lydgate, in the advice given by Aristotle to Alexander, emphasizes that princes should try to ameliorate their mutability and should seek to achieve a stable humoral balance through exercise, diet and philosophy. In a digression in The Fall of Princes following the fall of Rome in 410 AD, Lydgate applied alchemical terminology to suggest a prince should be as stable as any stone (like St Alban), tempering justice with mercy to attain Aristotle’s state of the golden mean.124 Aristotle, in the Ethics, described nature and human beings themselves as flawed because of their constant, restless changeability: only the gods, he argued, enjoy permanent equilibrium and pleasure, while humans are incapable of feeling permanent joy because of the inevitable conflict that occurs between body and soul, the constant oscillations between pleasure and pain.125 Dame Fortune herself, in The Fall of Princes, protests that the fluctuating moods of princes are just like the turnings of Fortune’s wheel, a force of disruption and division. A prince, she says, may think he can control the world; until, that is, he sees Fortune’s other face. This is a far cry from the ordered cosmos of Dante where all forms of human and social causality, and especially the authority of clergy and princes, are conceived in terms of the influence of the heavens: kings and emperors are governed by Jupiter, theologians by the Sun and contemplatives by Saturn. The Fall of Princes is essentially a journey through history, examining the lives of the great, but history in this epic is not determined by the wills of princes, and free will seems irrelevant in the face of Fortune’s arbitrary power: the torments of the fallen great occur as a result of the vagaries of Fortune rather than the operation of the human will. The plague which visits Thebes and the sufferings of Oedipus and Theseus are all attributed to the turning of Fortune’s wheel: the observation that the greatest sorrows come after joy, which in Francesca’s story in Inferno has an explicable rationale, is attributed by Lydgate to the envy and maliciousness of Fortune: 166

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And worst of all and most contrary, Is when estates, of highest renown, Be from their nobility suddenly cast down. There is no glory that shines here, That false Fortune cannot magnify But when someone’s fame is brightest and clear, She can eclipse it with some cloudy sky Of unforeseen sorrow, solely through envy. Look to Oedipus as open evidence.126 In an allegorical wrestling bout, Poverty binds Fortune to suggest that princes, with their wealth, are most prone to fall furthest from the wheel, and they can only make themselves less vulnerable by curbing their ambition and greed. Freedom of the will, including the will of a prince, is circumscribed by his mistress, Fortune.127 History therefore lacks any ultimate meaning, any sense of destiny, individual or collective; whereas for Dante, history is the unfolding, collective destiny of the Roman Empire, the Christian church and the divine will. The difference between the two views of Fortune and history is emphasized in the climactic encounters with Satan in The Divine Comedy and Dame Fortune in The Fall of Princes. There are striking similarities between these two great colossi. They are both seen from afar as gigantic mills. In the bottom pit of Cocytus, in the fourth circle of Judecca, reserved for traitors to lords and benefactors, Virgil says to Dante: Therefore ‘look ahead’, said my Master, ‘to see if you discern him.’ As, when a thick mist breathes, or, when our hemisphere is all night, a mill appears from afar that the wind is turning.128 Satan has gigantic arms and two great wings, like sea birds or the sails of a ship, but resembling those of a bat, which as they flap they freeze the River Cocytus and its lake; his appearance is partly inspired by the triple-headed demon devouring sinners in its three bloodied mouths in the mosaic in the cupola of the baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence. Lucifer is over one thousand feet tall and buried in the ice from the waist down he towers seven hundred feet above Dante, who is reliving his childhood experiences of looking up at the image of the monster in the cupola of the baptistry. Fortune similarly appears before the author of The Fall of Princes in the form of a gigantic woman with one hundred arms, like a great mill. The difference is Satan can only fan the ice cold winds of Hell over the sinners; he is impotent, trapped in the ice, and he only has power over the damned, those who have, like him, betrayed God and chosen of their own free will to be imprisoned with Satan. Fortune however, in The Fall of Princes, with her hundred arms, lifts and throws down all of humanity. These closely related encounters with the two mill-like forces represent two contrasting views of history and Fortune. The goddess in The Fall of Princes illustrates 167

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the alchemical principles behind nature’s flux. She is decked in white and red flowers, which bloom and decay, and many colours, of which the predominant one is green. The turning of her mill-like arms echoes the circular principles of nature: birth, generation and decay, from which no one can escape, and in which there is no overriding principle of justice or destiny. In Dante’s Inferno, by contrast, there is a working out of a conflict between the wills of the sinners and the divine will, culminating in the sight of Satan chewing in his three mouths Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot. The two great crimes against the will of God were seen to be the assassination and betrayal of Julius Caesar by Brutus and Cassius, which interfered with the imperial destiny of Rome, essential for the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, Judas's betrayal of Jesus Christ, followed by the Crucifixion. The imprisonment of Satan and these three traitors in ice in the bottom of the pit of Hell confirms the fulfilment of divine destiny to which all history moves. For those whose wills are conformed to God’s there is a way out from the nightmare of history. Dante is able to make his way out of Inferno through a worm hole to see the stars again, the lights of Heaven. However, he is only able to achieve this through the mediation and inspiration of women who are the only stable elements in his life, but who in early Renaissance England will be identified with the unstable and unpredictable forces of nature and Fortune.

Figure 8  Lydgate contemplating the wheel of Fortune. A woodcut from a 1513 edition of his Fall of Princes © The Granger Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

168

CHAPTER 6 LUNA (THE MOON) WOMEN

If it be the wish of Him through whom all things flourish that my life continue for a few more years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any woman. –Dante, Vita Nuova1 Beatrice gazed at me with eyes so divine and full of sparks of love … ‘io ti fiammeggio nel caldo d’amore’ (I flame you in the warmth of love) –Dante, Paradiso2 The treatment of women from Dante to the fifteenth century has some continuity in terms of the undermining of courtly love conventions where the woman, a remote and unattainable ideal, becomes the focus of more intimate and penetrating psychological observation, but in all other respects writers in England depicted women very differently and at times directly satirized Dante’s idealization of Beatrice. Most of the women that feature in The Divine Comedy are faithful, loyal and consistent. They reciprocate love because it was seen as a manifestation of light, something shared by all. They are also shown to be the moral and intellectual equals of men, and Beatrice, who displays facility in all four levels of the interpretive skills (literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical) which were seen to be the preserve of male clergy, serves as a philosophical mentor to the pilgrim, a source of inspiration in his progress to the heavens, as her sexuality and passion are sublimated into religious devotion. But Beatrice is the subject of explicit satire in Chaucer’s depiction of Criseyde as a changeable, irresolute woman governed by self-interest and pragmatism. Even more explicit satire was provided in Gloucester’s circle in the Latin translation of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio,3 in which the focus of a pilgrim’s love is the incarnation of greed, betrayal and lust. Lydgate identified the inconstancy of women with Dame Fortune, and the trial of Gloucester’s wife for witchcraft served to reinforce fears that women lured men away from intellectual, spiritual enlightenment, that they were to be identified with occult forces of the earth, and that they were an unstable element in the body politic.

Francesca and Nella: passionate and loyal women In the period from 1370 to 1450 Dante’s concept of Fortune as the serene and wise agent of Heaven had been transformed into an inconstant, wilful woman who declares to Boccaccio in Lydgate’s version of Fortunes of Famous Men:

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I am of manners most changeable, In these conditions truly feminine; … To every change ready to incline, As women be and maidens tender of age,’4 and this reflects changing attitudes to women in general. This is not to say that Dante’s views on women were anything but complicated, and it would be simplistic to suggest a seamless progression from his idealization of women in The Divine Comedy to the satirical, and at times scabrous, depiction of women that predominates in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century texts circulating in England. Women in Inferno, such as Thais and Myrrha, are seductive, deceitful, manipulative and motivated primarily by lust, but a change occurs in the treatment of women in Purgatorio where they become associated with loyalty and faithfulness; in many cases they are the only source of intercession for the penitents. The island is guarded by a stern pagan, Cato, released from Limbo during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell with the duty of minding the angelic gateway to the mountain reminiscent of the Pillars of Hercules, but pointing east instead of west. He softens in his attitude towards the pilgrim and lets him pass when Virgil agrees to bring news of him to his wife Marcia, a pagan in Limbo, who continues vainly to pray for her husband, who God has ordained will remain at the base of Purgatory: I am from the circle that holds the chaste eyes of your Marcia, who still seems to beg you, O holy breast, to consider her your own.’5 Further up the mountain Manfred begs the pilgrim to tell his ‘lovely daughter’, Constance, that he is not in Hell and she will certainly pray for him;6 Nino Visconti rests his hopes on his ‘innocent’ daughter, Giovanna,7 and Pope Adrian V’s last request to the pilgrim is to remember his virtuous niece, Alagia, whom Dante would have met between 1308 and 1309 when he was a guest of her husband, Moroello Malespina: ‘She alone is left to me back there.’8 It could be argued that, with the exception of Marcia, these are instances of the loyalty of innocent girls, and faithfulness in mature sexual relationships depends on the maintenance of physical contact. Visconti cannot rely on the prayers of his widow, Beatrice, who has remarried and he understands: Through her one readily understands how long the fire of love lasts in a female, if sight or touch do not frequently kindle it.9 However there is one encounter on the corniche of gluttony, during the pilgrim’s penitential progress up the mountain of Purgatory, that suggests a genuine conversion in the pilgrim’s attitudes, when he confronts his past, erratic and changeable behaviour towards women and his assumption that they are motivated purely by lust. Here, on a terrace appropriately concerned with sins of the tongue, he meets his close friend, Forese Donati, a member of the Black Guelph family, poet and brother of Piccarda, and in a 170

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conversation with him they refer to a shared past that causes Dante to feel a sense of shame, that inspires a conversion in his attitudes towards women: ‘If you call back to mind what you used to be with me, and I with you, the present memory will still be heavy. From that life I was turned away by the one who goes ahead of me.’10 This alludes to a period between the death of his father, shortly after 1275,11 and Forese’s death in 1296, when the two young poets engaged in a poetic dispute over the course of an exchange of six sonnets, a correspondence in verse known as a tenzone, in which they displayed their virtuosity in throwing insults at each other and their families.12 In the first of these sonnets in La Tenzone, Dante insulted Forese’s wife, Nella, portraying her as suffering from a hacking cough, due to her scanty bed clothing, punning on Forese’s inadequacy in the bedroom: ‘only for one lack inside her nest’, which prompts her mother to cry: ‘Alas, for dried figs I could have married her to Count Guido,’ implying she is sexually demanding and potentially unfaithful, either sexually or in her sympathies with the Donati’s enemies, the White Guelphs, and this was one reason Forese ignored her, because she could not be trusted.13 However, when Dante asks Forese to explain why, only five years after his death, he has moved so quickly up five corniches of the mountain, despite only repenting on his deathbed, he is brought face to face with the truth that in Purgatory penitents can only really count on the loyalty and intercession of women, and he is told by Forese that it is because of the faithfulness and devotion of his wife, Nella that I have been so quickly brought to drink the sweet wormwood of our sufferings by my Nella and her broken weeping. With her devoted prayers and sighs she has drawn me from the shore of waiting.14 This information inspires a re-evaluation of Nella’s real warmth and loyalty, beyond the sexual stereotypes held by both men: My little widow, whom I dearly loved, is the dearer to God and more beloved the more isolated she is in her good actions.15 Dante then asks his friend about his sister, Piccarda, and is informed: My sister, of whose goodness and beauty I know not which was the greater, already triumphs joyous with her crown on high Olympus.16 171

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However, the discussion about these two virtuous women is interspersed with a condemnation of the behaviour of the shameless Florentine women who walk around the city naked from the waist showing off their breasts. Forese predicts the coming of sumptuary legislation to compel them to cover themselves (legislation which would be promulgated by the bishop of Florence in 1310). However, even these diatribes reveal a certain degree of idolization of the feminine. In this terrace, associated with feeding and tongues, there is a concern over the misuse of the sacred breast being flaunted as a sexual attraction rather than being revered as the sacrosanct organ that feeds and nourishes the infant. In anticipating divine punishment for their behaviour, Forese makes a connection between communication through language, and feeding and nourishing a child at the breast: But if these shameless ones knew what the swift heavens are preparing for them, they would already have opened their mouths to howl, for, if my foreseeing does not deceive me, they will grieve before hair grows on the cheeks of one who now can be consoled with a lullaby.17 As far as Dante the vernacular poet was concerned, the penitential lesson he learned on this terrace is clear: it is from the breast of the mother, or wet nurse, that he would have imbibed the vernacular language, the most noble of languages, the mother tongue, the language of his sacred poem (in a letter to Can Grande della Scala he wrote: ‘it is the vernacular speech in which women communicate’).18 He had wronged a woman in this language, and he was penitentially bound to use his native speech to honour the woman who haunts the pages of The Divine Comedy, Francesca da Rimini. Nella revealed the complexity and depth of a woman whose faith and commitment undermined the sexual stereotypes of the Tenzone. Dante will reveal these qualities in his portrayal of Beatrice, whom he meets at the top of the mountain, when he has completed his penance, but it is his empathy for Francesca that shows his ability to understand a complex woman who does not conform to the polarized roles of Virgin Mary, the mother nursing at her breast an infant destined to be a great poet or the courtesan. Francesca is a woman fallen into Hell in the pursuit of passion (her sin has been committed through the eyes) and Dante’s portrayal shows the extent of his mature sympathy for and understanding of women (the very ink with which he wrote Francesca’s story was made from lambaste, a product of combustion or the flames of love). Dante's portrayal of Francesca was the fruit of a conversion: the convention of male suitors dictated that they should project onto a remote figure fantasies of pursuit and possession; but instead the poet of The Divine Comedy, rather than concentrating solely on a woman's beauty, shows an appreciation of her intelligence and passion: ‘what is more beautiful in a woman than to be wise’;19 and to give women a voice with which to express their desires, to tell their stories, independent of the narcissistic self-constructions of male poets. The beginning of this conversion occurs of a poet who once doubted womens' capacity for abstract thought and who wrote before 1394 in the canzone: 'Grief brings boldness to my heart': 172

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‘Rarely does an obscure word reach an intellect clothed in a veil and so with you plain speaking is required’20 may be connected with the donna gentile of the Vita Nuova, perhaps a learned woman who brought consolation to the grieving poet, who subsequently applied this to his love of philosophy. Halfway through the Vita Nuova when Dante takes the radical step of addressing a lyric presenting Beatrice as still alive, but written just after her death in June 1390, to ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore?’ (ladies who have intelligence of love),21 the lines with which his fellow poets, the troubadour lyricist of the mid-thirteenth century, Bonagiunta da Lucca, and Forese Donati greet him on the sixth terrace of Purgatory as an example of the ‘new sweet style’.22 Francesca da Rimini was a member of the Polenta family: her father, Guido I Vecchio da Polenta, was appointed to a position of podesta in Florence in July 1390 because as an outsider from Ravenna he was presumed to be above the factionalism prevalent in Florence, and his successors ruled Ravenna where Francesca’s nephew, Guido Novello da Polenta, a poet in the Dolce stil nuovo tradition, would be Dante’s host at the end of his life, and under his patronage Dante would complete Paradiso. Francesca’s story, like that of most women in this period, would never have been told had it not been for Dante’s poem, the sole source for her life. An early commentary, L’Ottimo commento della Divina Commedia,23 describes how she was pressed into an arranged marriage by her father, the lord of Ravenna, who aspired to dominance in Rimini through an alliance with Giovanni (Gianciotto) Malatesta, the son of the lord of Rimini, which would bring together the two most powerful families in the Romagna. The Ottimo commento suggests it was an incompatible match, for Gianciotto was an uncouth, ugly warrior, in contrast to Paolo, his younger, beautiful, well-mannered and rather lightweight brother, who was more suited to the beautiful, high-spirited and light-hearted Francesca (thus forming a similar triangle to Helen, Menelaus and Paris). Boccaccio in his Esposizione to The Divine Comedy introduced an element of deception into this arranged marriage: Guido da Polenta, worried that his headstrong daughter would not take to Gianciotto if she saw him before the marriage, sent Paolo Malatesta to Ravenna to marry Francesca as his brother’s proxy, and Francesca duly fell in love with Paolo. The marriage took place in 1275, the year that Polenta, with the help of the Malatesta, seized power in Ravenna. Francesca, after realizing the deception, continued to love Paolo. According to the Ottimo Commento, a servant conveyed news of the adulterous liaison to Gianciotto; and Jacobo della Lana (1324–8) described how the husband found the couple in the act of sinning and pierced them in such a way that they were locked together in one embrace in a liebestod. Boccaccio, claiming the status of a historian relying on oral testimony, suggested that Gianciotto ran at Paolo with his sword and Francesca, intervening, was inadvertently killed by her husband, who then slew Paolo.24 The deaths of the couple must have occurred between 1283 and 1286, for Paolo, in Florence as capitano del Polo in 1283, resigned in February 1283 to return to Rimini, and by 1286 Gianciotto had remarried.25 173

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Dante encounters Francesca in the second circle of Hell, just underneath Limbo in a circle reserved for the lustful, and defined by the first turning of Minos’s phallic tail, along with her lover, Paolo, buffeted by the winds symbolizing compulsive passion (a concept derived from Aristotle’s Ethics).26 Dante would think of the south-west gusts among the Pineta pine forest at Classe, near Francesca’s home town of Ravenna, when describing the gentle breeze blowing through the trees in the garden of Earthly Paradise. The pilgrim confessed to Virgil his sympathy and empathy for Francesca and her love: Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how much yearning, led them to the grievous pass. And he turns to Francesca and speaks directly to her: Francesca, your sufferings make me sad and piteous to Tears.27 Francesca has been condemned by many commentators as an Eve who, like most women, is good with words and persuasive, and who manipulated Dante into feeling sorry for her, but this does not do justice, either to the depth of her feelings, or to the extent of the pilgrim’s empathy. What Francesca has, in common with Piccarda and Forese’s widow, is loyalty and commitment. Francesca is no remote and tormenting idol of a courtly lover; it is she who is the dominant and communicative one, while Paolo just weeps; she assures the poet that the loved one has no choice but to reciprocate the feelings of love she receives, and she at least, like Count Ugolino, remains true to her passion, her will, or as she puts it ‘our twisted pain’:28 Love, which pardons no one loved from loving in return, seized me for his beauty so strongly that, as you see, it still does not abandon me.29 She will remain for all eternity in Hell, where she has chosen to be and where she belongs (which Lord Byron understood in writing to his sister, with whom he had been involved in a similarly incestuous passion), buffeted by the winds of her passion so clearly reciprocated by her lover: ‘so great a lover he who will never be separated from me’.30 Her will, so strong and so misdirected, may have secured her sentence in Hell; unlike Piccarda (whom she resembles as a wife and victim of a violent husband who she says is destined for Caina, named after Cain, the first zone on the ninth circle of Hell reserved for those who betray or kill their kin), she does not have a will divided between an absolute will devoted to Christ and a conditional will submitting to fear of violence and circumstances,31 and her undivided passion clearly moves the poet, because it reminds him of his own youth when his will overcame his reason: 174

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As doves, called by their desire, with wings raised and steady come to their sweet nest through the air, borne by their will.32 Dante loved women: his sympathy for their travails in childbirth (both his mother, whom he lost in 1370/3 while he was very young, and Beatrice, who may have died in childbirth) is shown when he hears a penitent cry ‘Sweet Mary’ and he recalls that this is what ‘a woman giving birth will do’.33 He envisaged the meridian traversing the empyreal rose linking the two women of his life, the Virgin and St Lucia, and he was sympathetic towards their carnality; he appreciated their lack of bodily hair and described his movement from the red heaven of Mars to the silver beauty of Jupiter as the changing in a short interval of time of a lady’s white face, when it burdens itself of the burden of shame,34 and his empathy for Francesca’s sweet sighs is shown in his placing the circle of lust just beyond Limbo outside the walls of Dis. The sphere of Venus, ‘where the shadow of the world shrinks to a point’, shares a similar transitional demarcation position to the tenth canto, near where it is situated, located at the farthermost outreach of Earth’s conical shadow, when the sub-solar spheres of the Moon, Mercury and Venus are in opposition to the Sun. Within this shadow are the blessed who, when alive, were weakened by earthly frailties and attachments and who committed venial sins of inconstancy (the Moon), sins of ambition (Mercury) and sins of passion (Venus). In Venus the pilgrim encounters two women whose lives have been dictated by the lights of Venus: the prostitute Rahab whose displayed red cloth helped Joshua into the city of Jericho,35 and Cunizza da Romano, who after her abduction by the troubadour poet Sordello wandered the world taking lovers and husbands until, in 1265, she found shelter in the Cavalcanti household in Florence, where Dante may have met her, and who confessed that, although common folk would not comprehend her passion, she joyfully forgave herself ‘because the light of this star overcame me’. 36 The third encounter in Venus was with the troubadour poet, Folquet de Marseille, who loved his lord’s wife and who, after her death, entered a Cistercian monastery and applied his passion to crusading against the Cathars.37 Dante, in his celebration of the physical world of the flesh, opposed the dualistic trends of the Cathars, which were to some extent upheld in orthodox circles in the fifteenth century church and were encouraged by Plato’s emphasis on the spirit, and even by alchemists’ attempts to transmute flesh into spirit. In his celebration of the beauty of women, Dante makes a connection between Francesca and Beatrice. Francesca recalls that Paolo was seized by his love for her beauty and the manner of her losing this beauty still pains her: Love, which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart, seized this one for the lovely person that was taken from me; and the manner still injures me.38 175

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And Beatrice reflects on her death in a similar way, telling Dante in the Earthly Paradise: You will hear how the burial of my flesh should have turned you the contrary direction. Never did nature or art present to you such beauty as did the lovely members in which I was enclosed, and now they are scattered in earth.’39 She is no less an object of sexual passion than Francesca: A thousand desires hotter than flame drew my eyes to her shining ones,40 and her reunion with the pilgrim in the Earthly Paradise, with its eager anticipation of exchanging glances, is as erotically charged as that of Francesca and Paolo, as the dancing nymphs in the Earthly Paradise beg Beatrice ‘to turn your holy eyes’41 and even to ‘do us the grace of unveiling your mouth for him’.42 Beatrice, in castigating her lover for his betrayals, is as dominant and articulate as Francesca, and both men are reduced to uncontrollable weeping. What separates the two women is Beatrice’s sublimation of erotic passion into religious devotion: ‘within your desires for me which were leading you to love the Good’43 and which are emphasized by her turning away from her lover to look at Christ in the form of the griffon. The beauty of women, especially the Virgin and Beatrice, demonstrates the perfection of the relation of the soul and the body – the permeating of the body with the ‘word’ of the soul so that the pursuit of a woman’s beauty becomes a religious quest. Dante’s complex feelings towards Francesca are intimately bound up with his passion for Beatrice (he faints in both women’s presence) and they are connected with his sympathy for another betrayed woman, the wife of his friend Forese. Nella Donati and Francesca da Rimini force the pilgrim to revaluate his past attitudes. When Francesca says, ‘Love, which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart’, she is echoing the phrases employed by poets of the ‘new sweet style’ such as Guido Guinizelli (1230–1276) and Dante himself, which express conventional chivalric attitudes towards women. Dante’s conflicted emotions and sense of involvement in the doomed lovers’ passion reach a climax when he hears that their love had been consummated when they read Galeotto (Galahad’s account of the love affair between Launcelot and Guinivere); it is at this point that he is most profoundly affected: ‘When we read that the yearned for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he, who will never be separated from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it: that day we read there no further.’ 176

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While one spirit said this, the other was weeping so that for pity I fainted as if I were dying, and I fell as a dead body falls.44 Galeotto, the Italian form of Galahaut, Lancelot’s friend who arranged the meeting with Guinevere, is the Italian equivalent of a pandar or go-between, and Dante had been directly implicated in this relationship because he too had been galeotto or go-between as the youthful author, of the type of love poetry read by Francesca and Paolo that, while idealizing the beloved, sees possession as the ultimate quest of the lover. Dante’s attempt to move beyond this concept of love, to accept his destiny of loving a woman he has never possessed and is now dead, is the subject of his Vita Nuova (The New Life), composed in 1292–3 shortly after Beatrice’s death.

Beatrice and the wisdom of women It has been suggested that Beatrice whom Dante rescued along with Francesca from oblivion, and who he describes as having pearl-like pale skin, emerald green eyes, and therefore presumably auburn hair, is a fictitious creation or that Dante based his portrait around someone he hardly ever saw. This seems unlikely as they were the same age and grew up in the same small neighbourhood: the Alighieris had, since the twelfth century, lived in the parish of San Martino del Vescovo, within the sesto of Porta San Pietro. Beatrice Portinari (b. 1266) was from a family prominent in trade and finance in the sesto Porta San Pietro and therefore, living in the same district, she must have come into close contact with the Alighieris. Both families were politically close to the Cerchi family, the backbone of the White Guelphs in opposition to the Black Guelphs led by the Donati: and Dante refers to Beatrice by name in a conversation with Forese Donati as if his relationship with his sister was well known among their friends45 (he even nicknamed Beatrice Lady Bice)46. There were three encounters between her and Dante that feature in the Vita Nuova, as nine-year-old children, again at the age of eighteen when Beatrice acknowledges his greeting, and a subsequent meeting at which she withheld her greeting. But the Vita Nuova attests to numerous other meetings: ‘Wherever and whenever she appeared, in anticipation of her marvellous greeting, I held no man my enemy … And when she was about to greet me, one of Love’s spirits, annihilating all the spirits of the senses, would drive out the feeble spirits of sight.’47 His behaviour around her even occasioned some amusement and incredulity: ‘Since you take on so ridiculous an appearance whenever you are near this lady, why do you try to see her.’48 Beatrice is even described walking towards the poet in the company of Vanna, the lover of his best friend Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante considered Beatrice’s brother, Manetto, to be his best friend after Guido.49 Manetto seems to have been well aware of the poet’s affection for his sister, and on the death of Beatrice, as head of the Portinari family, he asked him to compose something for a lady who had died.50 The commentary Dante wrote for his prophetic 177

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nightmare in which he saw Beatrice lying dead suggests he may have visited the house of mourning and witnessed her laying out: 'I saw my lady lying dead and women seemed to be covering her, that is her head with a white veil'.51 Dante even wrote a letter in Latin prose to the priors of Florence (referred to in his Vita Nuova) describing the city’s grief, taking the words of Jeremiah: ‘How doth the city sit solitary,’ and one of the recipients was Cino, son of Iacobo de Bardi, head of the guild of merchants, and a cousin of Beatrice’s widow, Simone.52 The Divine Comedy provides a hint of a relationship between the two which is based on Beatrice’s knowledge of Dante’s faults. In Paradise, in the sphere of Mars, Dante eagerly questions his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, on his noble, Roman heritage, glorying in the mantle betokening his ancestor’s knighthood, and this elicits from Beatrice a fondly indulgent smile, aware as she is of his pride: So that Beatrice, a little apart and smiling, resembled her who coughed at the first recorded fault of Guinevere.53 This linking of Beatrice’s fond indulgence towards the pilgrim with that of the Lady of Malehault, a former lover of Lancelot who observed the adulterous Guinevere’s interest in Lancelot, would imply that even in Paradise there is an erotic element to the relationship between the pilgrim and Beatrice. Initially the object of the lover’s quest is possession, fulfilment of desire in the form of obtaining a greeting or salutation from Beatrice: ‘Now it is most evident that in her salutation lay my blessed happiness,’ and: ‘There burned within me a flame that consumed all past offences;’54 after he has received her greeting and witnessed the ‘net’ of her smile that leaves him ecstatic, he has a sensual dream (unaware that it foretells her death) in which Love appears in a cloud of fire: ‘It seemed to me that in his arms there lay a figure asleep and naked except for a crimson cloth loosely wrapping it. Looking at it very intently, I realised that it was the lady of the blessed greeting.’55 One day Beatrice denies Dante her greeting, angered about the rumours of his attentions towards another woman (who he claims to have used as a screen to hide his adoration of Beatrice). He has a dream on the ninth hour of the day when a young man in white denounces the power his passions have over him: ‘I am like the centre of a circle, equidistant from all points in the circumference, but you are not.’ 56 Aware that he needs to become centred, in control, instead of on the periphery of emotional stimuli, he responds to this crisis by formulating a new approach to love poetry in which possession and gratification are no longer required and which he explains to a group of sharp witted ladies who are puzzled by his obsession and who ask him: ‘To what end do you love this lady if you cannot even endure the sight of her? Tell us for surely the purpose of such love must be strange indeed.’ He replies: ‘Ladies, the end and aim of my love formerly lay in the greeting of this lady to whom you are perhaps referring, and in this greeting dwelt my bliss and all my desires. But since it pleased her to deny it to me, my lord, Love through his grace has placed all my bliss in something that cannot fail me.’ They ask him 178

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what this bliss is (their sighs like lovely snowflakes amid the rain), and he replies: ‘In those words that praise my lady.’57 In other words the poetry itself becomes the source of bliss and one of the ladies perceptively observes: 'If that is true your verses would be very different'.58 To the troubadour poet Bonagiunta of Lucca (c. 1220–90) and Forese Donati, on the sixth terrace of Purgatory, he explains: I in myself am one who, when Love breathes within me, take note, 59 suggesting, with the emphasis on breath (pneuma) or spirit, and the dictation from the god of Love, that these feelings proceed from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and are breathed back to God through his feather quill, in poetry described by Bonagiunta as the untying of a knot,60 the knot that releases the falcon as it flies back to the falconer swinging the ball of the revolving heavens. The precise nature of this praise, focusing on the goodness and divine origins of the lady, will be the subject of the next chapter. But this realization of a change in direction of his attitude towards women and his art was not without conflict and guilt, which surfaced in his reaction to Francesca. One of the ladies to whom he has revealed his conversion reminds him that behind his self-pitying laments lay impure designs: ‘If you are telling us the truth, then those words you wrote to her indicating your condition must have been composed with other intentions.’61 The conflict between desire and reason, in which Francesca succumbed to desire, continues to trouble the poet after Beatrice’s death, when he develops feelings towards a compassionate woman: ‘My thoughts were divided. One I call heart, that is desire; the other soul, that is reason.’62 This conflict is resolved when one day, at nones on the ninth hour of the day, he has a vision that helps him combat desire, the adversary of reason. He sees Beatrice as a nine-year-old child, in the crimson garments she wore when he first saw her, and his heart began to repent of the desire ‘by which it had so unworthily let itself be possessed for some time contrary to firm reason’,63 and once he rejects this desire, all his thoughts return to Beatrice. Dante recalls this vision of her as a nine-yearold child in crimson when he meets her at the top of Mount Purgatory. Beatrice shares with Francesca beauty, compassion and loyalty, and both women are articulate. Beatrice is as loquacious and as intellectually sharp and opinionated as Virgil; her lecture on providential history is prefaced: ‘according to my infallible judgment’.64 She shares with Dante’s teacher a degree of androgyny, occupying roles forbidden to women such as a priest, confessor, teacher and theologian and she exhibits a masculine intelligence.65 What distinguishers her from Francesca is she does not allow her passions to overrule her reason, and this is why the two women have different fates in the afterworld: Francesca abused God and his gift of free will by allowing her instincts, her passion, to override her reason. Beatrice goes to the edge of Hell, to Limbo, moved by love, to persuade Virgil to rescue Dante from the dark and wild wood where he has lost his way, impeded in his progress by the three beasts representing the three divisions of Hell and the disordered appetites of the will, and to guide him from Hell by showing him the effects of his surrender of his free will. His journey up the mountain of Purgatory is an educational 179

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and penitential process schooling his will, controlling his various weaknesses, of which pride and lust feature, and Beatrice scolds him, like a stern mother, rebuking him for wandering from her after her death, distracted by mortal, transient things. On the seventh terrace, on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise, he is exhorted by Virgil to pass through the purifying flames that will purge his lust by reminding him that Beatrice is on the other side. In contrast to the dark wood and permanent night of Hell, she is identified with the sun, the light of reason: I have sometimes seen, at the beginning of the day, the eastern sky all rosy, and the rest adorned with cloudless blue, and the face of the sun rising shadowed, so that by the tempering of vapours the eye endured it for a long while.66 It is significant that at the point of his entry into the Earthly Paradise, at the end of his penitential journey up the mountain with Virgil, Dante is transferred to the care of Beatrice, emphasizing that she is taking on the role of fostering his discipline and reasoning, occupying the role of a father, an interesting and radical dimension to Dante’s conception of women. Parental figures are fundamental to his concept of the relationships between men and women: on the death of Beatrice’s father on 31 December 1289, while observing Beatrice’s weeping, he reflects: ‘There is no friendship more intimate than of a good father for a good child or of a good child for a good father.’67 Virgil has been Dante’s surrogate father, performing the role of his real father. Dante never mentions his biological father, Alighiero di Bellincione (who as a usurer sold God’s time), and who died shortly after 1275 when Dante was barely ten (which inspired Joyce to create the father–son relationship between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus), and the moment when Virgil hands over his charge to Beatrice for further correction is especially poignant: But Virgil had left us deprived of himself – Virgil, most sweet father, Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation –, nor did everything our ancient mother lost suffice to prevent my cheeks, though cleansed with dew, from turning dark again with tears. “Dante, though Virgil depart, do not weep yet, do not weep yet, for you must weep to another sword.68 It is at this juncture, when the father passes the son onto his lady, that Dante remembers his first encounter with Beatrice as a nine-year-old child, in which, according to Boccaccio, Dante’s actual father played a similar role. Boccaccio was 180

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acquainted with a near relative of Bice Portinari, and despite his acerbic satire of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice, he provided a sensitive and perceptive account of their first meeting. Acknowledging that it may have resulted from a special influence of Heaven, and therefore of religious significance, he also provides a rational explanation, suggesting that Dante’s fixation may have been the result of the meeting of a harmony of temperaments and complexions (or humours), and a complex network of associations inspired by the influence of the sweetness of the music, the general happiness of the occasion, and the deliciousness of the wines and food. However he also sensed this patriarchal aspect of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice when he described their first meeting, on the first of May 1357, amid the hawthorn blossom, when Beatrice’s father, Folco Portinari, kept a festival for his neighbours, attended by Alighiero di Bellincione, followed by his son, Dante: ‘for little children are won’t to follow their fathers, especially to places of festival’,69 and here, among the boys and girls playing around the trestle tables, he met Beatrice. The theme of fatherhood dominates the first two canticles of The Divine Comedy when Virgil fulfils the roles of both parents. He is frequently described as a mother shielding his charge from harm. In the eighth circle when they are fleeing demons: My leader seized me quickly, like a mother who is awakened by the noise and sees the flames burning close by, who takes up her son and flees, caring more him than herself.70 Virgil protects him, carries him, in the circle of hypocrites as he runs down the embankment bearing Dante on his chest: ‘just like a son and not as a companion’; he encourages him and occasionally scolds like a loving parent. However, with the approach of Paradise, the motif of motherhood becomes more important, and this is a role performed by Beatrice. At the point when the pilgrim meets her at the top of Mount Purgatory, he turns back to Virgil for reassurance: With the appeal with which a little boy runs to his mama when he is afraid or when he is hurt.71 But now it is Beatrice who will fulfil the more patriarchal role of teacher and guide. This relationship is more complex. The generally lenient and encouraging exhortations of fathers, whether Virgil, Brunetto (who twice addressed Dante as ‘son’) or Cacciaguida, contrast with the withering accusations of Beatrice, and this is perhaps because in their mother/son relationship there is a sexual element involving betrayal and jealousy. Beatrice is all spurned and angry woman when she accuses Dante of ‘giving himself to another’72 and turning away from her towards ‘either a young girl or some other new thing’.73 The passage through the purifying flames of Purgatory, at the urging of the 181

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angel of chastity, has freed the pilgrim’s will; no longer prey to the sexual compulsions of adulthood, he is restored to the state of innocence and freedom he enjoyed as a nine-yearold prepubescent boy when he first saw Beatrice, in May 1275, when he was looking for a substitute for his mother, who died between 1270 and 1273. Beatrice, replacing Virgil as Dante’s intellectual and spiritual guide, escorts him through the heavens, explaining to him the various theological conundrums that are beyond the comprehension of Virgil: why the light of Heaven is distributed unevenly throughout the universe causing dark spots on the moon; how the primum mobile holds the universe together by creating nature (time and space) while the pre-existent God in the Empyrean is outside of it and enclosing it, not in a spacial sense but in a causal and formative way; how the revolving speeds of the angelic spheres in the primum mobile operate in a mirror image of the planetary spheres, with the nearest fastest and the outermost the slowest. While continuing to scold her child when necessary, ‘so as a mother seems severe to her son as she seemed to me’, 74 she now becomes an embodiment of tender motherhood: when she first encourages her charge to look like her directly into the sun, she conforms to what bestiaries taught was the behaviour of eagles towards their eaglets.75 In the sphere of Saturn, frightened by the loud cry of the blessed for divine vengeance following Peter Damian’s bitter speech on corrupt prelates which reveals the dark problematic character of the planet, the pilgrim turns to Beatrice: Like a little child that runs always where he most has confidence and she, like a mother who quickly helps her pallid, breathless son with the voice that has the power to calm him.76 In the sphere of the fixed stars he surveys the entire cosmos, the rounded ether of the planets circling the Earth, but her eyes, to which he turns for reassurance, are more beautiful: Then I turned my eyes back to her lovely eyes,77 and the mother figure is described as a protective, nesting bird (evoking memories of Francesca as a dove flying to her ‘sweet nest’)78 waiting to introduce her child to the sunrise and to the midday sun when they will together ascend towards the primum mobile: Like a bird within the beloved foliage, perched on the nest of its sweet offspring during the night that hides all things from us, as-in order to see their yearned-for faces and to find the food to nourish them, … it anticipates the time upon an open branch and with burning affect awaits the sun, gazing fixedly for the first birth of dawn: so my lady was erect and alert.79 182

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In her maternal solicitude and care to bring the poet to Christ she also evokes comparisons with the ‘Virgin Mary, (whom she devoutly venerated and who is never mentioned by Dante in connection with the immaculate conception)’; she is an idealized woman like Beatrice:80 The name of the lovely flower that I ever invoke both morning and evening.81 In her blue, lapis lazuli mantle evoking the skies above, the Virgin ascends from the fixed stars to the mantle of the primum mobile, and all the other spirits stretch towards her: And like a little child raising its arms toward its mamma, after taking the milk.82 Beatrice, teacher, guide, father and mother, embodies all tender parental feelings, and yet, as seen on the edge of Paradise, she is also all woman: Her white veil girt with olive, a lady appeared to me, clothed, beneath a green-mantle, in the colour of living flame.83 These colours symbolize hope and passion, and she holds Dante by the holy light of her emerald green eyes, bearing love, and by the net of her radiant, holy smile, ‘santo riso’, an expression of heavenly joy, ‘the smile of the universe:84 So fixed and attentive were my eyes to slake their ten-year thirst, that all my other senses were extinguished. And my eyes on this side and that had walls of non-concern-her holy smile so drew them to itself with its ancient net!85 This is what has led him from the darkness of Hell and his estranged will to the peace of Paradise where, in the final canticle, Paradiso rimes with riso (smile). In the first sonnet of Vita Nuova the protagonist goes beyond the widest turning sphere to glimpse Beatrice in Heaven, after which he expresses hope for a renewed sight of her in glory.86 This would be realized in the pilgrim’s last sight of her in The Divine Comedy, when he addresses her in his imagination, not with the honorific voi he had used in Purgatorio and the early cantos of Paradiso, but the familiar ‘tu’ form of intimacy, and she seals her departure with a smiling glance back at him: ‘sorrise e riguardommi’,87 recalling the moment she first turned her eyes towards him in Vita Nuova ‘volve di occhi’:88 the smiling gesture in which lay ‘the entirety of my blessedness’ that set him on his epic journey. In 183

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‘figuring forth Paradise’ in the realm of the fixed stars, he confesses to trembling beneath the burden of communicating the ineffable beauty of the vision of Cristo, presaged in the smiling face of Beatrice. The journey in his ‘sacrato poema’ (sacred poem), his Argo, could be traced back to the outset of the Vita Nuova with the image ‘in the book of my memory’ of her smile: It is no voyage for a little bark, the one my daring prow goes cutting, not for a helmsman who spares himself.89 The one writer to develop Dante’s sympathetic portrayal of a strong, intelligent woman was significantly a woman. Christine de Pisan, who lost her mother when she was young, grew up under the tutelage of her learned, Prospero-like father, Thomas, the court astrologer and alchemist to Charles V. After Thomas died in 1397/8, his place as a paternal figurehead for Christine was taken by Dante, her Virgil, whose footsteps she closely followed in her version of a journey into Heaven and Hell, Le Chemin de long estude (the Book of the Path of long study) of 1403.90 The circumstances of its composition were similar to those of The Divine Comedy: bereavement. Christine had lost her husband in 1390 to the Plague when she was 24/5, the age of Beatrice when she died, and thirteen years later, in 1402, she reversed the roles of Dante and Beatrice and opened her poem with the persona of a solitary widow grieving for her husband. She falls asleep and is taken on a journey to Mount Parnassus, her version of Dante’s Limbo, where the learned philosophers and poets of antiquity dwell: ‘The name of this pleasant habitat was never taught me except that I remember that Dante of Florence records it in his book which he wrote in a very beautiful style.’91 Christine’s identification with the learned inhabitants of Limbo was cemented when the Sybil prophesies her future fame and learning. If her relationship with the Sybil resembled that of Dante and Virgil, she also followed closely Dante’s path of learning and translated a fearful Dante’s meeting with Virgil in the wild wood: ‘May the long study avail me which made me pour over your volumes from which we have come to know one another.’ Dante was a careful reader and follower of Virgil, and Christine became an equally careful reader and follower of Dante and, recalling this passage, she realized their parallel paths: ‘Then I knew from this place that the valiant poet Dante, who was hungry for long study, had entered upon this very road when he met Virgil who led him from Hell.’ She therefore adapted these words: ‘May the long study avail me’ as a protective talisman to confront her fears: ‘And I said I will not forget these words but would use them rather than the Gospel and the Cross when faced with the various difficulties and many dangers I have faced myself,’ and when, like Dante, she is confronted with three beasts she says: ‘I eschew safety and without hindrance by saying: “May long study avail me”.’92 This gift of Dante enables her, as a woman, to live the role of a learned scholar and poet, and it inspires her in 1402 to take on the clerical male establishment in a debate in the Querelle de la Rose and in the Le dit de la rose on the literary merits of the most popular poem in French literature, The Romance of the Rose, in which Christine attacked Melun’s stereotyped views of women as either passive recipients of male courtly love pursuit or as seducers.93 184

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Chaucer and the complexity of women Christine’s enthusiastic pursuit of the life of a learned woman, inspired by her reading of The Divine Comedy, was an exception. In England there was Julian of Norwich, a learned woman who in her Revelations of Divine Love, written between 1393 and 1413, wrote as a visionary and guide in defiance of the 1409 Constitutions, as an authoritative recipient of Divine grace.94 However she too was an exception. Compassion, loyalty, faith and spiritual wisdom and learning, all those qualities celebrated in Dante’s women, would come under sardonic scrutiny in the literature of his male followers and admirers from the late fourteenth century. Beatrice and Francesca inspired much poetry in the nineteenth century, but as early as 1384 they inspired the writing of probably the greatest love poem in the English language, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer did more than just paraphrase passages of The Divine Comedy; throughout the courtship of Criseyde, the story of Francesca and Paolo is subtly alluded to and undermined with a cynical realism. Both works bequeath to the respective vernaculars in which they would have written the terms (galeotto and pandar) for go-betweens or pimps. While the lovers Troilus and Criseyde are consummating their passion, to emphasize that he occupies the same intermediary role as Dante did for Francesca and Paolo, Pandarus reads the kind of romance that Francesca was reading (like Chaucer’s narrator he is bookish with little experience of love) and Troilus, like Dante, faints through guilt in his role in Pandarus’s deceptive ruse to bring about the seduction of Criseyde: God knows that in this game, When all is known, that I am not to blame.95 Chaucer’s lovers inhabit a self-absorbed, nocturnal world that resembles the eternal darkness of Dante’s Inferno. They always meet at night and fear and resent the approach of morning light as if, like Dante’s lovers, they are committed to their own version of Hell. But Criseyde is different: she never totally surrenders her will to passion. She is changeable and inconstant (like Fortune) and pragmatic, motivated by self-interest, a debased form of reason. When Pandarus advises his niece to return Troilus’s love: ‘Certain, best it is That you love again for his loving As love for love is skilful requiting,’96 he is echoing Francesa’s expressed sense of obligation to reciprocate Paolo’s devotion: ‘love which pardons no-one loved from loving in return’.97 However Criseyde’s reaction is much more calculating and self-interested: she feels under no obligation to return Troilus’s love but, worried about the scandal if Troilus kills himself through unrequited love and losing her uncle’s good favour, she resolves to be pleasant: 185

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Unhappiness falls thick Always for love … And if this man should slay himself,-alas! In my presence, it would be no solace. How men would judge it I cannot say It behoves me full slyly to play.98 It is therefore entirely in character for her to finally betray Troilus, giving his parting gift of a broach to her new lover, for pragmatic reasons of self-preservation, recognizing that the Greeks are unlikely to let anyone out of Troy alive and acknowledging Diomede’s great wealth. She merely writes her lover a deceptive letter, saying she will return to Troy when she can, asking him not to be offended if she doesn’t write more as she is not a great writer. The contrast with Francesca’s devotion could not be greater, and Chaucer the narrator, instead of fainting with sympathy, merely says: ‘I need not choose this silly woman to chide.’99 It is indicative of the persistence of stereotypical expectations of the way women should be paragons of constancy that contemporary readers of Chaucer did not always react to Criseyde the way the author intended: John Metham, a Norwich resident and Cambridge scholar, the author of scientific treatises on palmistry and physiognomy, wrote in 1448/9 a romance, Amoryus and Cleopes from a Greek source, translated for him by a travelling Greek scholar, for his patrons Sir Miles Stapleton of Ingham, Norfolk and his wife Catherine, in which he praises Catherine as patient and beautiful as Chaucer’s Criseyde or Penelope.100 Criseyde’s inconstancy is furthermore used to undermine Dante’s conversion from the poetry of pursuit and possession in Vita Nuova, to his resolve to be content with merely praising Beatrice and following her to Paradise. The wood in which Dante is delivered from wild, lustful beasts, through the inspiration of his holy lady, is evoked when Troilus dreams of Criseyde engaged in a carnal act with a wild boar (emblem of the Greek warrior Diomede) whose tusks symbolize the horns of cuckoldry and lust: And so it befell that in his sleep he thought That he walked in a forest thick to weep For love of her that in him these pains wrought And up and down as he the forest sought, He dreamed he saw a boar with tusks great Slept against the bright sun’s heat. And by this boar, fast in its hooves folded Lay ever kissing it, his lady bright, Criseyde.101 Chaucer uses this brutal nightmare to mock the idealistic loves of Troilus and Dante, forcing the dreamer to confront female lust, a subject he would pursue in The Canterbury Tales. Sexual possession is the focus of love in Chaucer’s world: lovers merely follow the procreative urges outlined in The Parliament of Fowls, and this is the only heaven that 186

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a woman can offer a man. Troilus, as he consummates his passion, enters a sensual paradise: Her snow like throat, her breasts round and light. Thus in this heaven he began to delight.102 The point is emphasized when, in his bliss, he invokes Venus, pagan goddess of love, his version of the Virgin in a prayer adapted from the one given by St Bernard when he delivers Dante to the Empyrean. Mary sits enthroned just above Beatrice, and Dante’s prayer is for undeserved grace: In you mercy, in you compassion, in you magnificence, in you is united whatever there is of goodness in any creature, Now this man, who from the lowest pit of the universe up to here has seen the lives of the spirits one by one. supplicates you, of grace, for so much power that he may lift his eyes up higher toward the ultimate salvation.103 Troilus may, in the intensity of his feelings, have felt that his was the love that moves the sun and other stars and that could usher him into Paradise but his quest, like that of the juvenile Dante, is possession and the prayer applies this to the granting of sexual favours and admission to the erotic bliss of Paradise: Here may men see that mercy surpasses right; The experience of this is felt in me, That am unworthy of so sweet a person. But my heart, in your generosity, Think, though I unworthy be, Yet I must amend in some wise Solely through the virtue of your high service.104 Dante may have identified Beatrice with the Virgin because of her inspirational constancy, but Criseyde, in her changeability, becomes Chaucer’s model for all women, including Beatrice, revealing their frailty, and the futility of projecting onto them such ideals, as Pandarus points out to Troilus when talking about his niece: And for to speak of her specially, … It suits her not to love celestially.105

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From Chaucer’s perspective, the idealization of Beatrice belongs to the realm of faith, and it is in his ironic undermining of Dante’s idealization of Beatrice that we have a true collision of worlds of faith and realism. This is not, therefore, to say that Chaucer would have considered himself less sympathetic than Dante towards women, just more realistic. Dante placed Dido with Francesca in Inferno and described her as one who killed herself for love, thereby breaking faith with the ashes of her husband Sichaeus and endorsing Virgil’s view of her as a passionate woman easily won by Aeneas who, when deserted, evoked her marriage vows to cover her guilt at breaking them.106 Chaucer however begins The House of Fame with a dream about Dido which incorporated Ovid’s more sympathetic account, to show her genuine grief at breaking these vows and her lamentation that after Aeneas has left her she will be tarnished with the reputation of a loose woman.107 Chaucer was not only suggesting that beneath the accretion of legends surrounding Dido the truth is elusive, he implied that Dante, by following Virgil, was merely perpetrating the sort of rumours or gossip that make their way to the house of tidings, which proves that women generally get a raw deal at the hands of male reporters. In a world of male authority, seduction and abduction, condemnation of a woman’s susceptibility was all too easy, and Chaucer, in his tactful and reticent portrayal of Criseyde, also offers an oblique criticism of Boccaccio, who in his Filostrato (c. 1335) followed the rumour trail to depict Criseyde as an exemplar of female fickleness. Instead Chaucer made allowances for the bullying Criseyde was subjected to from her father, her uncle, Troilus and Diomede. Boccaccio similarly softened Dante’s judgement of Francesca by stressing the way she was deceived and married into an alliance conducted against the backdrop of the violent feuds of Romagna.108 In Chaucer’s world women have to negotiate this masculine world with cunning, pragmatism and an intelligent use of their sexuality.109 These are skills displayed by women in the stories told by the company of seven women and three men in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which begins with a proverb: ‘le parole son femmine e i fatti sono maschi’ (words are feminine deeds masculine).110 Acknowledging that their forte is the spoken word of the vernacular mother tongue which they teach to their children, Chaucer in many of his tales features women as mediators, skilled practitioners in the arts of rhetorical persuasion, which, in the prose Tale of Melibee, proves to be life-saving as Prudence dissuades her husband from violent revenge; such skills were especially important at a time when England was ruled by an unstable king who, according to a funeral monument, was appeased by the intercessions of his queen Anne of Bohemia.111 Dante was just as aware of the prevalence of masculine models of abduction and coercion, but he was more idealistic in his belief that these could be overcome by the softer, maternal aspects of femininity. The difference between these two views of women is encapsulated in the way Chaucer, with characteristic irony and self-deprecation, hints where he stands on this issue in The House of Fame in his delicious satire of the dream Dante has on the slopes of Purgatory that condenses the entire Divine Comedy. Sleeping in the early morning dawn, Dante’s pilgrim hears the sad song of the swallow, Philomena, raped by Tereus, and he sees a golden, feathered eagle, representing the incarnate God and the eagle of St John; he is reminded, before being carried up by this 188

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bird as far as the fires of Purgatory, of the fate of the Trojan prince, Gannymede, seized by Zeus in the shape of an eagle, and, prompted by the early morning sun shining on him from the East, he wakes imagining he is being burned by the fire. This is an apparently violent, masculine dream of divine grace propelling him through the flames of Purgatory to the heavenly fires with associations of rape, erotic violence, seizure and abduction that is in conflict with the conscious life of the pilgrim who inhabits a predominantly feminine, Catholic world: there are few references to a masculine god in The Divine Comedy and the agents of the pilgrim’s actual ascent through the fires of Purgatory to Heaven, apart from the slightly androgynous Virgil, who is part mother to his charge, are Beatrice, who anticipates the pilgrim's vision of the Virgin Mary, St Lucia, and Matelda, the countess of Tuscany, who renewed the baths at Acqui for the use of all races and who even takes the place of John the Baptist by immersing the pilgrim in the River Lethe to obliterate memory of his sins before restoring his health and vigour in the River Euonie. The beauty and complexity of the pilgrim's dream on the mountain side is such that the frightening and violent masculinity of the dreamer’s unconscious is cocooned in a protective femininity conforming to his conscious mind, which begins to assert itself as he wakes, thinking of the way Achilles’ mother carried her sleeping child to Skyros, and Virgil explains that the origin of Dante’s waking dream is in fact the tender Lucia of ‘the lovely eyes’ who has carried him up the slope to the entrance of Purgatory proper.112 Lucy of Syracuse, martyred during the reign of Diocletian was, as the patron saint of light and sight, an important intermediary between the pilgrim and Beatrice, the Virgin, and the light of Heaven (according to the chronicler, Villani the church of Santa Lucia dei Magnoli or Santa Lucia dei Bardi was located close to the houses of the Bardi, and this was probably where Beatrice worshipped and was buried);113 Lucia’s identification with light, and by implication intellectual illumination (she was represented in art as Divine Wisdom with a lighted lamp), suggests she was also identified with the donna gentile or Lady of Philosophy).114 Chaucer, in The House of Fame, retains the dream’s rapine masculinity by having Geoffrey comparing himself unfavourably to Ganymede ‘born up’ by Jupiter, but he drains the pilgrim's dream of all the tender feelings Dante's pilgrim showed towards women and the central role of Lucia. Chaucer’s pilgrim is taken up to the heavens by an eagle, protesting that he knows nothing about love. His guide, like Virgil, attempts to reassure his charge, telling him not to be afraid, and the pilgrim thinks that it is a kinder voice than one he could name (his wife) whose voice was never so: ‘Awak And be not so aghast, for shame!’ And called me then by my name,.. ‘Awak’, to me he said, Just in the same voice and tone That one uses who I could name; And at that voice, truth to say My mind came to me again 189

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For it was gently said to me, As it has never wont to be.115 The shrewish squawk of the eagle emphasizes that there is no Beatrice in Chaucer’s life, and perhaps no Lucia or Virgin Mary. The wife germinating in the poet’s unconscious when he hears this squawk in his sleep was possibly Alison of Bath. Chaucer had identified himself twice as the sixth: in Troilus and Criseyde as a poet of European pretension he had aligned himself, along with Dante, as sixth in a list of classical poets, but in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales he lists himself as the sixth in a list of that included a reeve, a miller, a summoner, a pardoner and a manciple,116 signifying his intent to divorce himself from Dante’s astral aspirations and to focus on the tidings of tradesmen and officials that reflected his background: in other words putting himself on the same level as the weaver from Bath who declared in her prologue that she was waiting for a sixth husband: ‘Welcome the sixth whenever he shall come’117 (one who in his writing was conscious of women’s vulnerability to violence and their superior verbal rhetorical skills). However, the onomatopoeic squawk of the eagle also reminds the poet/pilgrim and the reader how distant all this is from the Beatrice who inspires in Dante’s pilgrim the linear progress to the heavens. The wife of Bath knows much of ‘wandering by the way’.118 Her sensuality, garrulousness and circumlocutious digressions represent a nonlinear, extremely earthbound mentality in accord with a pilgrimage which goes nowhere.

Women at Plesaunce: self-possession, lust and fortune Further reflections on, and adaptations of, Dante’s reverential treatment of women occurred in the circle of Humfrey duke of Gloucester, where women occupied an important place. An attempt has been made by Ethel Seaton to assign a body of anonymous lyric poetry of the first half of the fifteenth century, connected with Humfrey’s Plesaunce, to a knight of the king, Sir Richard Roos, through acrostics, none of which are complete, within the lines of the poems.119 This erudite and compellingly unhinged attempt to create an entire literary world, and a corpus of writings of a literary genius and successor to Chaucer, out of dubious acrostics reads like Charles Kinbote’s attempts to create the exotic kingdom of Zembla from his extensive and arbitrary footnotes to the dull poem of the well-meaning academic, John Shade.120 However, there is one acrostic that is more convincing, which occurs in the prologue to an English translation of Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, where the translator, punning on the phrase to rise, begins his poem by announcing: ‘Half in a dream—I rose (roos)’.121 This acrostic is confirmed in one of the six surviving manuscripts of the English translation of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, in which it is written that this work ‘was translated out of the French by Sir Richard Roos’.122 Roos’s narrator adopts the pose of a melancholic lover, like Dante and Charles of Orleans, grieving over the death of his mistress who was ‘my joy and plesaunce’; he 190

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remembers he has promised to translate La Belle Dame Sans Mercy ‘for those to whom I dare not disobey’ (possibly an allusion to the duke of Gloucester and his duchess). He rides out to a garden, where there is feasting and dancing, and he observes a man in black, like himself, absorbed in looking at a lady, and he listens to their conversation.123 The dialogue that ensues reveals a sophisticated, logical woman whose emotional detachment gives her an intellectual superiority to her suitor, but who has none of the inspirational, religious qualities of Dante’s Beatrice, and whose pragmatism and self-possession do not stem from the vulnerability, helplessness and weakness shown by Criseyde. This lady is totally self-sufficient, and the poem explores the folly of placing emotional store where there is no hope of its being requited. To the lover’s pleas for mercy to be allowed to serve in order to ease his suffering, the lady observes that ‘you hurt in nothing but your conceit … to live in woe he has a great fantasy’ and that it is better for one person to suffer than two, and so his feelings are of no relevance to her: In love I seek neither plesaunce not ease, Nor great desire, not really great assurance; Although you are sick, it does me nothing please Also, I take no heed to your plesaunce. 124 Much of the language in the dialogue is concerned with imprisonment. The lover longs to escape from the prison of his self, to be absorbed in another person, but she values and guards her freedom and isolation: Free am I now, and free will I endure; To be ruled by man’s governance For earthly good, no! that I you ensure!125 Her self-possession is so complete she has no need to escape herself and his pleasance is not hers; he cannot constrain her to love. Her cynicism regarding the lover’s vows, when she says there is no permanence in love’s oaths and God and his saints laugh at them, echoes Chaucer’s description of the protestations of love in the house of tidings. She implies that the lover’s pain is a mental illness, which love longing only aggravates, and that he is attracted to her because she is self-possessed and not in pain. She defends herself against accusations of a lack of compassion by pointing out that he surely cannot expect pity as he does not love himself, and she will choose a better love. The poem ends with the author observing the suitor’s departure: ‘Verba Actoris. This woeful man rose (roos) up in all his pain’ (the pun on the surname Roos after the word ‘author’), and he walks away ‘like to die’.126 The lady thinks no more of him and prepares to dance, and the author hears that the unsuccessful suitor ‘took such great heaviness’ that he died within a day or two.127 This exchange is so different from the world of Dante’s Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy, where love is a light that floods everywhere, coming from and returning to God. The interplay of the man’s fragile emotions and the intellectual resilience of the 191

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woman, with her formidable array of logical rebuttals, is a marked contrast, not only to the passive remoteness of heroines of the courtly love tradition, but also the conventions of the love lyrics of the later Renaissance, where male lovers, in their attempts at seduction, display their brilliance, either in the multiple personas of Sir Philip Sidney or in the scholarly metaphysical arguments of the soldier/divine, John Donne. Roos’s lady without pity has none of the feminine vulnerability of Criseyde, and her eyes offer no hint of divine love or salvation: they are merely for looking and communicating to her suitor that he may as well ‘be deed and graven under stone’.128 The lady’s sophisticated psychological analysis of love is purely secular and devoid of religious significance, and potential erotic encounters between individuals are seen to pose the same issues of selfpreservation and identity that occur in wars between countries: the lady’s ‘pleasant’ (plesaunt) look is merely a herald of defiance. The translator and his poem can tentatively be placed in Gloucester’s circle in the period between 1424 and 1441 (Roos owned land in East Greenwich),129 after which Richard and his brother gravitated towards the court circle of Charles of Orleans and Margaret of Anjou, along with Margaret Roos, who joined Margaret of Anjou’s household in 1452–3; Eleanor Roos, Robert’s daughter. Roos was a distant cousin of Eleanor Cobham, and one of the feoffees in his acquisition of the manor of Penshurst was Gloucester’s father-in-law, Sir Reginald Cobham. One copy of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy occurs in a manuscript containing the poems of Charles of Orleans, owned by Lord Stanley, Eleanor Cobham’s keeper.130 It is certainly the case that in Gloucester’s Plesaunce articulate women occupied a prominent place in literary exercises. Thomas Hoccleve in his Dialogues with a Friend, has a discussion about a suitable writing project to please Duke Humfrey. Hoccleve’s friend suggested he fulfil his obligation to provide the duke with a work he promised the previous September by writing a tale that restored the reputation of women for the duke’s amusement and mirth, because he loves to have honourable dalliance with ladies.131 This implies that a debate about Dante’s idealization of women, and their subsequent denigration in such works as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and Hoccleve’s Book of Cupid, was taking place in Gloucester’s Plesaunce circle. However, while claiming to put women in a courtly, civilized light to entertain his patron, Hoccleve merely continues in the same satiric vein as Chaucer and Boccaccio, referring to the Wife of Bath as an authority proving that women do not like their faults set before them, and he chooses to follow the example of the Oxford scholar in The Canterbury Tales who antagonizes the wife of Bath by telling the tale of the meek, obedient and patient Griselda, by adapting a similar tale from the Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans) of patient, female suffering, and concludes it with his friend’s observation: ‘Women have been beguiled by the fiend since Eve’s advice.’132 Hoccleve’s portrait of Humfrey enjoying the company of women and placing them in a prominent position, only to be pushed off the pedestal they occupied in Dante’s works, can be seen in the duke’s commissioning of translations of Boccaccio. The intellectual atmosphere at the court of Plesaunce can be gauged from the opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a French version of which, by Laurens de Premierfait and undertaken in 1414 for the duke of Berry with the help of Friar Antonio d’Arezzo, was presented to the duke of Gloucester by his fellow guardian of Henry VI, 192

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Richard Beauchamp the earl of Warwick.133 The work opens with the retreat of a countess and an entourage of nobility from the plague-ridden city of Florence to a paradisal garden in a rural estate in the hills of Fiesole, five miles away, approximately the same distance as Greenwich from London up the River Thames. In the court created by these nobles, women play a dominant intellectual role recounting tales, many of which were bawdy displaying feminine wit and quick thinking, to pass the time during the quarantine. One such work, also by Boccaccio, focusing on women, was an extended parody of Dante’s celebration of the redemptive role of Beatrice as a spiritual and intellectual mentor and source of salvation. Boccaccio’s Corbaccio (an anagram of Boccaccio and also meaning black crow) was originally written in the mid-1350s, and in 1444 Gloucester specifically requested a translation of the work from the original Italian into Latin by his secretary, Beccaria, who was from Verona and had become friends with another member of the duke’s household, Pietro del Monte, who arrived in 1437 with Frulovisi, and who wrote the duke’s letters to Decembrini and Alfonso. This translation, along with the French translation of the Decameron, remained in the duke’s private collection after the Oxford donations.134 It was not a solitary anomaly: even Lydgate penned an obscene anti-feminist poem The Hood and the Green.135 The inspiration for this scabrous version of the first two cantos of The Divine Comedy is a rare instance of defilement of women in the Purgatorio, when Dante (following Ulysses) dreams of a female, stuttering and cross-eyed, crooked in her feet with stunted hands and pallid colour, who is transformed into a bewitching siren because the pilgrim sees what he wants to see: So my gaze loosed her tongue, and then in a short while it straightened her entirely and gave colour to her wan face, just as love desires.136 Virgil breaks the spell by tearing open her clothes, showing the sleeper her belly, from which issued a stench that wakes the pilgrim, and he urges him to sublimate his sexual desires by stretching forward (protendere) to turn his eyes upwards to the lure of the falconer’s eternal wheels of Heaven.137 This incident becomes the source for a penitential journey in the Corbaccio that proceeds in a closely paralleled direction to that undertaken through Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio (there is no Paradise in this work). A suggestion that the Corbaccio should be seen, less as an invective against women, and more as an extended satire of Dante’s treatment of them, following Chaucer’s example, is provided by the prologue in which the Beccario claims he decided to reveal the wonders of this book because his patron requested the work, not to generate hate against women, but so he could understand the wit of Boccaccio.138 A jilted scholar, in love with an ugly widow and on the verge of suicide, falls asleep while attempting to reason with himself: ‘show me where she came and forced you to love her,’ rationalizing that he cannot force someone to love him.139 He dreams that he is lost 193

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in a foggy valley as night falls: ‘a desolate wilderness, rough and harsh, rankly overgrown with trees, thorns and brambles, without any track or path, and surrounded by rugged mountains- so high that their summits seemed to reach the heavens’.140 The similarity to the dark wood of Dante’s Inferno is emphasized when he is unable to find his way out of the valley up the mountain slopes because of his fear of howling beasts: ‘everywhere I turned, I heard the roars, howls and shrieks of many ferocious animals, which, judging from appearances, seemed surely to infest this wilderness’.141 His rescuer is a Virgil-like figure, a fellow Florentine to whom he appeals as Dante did to Virgil, on grounds of a shared home: ‘for that love which you owe our common native city’.142 The one who will show the dreamer the way up the mountain is the shade of the husband, whose widow the dreamer is in love with, and the shade points out that the beasts of this labyrinth of love, or ‘pigsty of Venus’, are not external (like the leopard, wolf and greyhound that block the pilgrims way in Inferno, or the minotaur of the Cretan labyrinth), but they are his own howling, bestial lusts: ‘these beasts which you say you heard and hear growling are the wretches – of whom you are one – who have been caught in the net of false love’.143 The labyrinth with the minotaur at the centre is a prison forged in the mind, and the only way to escape is to employ reason as Daedalus had done. The guide attempts to cure the lovesick scholar of his infatuation by demonstrating that female beauty is an illusion, maintained through alchemical means of make-up, the use of quicksilver, and by employing the same satirical techniques that Jonathan Swift would use, in an albeit more hysterical way in his Journal to Stella, focusing on the object of adoration, without the glossing of romance, on the intimate details of the widow’s anatomy. Her body becomes a geographical landscape resembling Dante’s Hell: the gulf of her vagina is an infernal abyss: ‘I will be silent about the sanguine and yellow rivers that descend from it in turn, streaked with white mould, sometimes no less displeasing to the nose than to the eyes,’144 and from the 'village of Evilhole' between two lofty mountains there issues forth thunderclaps and sulphurous smoke.145 The cuckolded spirit promises to guide the unrequited lover from the inferno by helping him to restore his powers of reasoning that have been compromised through irrational passion and to bring him to a realization of the shallowness and inconstancy of women’s love. His confession of his own failings in this regard – his suffering too patiently the infidelities and abuses of his wife146– recalls the contrasting behaviour of the widow Nella in The Divine Comedy, whose depth of feelings revealed in her prayers for her husband secures his swift passage through Purgatory; by contrast the spirit’s widow gloated over his death, deprived his children of their inheritance and took up a series of lovers. The dreamer has been similarly treated. The spirit tells him he visited her cottage and observed her laughing with one of her lovers at the professions of love in one of her scholar suitor’s letters;147 it is a scene similar to one of Thomas Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance, and the spirit encourages the dreamer to use his powers of reason to laugh at himself and his delusions; for nothing, especially human feelings, lasts, as he can testify, who now despises the woman he once loved. The shade tells the dreamer: ‘a woman is an imperfect creature, excited by a thousand foul passions’ and that for this he has ‘put his own throat in a chain’,148 projecting onto the widow his own fantasies: ‘You yourself were the origin of your own error, and from this 194

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we will come to speak of her with whom you foolishly fell in love, although you hardly knew her.’149 The spirit guide says: ‘Let us go at once’ and they leave the valley as one, like the split personality of Eliot’s Prufrock, and the implication is that they arrive into the sunlit uplands of a rational consciousness devoid of religious significance. The guide has informed the love-struck scholar that his pursuit of learning and philosophy is incompatible with achieving closeness with a woman. He furthermore suggests that women think differently. Leonardo Bruni, another member of the Gloucester circle, could not accept that Latin was ever a vernacular because that would mean shop girls and wet nurses in ancient Rome could have communicated in a language he could scarcely manage to speak.150 Boccaccio, using the dreamer's guide as a mouthpiece, did acknowledge that women have a quick intelligence, and while students can spend years in poverty studying and learning little, women can, in a single session in church, learn more indiscriminate information through gossiping about: the firmament, the course of the planets, the Greeks and the Romans, where the source of the Nile is found, with whom their neighbour slept, and how many eggs their neighbour’s hen lays a year.151 Chaucer too commented on the rapidity of women’s thought processes, their ability to talk their way out of anything, and although he was sympathetic towards them they remained different, unknowable and therefore objects of fascination.152 Boccaccio, by suggesting that there is a basic difference between female and male intelligence, directly contradicts Dante’s attempt to show that Beatrice possessed the same moral and philosophical intelligence as Virgil and that a woman’s love, rather than inspiring, blinds the spirit and seduces the intellect. Through the guidance of the widow’s husband, the dreamer comes to the realization that ‘I was almost a beast without intellect – and subjected my reason to the hands of a woman.’153 His deliverance from the foul valley of irrational feelings and lust occurs when the sunlight of reason dispels the misty fogs of his mind, and he sees the morning sun rising over the mountains in the East: ‘I raised my head toward the Orient and saw a light rising very slowly over the mountains, just as the dawn rises in the East before the coming of the sun.’154 The imagery is derived from the conclusion to Dante’s Purgatorio, but there it is Beatrice, the embodiment of woman, who rescues the pilgrim’s will and intellect and leads him into the sunlight on top of the mountain. There are hints of the spirit of Beatrice in the Corbaccio, but they serve to underline the ways in which this work departs so radically from Dante’s idealized vision of women. The widow is first seen by the dreamer as the third woman on a bench (an allusion to the Trinitarian symbolism associated with Beatrice); there are a number of references to the nets cast by the widow to ensnare her victims (Beatrice holds Dante by the net of her smile), and the guide, in forcing the dreamer to confront the reality of the widow’s ageing breasts, applies the metaphor of the blighted plums: ‘the flesh of two puffed and blighted plums, which were once perhaps two unripe apples, delightful to both touch and sight’;155 this same metaphor was used by Beatrice to describe the natural processes of change that she sees as an aspect of God’s wisdom and love. Dante, in Vita Nuova, resolved, if God granted him sufficient time, to write about Beatrice in ways no one had ever written about a woman before,156 but Boccaccio, who throughout his version of a 195

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journey through Hell and Purgatory, suggests no such woman has or can exist, has his visitor to the dark valley resolving: ‘If only I am granted enough time either to tune my rhymes or to draft my prose’ to write about the widow and to degrade her in such a way ‘that she will wish she had never set eyes on me’.157 For Boccaccio’s guide and pilgrim the only woman to have the inspirational qualities of Beatrice is the Virgin Mary. In a direct adaptation of the opening of Inferno, the spirit who comes to lead the dreamer out of the wood tells him he has been sent by the Virgin Mary: ‘Her, within whose womb our salvation was enclosed, and who is the living fountain of mercy and mother of grace and compassion … you always had complete hope in her as in a fixed terminus.’158 It is only here, in describing the Virgin’s role in the dreamer’s salvation, that Boccaccio will employ the sort of tender and maternal solicitude that had been employed by Dante to describe Beatrice’s concern for him: This was manifest to her Divine eyes, and when she saw you more than usually lost and trapped in this valley because you had taken leave of your senses, and saw the peril you were in, without awaiting your request, just as she often does, most generously, in the affairs of her faithful, she moves of her own free will without awaiting prayers.159 Just as Beatrice pleaded with Virgil to be her intermediary, the Virgin approached the spirit for help: ‘She asked grace on your behalf from her Son and pleaded for your salvation. For this I was commissioned to come as Her messenger.’160 The spirit guide reminds his pupil that while women may claim that the Virgin was a women like them, this is not possible for Mary, like her son, is divine: ‘Only the Bride of the Holy Spirit was such an undefiled, virtuous being, so pure and full of grace, and so completely remote from every corporeal and spiritual uncleanness, that in respect to these others, it is as if she were not composed of natural elements but were formed of a quintessence.’161 These ideas, identifying the Virgin Mary with the incorruptible alchemical fifth essence, the philosopher’s mercury, and contrasting her constancy with the changeability of mortal women, placing Dante’s idealization of Beatrice in the realm of faith, would resonate in the Duke of Gloucester’s circle. Lydgate in The Fall of Princes suggests that faith is the one human attribute that separates men from women and the changeability of their natures, and this faith could be projected onto them, however unworthy they may prove to be. He therefore identifies the inconstant Delilah with Fortune, dressed as she is in many shades of green, the colour of nature and mutability: … like an adder of manifold colours, right fresh appearing and fair upon to see For shrouded was her mutability… She wore colours of many diverse hues, In stead of blue, which steadfast is and clean: She loved changes of many a diverse green.162 196

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Traditionally Samson was depicted as a dupe, a figure of fun in his erotic obsession with someone so changeable and unreliable; but Lydgate shows that Samson defies these seemingly inevitable processes and is ennobled through his constant faith in Delilah: He intended truth, and she was variable, He was faithful, and she was untrue, He was steadfast, and she was unstable, He was trusting always, 163 and, by pointing out that Delilah was not dressed in blue, the colour of faith and the Virgin, he was of course suggesting that Mary would have been a more worthy object of his devotion, something he addressed in his finest work, The Life of Our Lady, completed for the Prince of Wales in 1411.164 Women however, Lydgate urges his readers to remember, are to be identified with the unreliability of Fortune, and in the Troy Book he responded to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde by identifying Criseyde with the fluctuations of Fortune in a way that suggests he saw her as an incarnation of natural forces, a representation of the alchemical laws of transmutation: Lo here the end of worldy bitterness? Of fleshly lust! Lo here the instability! Lo, here the double variation of worldly bliss and transmutation This day in mirth and in woe tomorrow.165 Chaucer's satirical undermining of Dante's idealization of the eyes of the beloved is taken a stage further to illustrate the deception and fraud that is more appropriate to Dante's Geryon: They hide so, that no man can spy And though it so be that with a woeful eye they outwardly can weep piteously, The other eye can laugh covertly.166 The emphasis on female concupiscence and depravity in the Corbaccio, which fits in with the tone of many of the tales of the Decameron, also conforms to a preoccupation with the sin of lust on the part of the duke of Gloucester himself. Humfrey had a reputation for indulging in the sins of the flesh: Pope Pius II, between 1458 and 1464, declared that the duke possessed an unbalanced mind that he was effeminate and given to sensual pleasures, a tendency which vitiated all his actions; he concluded that the duke was more suited to a life of letters and lust. Lydgate hints at this predisposition, after his accounts of the rapes of Lucretia and Dinah, in a passage on the undoing of princes who succumb to lust: ‘In lechery was set all their plesaunce.’ Apart from Jacqueline of Hainault and Eleanor Cobham, Humfrey had two mistresses and two illegitimate children. An 197

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indication of the activity of the duke’s libido is provided in his notes to some of his books. In the fly leaves of his copy of the poems of Jean Froissart he declares, in French, his affection for Jacqueline of Hainault: ‘Cest bien saison R Jaqui de Bavaria (this is good season)’ but on more than one occasion he also declares: ‘There is no one uglier than Jacqueline’, and on the same page he writes: ‘more beautiful my Waryng,’ referring to Jacqueline’s equerry Jean de Warigny, and at the top of a copy of a translation of Arabic medical treatises, an Antidotarium, that was probably a gift from Eleanor Cobham, he writes: ‘loyal and beautiful to Gloucester’, which became his motto.167 There was a medical and political aspect to this preoccupation with lust. Gilbert Kymer was one of the duke’s physicians, and he gave an account of his client’s medical condition in his Dietarium, dated 6 March 1425 and written in Hainault, Flanders. The duke was not at this time well enough to lead his troops in person to take possession of Jacqueline of Hainault’s territories.168 The Dietarium, designed to give its patron spiritual and bodily guidance, with extensive borrowings from the Secret of Secrets, reflects an understanding of the duke’s personal complexion and balance of humours and places great emphasis on his lustful predisposition. In the nineteenth chapter, Kymer referred to the scarcity of his patient’s semen, due to excessive sexual activity and its debilitating effect on his nerves, on his energies and on the flower of his youth. Promising to provide rare medicines to combat this fault in an otherwise virtuous prince, he pointed out that frequent intercourse reduced the natural heat and moisture in his body, rendering the duke prone to dryness, which afflicted his spleen, liver, kidneys and genitals, impeding his digestions, generating corrupt humours and shortness of breath. A prediction follows that the consequent excess of choler would ultimately lead to melancholy in the patient after his forty-fifth year which would shorten his life.169 However, it is also clear that for Kymer and Humfrey, the conquest of lust also involved a movement away from the dark valley of base instincts to the sunlit uplands of reason, in ways similar to the journey of the dreamer in Corbaccio, and the progression of the philosopher in Plato’s Republic from the dark cave to the sunlight above.

Women the occult and the health of the body politic In his understanding of alchemy, Humfrey would in all probability have shared the antifeminist bias of writers on alchemy and humoral medicine and practitioners of these disciplines: men were expected to be interested in natural science, and women, it was assumed were solely interested in the practice of magic. This may be the immediate context for the commissioning of the Latin translation of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio in 1444, which can be seen as the duke’s reaction to the arrest and trial of his wife, Eleanor Cobham, for witchcraft in 1441. In the Corbaccio it is claimed that women’s every thought is to rob, control and deceive men and find out what they are plotting: ‘Because of this, they visit, summon, and cherish astrologers, necromancers, witches and diviners; and the latter, in all their necessities, though using nothing but fables, are abundantly aided and sustained, even enriched by the property of their wretched husbands.’170 Humfrey’s 198

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favourite text, Plato’s Republic, is forthright in its condemnations of the practice of magic, which is consigned to the world of illusions, the flashing images on the wall of a cave, and which is regarded as an insult to reason. Magic, sexual pleasure and fear, all components in the accusations against Eleanor, are condemned in the Republic as forms of deception and robbery, depriving an individual and community of a sense of self and reality. Public confirmation of the duchess of Gloucester’s involvement in the occult came on 13 November 1441 when the citizens of London witnessed the public penance of Eleanor Cobham, who was taken down the River Thames on her barge to the Temple steps, and from there she walked on foot, bareheaded to St Paul’s Cathedral, showing a meek and demure countenance, and carrying before her a wax taper of two pounds which she offered to the high altar. This was the first of three days of ordered pilgrimages to London churches. The following Wednesday, by way of Thomas Head, Bridge Step and Leadenhill, she came to Christ Church Aldgate, and on Friday, she landed at Queen’s High and went to Chepe and St Michael, where she was met by the mayor of London and the sheriffs and crafts from the city and escorted along the road of penance.171 Chroniclers commented: ‘O how the mighty have fallen.’172 Her change of fortune was as dramatic as any of the incidents narrated in The Fall of Princes. She had been charged in proceedings instituted by Suffolk, who presided over a special commission, to enquire into all matters pertaining to sorcery in which Eleanor, and the Oxford clerks Thomas Southwell, canon of St Stephen’s, Westminster (where Eleanor sought sanctuary to no avail), and Robert Bolingbroke were arraigned in a court presided over by Adam Moleyns, clerk of the king’s council. Eleanor was accused of indulging in necromancy to bring about the death of Henry VI and of using spells and a wax effigy of the king, which she roasted before a fire (a practice described in many of the classical authors that Humfrey read). In her trial she did plead guilty to several of the charges: she had consulted the astrologers Southwell, and Bolingbroke, who had dedicated one treatise to the duchess, which gives a brief introduction to judicial astrology including questions on how a man might die. Southwell and Bolingbroke cast a horoscope for the king for the fifth of December and found that the king’s natal Moon in the twelfth house, in close opposition to Mars in the sixth house, indicated mental weakness and a possibility that he would die of melancholia towards the end of May or in June 1441, and Saturn in the eighth house, squaring with Venus, called into question his ability to produce offspring. The overall reading presented worrying concerns over the king’s health in his nineteenth and twentieth years, his predisposition to be easily led, and his inability to rule without guidance of someone else. For Eleanor, the wife of the heir presumptive, this reading for a childless king prompted her to visit the witch of Eye, Margery Jourdemayne, to secure potions to ensure a safe delivery of a Lancastrian child (she had no children).173 Bolingbroke and Southwell had acted in good faith, and in their concern for the king’s welfare they performed a prohibitive Mass at Hornsea palace for the physical preservation of the king. There was some rivalry with Cambridge astrologers, John Holbroke and Roger Marshall, who nevertheless drew similar charts, while questioning the methods of their Oxford rivals,174 but the readings of Bolingbroke and Southwell seem to have been accepted as accurate: no one accused them of questioning Henry’s fitness to rule 199

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or his ability to have children. By this time rumours of his lack of martial instincts, childlike simplicity and disinterest in sex were widespread.175 What sealed their fate, and that of the duchess, was their connection to the heir presumptive. Humfrey could not be linked with their alleged plot without making public the reading about Henry’s mental health, and his enemies concentrated instead on establishing a link between Humfrey’s duchess, Eleanor Cobham, and Bolingbroke and Southwell. Southwell died in prison and Bolingbroke, before he was hung, drawn and quartered, named the duchess (probably under duress of torture) of instigating an enquiry into the king’s future welfare by asking: ‘what estate she should be in’. Their readings on the king’s well-being in his nineteenth and twentieth years therefore could be interpreted as a direct response to the duchess’s enquiry concerning the likelihood of her becoming queen in the event of her nephew’s death, and they were enough to convict them of treason. A more favourable horoscope for 5 December was cast at the instigation of the king’s physician, John Somerset of Cambridge,176 and given that Henry’s ability to have children had been called into question, Humfrey’s enemies forced him to divorce Eleanor to prevent him from having legitimate offspring. Eleanor confessed to consulting the witch, Margery Jourdemayne, who was burnt at the stake at Smithfield, to obtain love potions to secure the affections of her wayward husband and to help her conceive, and Eleanor was found guilty of heresy and witchcraft. None of the contemporary chroniclers suggested her trial was for political reasons; this would be claimed by Tudor chroniclers. She was imprisoned in various castles, and in July 1441, Lord Stanley was directed to take her to the Isle of Man. The following year she was imprisoned in Flint Castle, and finally, in March 1449, Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey, where she died in July 1452.177 There is little doubt that Margery did dabble in the occult arts: an inventory of her property reveals she possessed a vial of aqua vitae (used in alchemical medicines), and an anonymous poem How a Lover Praiseth His Lady,178 written at, and about, Greenwich Palace, hints at some of her attempts under moonlight to secure her husband’s love and fidelity. The poem, heavily influenced by The Romance of the Rose, survives in a single manuscript owned by Lord Stanley, who had the final charge of Eleanor after her conviction, and presumably it came into his hands from her possessions after her death in 1459.179 Conversations among ladies in the garden about the French relics180 suggest a reference to the coronation of Henry VI in Rheims Cathedral, when the holy relics of the French kings were brought out, and this dates the poem to after Easter 1430, and references to necromancy would indicate that it was composed before Eleanor’s trial in 1441. The poem, besides containing allusions to Plesaunce, its towers, walls and the sight of the nearby River Thames, full of merchant ships, and a nearby great city, gives an account of some occult practices. There is a description of a well with medicinal herbs tended by a gardener and a list of precious stones used to aid fulfilment of one’s wishes including jacinth for safe journeys; carbuncle which shines by night; ruby for honour and grace; adamant to secure a man’s love; and topaz to harness the moon’s influence and keep a man’s love, and which, along with diamonds, was used in enchantments.181 Even more suggestive than the duchess’s jewels however is the reference to her mirror of wondrous design (probably an obsidian scrying glass): 200

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There was also a mirror of wondrous design polished by Intelligence divine Made by starred astronomy By spirits in the air and necromancy In whom you might behold and look In the example of the divine book182 How your friends fare in every country And how your self in perfect health may be.183 It is tempting to see Eleanor as a Lady Macbeth figure, fanning the flames of her husband’s ambition. She certainly had a reputation as a magnetic and dangerous Medealike woman. Lydgate, in a poem on Gloucester’s approaching marriage, had described the previous duchess of Gloucester, Jacqueline of Hainault, as a model of constancy, a Dido or Lucretia,184 and he even employed alchemical imagery to celebrate the joining of the two realms: The dew of grace shall distill and rain Peace and accord it will multiply … That the duchess of Holland by whole affection may be allied with Brutus’s Albion.185 When the duke finally realized the duke of Burgundy would never allow him to take over the territories of Jacqueline, he pillaged the Flanders countryside before returning to England in 1425, and Lydgate wrote that he had abandoned the duchess, in the same way that Duke Theseus (another patron of learning who made Athens the ‘well of philosophers’ where the seven liberal arts flowed like streams) had left Ariadne on an island and married Phaedra, the source of all his sorrows.186 The implication is that Eleanor Cobham, the lady in waiting accompanying Jacqueline to Hainault, who returned with the duke to became his mistress in 1425, would be a similar source of grief. A more specific criticism of Gloucester’s association with Eleanor was expressed in an indignant ballad, ‘A Complaint for My Lady of Gloucester’, in which the author, one of Gloucester’s chaplains,187 hides his identity and that of the duke and the two duchesses and expresses his sympathy for Jacqueline and attempts to excuse the duke’s behaviour by suggesting he was the victim of Eleanor’s witchcraft.188 A solitary has a dream, in a setting that suggests Humfrey’s tower and park overlooking the Thames, in which he hears by the riverside women lamenting the fate of a wronged woman far from home. By the river’s strand a Melusine-like figure, a mermaid, appears resembling an enchantress with the face of a sorceress. She is accompanied by a circle of witches, gathered in the tower, and by serpentine wiles they turn the prince’s heart and make it double: They thought they saw a mermaid Resembling an enchantress Of face like a sorceress 201

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Upon a tower with a great company Of witches sitting round about They were of heart serpentine By appearance they looked to be Busy to bend and incline, With all their power and their might, The prince’s heart against all right.189 The author may have been attempting to explain Humfrey’s behaviour by calling for vengeance on the enchantress, but he was also reinforcing doubts about his manhood and even calling attention to another innocent victim, the first duchess’s grieving sixyear-old godson, Henry VI.190 The author’s suggestion that Eleanor, a false Circe and siren, and her witches, used false incantations and medicines to provide love potions to turn the prince’s heart and make him untrue would lend substance to the confession of Margery Jourdemayne that she had supplied Eleanor with the potions, whereby she had bewitched Humfrey a decade earlier.191 Humfrey was in no position to defend his wife. He was seriously compromised, and his vulnerable position was made clear when Bolingbroke was brought to a platform in St Paul’s churchyard and seated on a mock throne: ‘whereon he was wont to sit when he wrought his craft’, dressed as an astrologer and conjurer, with a paper crown on his head, in an allusion to Gloucester’s surname and his perceived pretensions to the crown.192 Eleanor and her husband did share an interest in astrology and medicine:193 among the physicians in the duke’s household, apart from Kymer, were Giovanni da Signorelli of Ferrara (Frulovisi’s native city) naturalized in 1432, Thomas Southwell, and John Harowe, who petitioned the mayor and aldermen of London to set up a college of surgeons and physicians in London (Harowe also accompanied Humfrey on the relief of Calais in 1436 with six barber surgeons).194 Lydgate attested to the duke’s interest in alchemical medicine in his Letter to Gloucester, when he complains that although he has tried various potions to alleviate the lightness of his purse, ‘I sought leeches for a restorative, in whom I found no consolation. Apothecaries for comfort’ and concludes that the only cordial to cure his condition is ‘aurum potable, in quintessence the best restorative’.195 Eleanor presented her husband with a manuscript of medical/astrological texts, and Whethamstede gave to Gloucester a miscellaneous collection of medical, astrological texts including Albertus Magnus’s De divinatione and Raymund de Marseille’s liber cursuum Planetarum (Book of the Courses of the Planets).196 Gloucester’s book of geomancy survives.197 Further indication of Gloucester’s interest in astronomy and astrology is provided by his employment of the polyphonic composer, John Dunstable, formerly in Bedford’s service, as a ‘serviteur et familiar domestique’ (a high-ranking domestic servant). According to the epitaph written for Dunstable by John Whethamstede, he had ‘secret knowledge of the stars’.198 William Worcester copied into his notebook a list of latitudes of English places from ‘old writing in the hand of Dunstable’.199 The composer’s association with Whethamstede was confirmed by the abbot’s composition of verses for twelve stained glass windows for the abbey 202

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library devoted to learning, and Dunstable was commemorated for his knowledge of astrology, astronomy and medicine. There is even evidence that Humfrey, to a degree, shared his wife’s interest in the occult. He is credited with the composition of a prologue on astrological tables on the effectiveness of planets and predicting.200 He had been sympathetic to another woman involved in a witchcraft scandal. In 1419, Joan Navarre, widow of Henry IV, was charged with witchcraft: according to the confession of her chaplain, Friar Randolph, she urged him to use sorcery to conjure the king’s death in the most horrible way imaginable (she had quarrelled with Henry V over the release of her imprisoned son, Arthur of Brittany). Joan’s father, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, had been accused of sorcery by the dauphin, the future Charles V, and in her possession, during her confinement at Leeds castle, there were vials of aqua vitae and rose water. She was released from captivity on Henry V’s dying wishes in 1422, and Humfrey and Eleanor expressed their support by visiting her after her release from prison, and Humfrey arranged her funeral on 11 August 1439, attended by Eleanor. Humfrey also had close links with Friar Randolph: he possessed Randolph’s astrological tables and had him removed from the Tower of London, which was fortified by Beaufort in 1425. More suggestive still, there are, in the York Minster records for 1465, accusations against a chaplain, William Bygg, alias Leech, accused of illicit dark arts. In his full confession to the vicar general of the archbishop of York, Bygg admitted to his activity as a crystal gazer and to owning books of an occult nature that were in his library in his room in Duke Humfrey’s manor at Greenwich.201 What is certain is that there was an elitist, cabalistic element to the intellectual activities of Humfrey’s Plesaunce circle. A politically damaged Humfrey did, despite the divorce imposed on him, endow a perpetual chantry for Eleanor in 1444, but there is no evidence that he was an accomplice to a Lady Macbeth, using magic to attain the crown: he was never charged with any occult activities, and he seems to have distanced himself from his wife’s behaviour. In this he was in line with conventional alchemical/medical views on women and the threat they could pose to the body politic. Boccaccio’s portrayal in Corbaccio of a sexually depraved widow who causes so much unhappiness is not just for entertainment; it is an endorsement of commonly held assumptions about the uncertain, ill-defined and potentially disruptive role that older women, widows and spinsters occupied in society. The widow in Corbaccio is presumably childless, and her womb, uterus and vagina, all regarded in Galenic medicine as a single organ, like an upturned vessel, was seen to be a potentially wild and dangerous animal. In traditional, Hippocratic medicine, expressed in the Trotula treatises202 and in The Sicknesses of Women, which were widely copied in the fifteenth century, it was maintained that the womb, if denied the moisture coming from sexual activity, wandered restlessly through the body in search of this moisture; that was fundamentally the search for a child. The Trotula treatises endorsed the medieval tradition that the build-up of female semen or corrupt seed needed to be released for medical reasons, and they prescribed masturbation and the use of pessaries and other instruments to ‘deliver her corrupt seed’.203 The widow’s recourse to such instruments, if there were no man available, was an activity regarded with horror by the spirit guide in Corbaccio: ‘No other creature is less clean than a woman—let him search the secret places where they in shame hide the 203

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horrible instruments they employ to take away their superfluous humours.’204 Widows, as they approached the menopause, were regarded with suspicion because they were denied the regular release of harmful humours through menstruation. The contrasting attitudes to female and male sexuality in fifteenth century medical circles were demonstrated in the Dietarium Kymer wrote for Humfrey duke of Gloucester. Kymer, who was accused by the theologian and chancellor of Oxford, Thomas Gascoigne, of abandoning his wife, whom he married before 1420, for a career in the church,205 saw women as predominantly irrational, sexual creatures, and he warned his patient about their restless search for sexual satisfaction, instructing Humfrey not to pay any attention to this in his congress with a woman. Kymer assured his patient that the great desires he may feel from time to time were due to superfluous humours, and while acknowledging that it is permissible to expel them at rare intervals to facilitate sleep and easier movement, he also warns the duke that the seed a man expels must have a powerful potency, containing as it does the very image of a man. It should, therefore, only be released to preserve and continue the species, and the serene prince should moderate coition so that it does not harm the body and is displeasing to God by indulging in copulation in the spring rather than the summer and in the autumn rather than the winter. Then, God willing, such healthy intercourse will produce male heirs and abundant succession. Additional advice on diet, in the nature of sympathetic magic, is provided to ensure this through the consumption of such seeded fruits as grapes, figs, and dates, peppers, almonds, coconut flesh, liquorice, the eggs of chicken and fish, and the genitals of bulls and cockerels. Kymer warned his patron that the vice of Venus to which he and other Lancastrians were addicted was likely to result in sterility or at best small amounts of semen, which would produce effeminate offspring, likely to be cuckolded, or imbeciles.206 The implication of such advice for Henry V’s progeny is clear, and its relevance to both Gloucester and Sir John Fastolf (who was made aware of the Dietarium by his medical adviser, William Worcester); both men lacked legitimate male heirs. Worcester, in a note to his copy of the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, which he revised after Scrope’s death, perhaps in his capacity as literary executor, added against the dict ‘women are snares’ the note: ‘and especially be not conversant nor near or among women, for I was kept from their company xxx years and so too were those of my counsel; I thank God for it’,207 and, in a saying attributed to Diogenes, it is maintained ‘love is a sickness that comes to people through great idleness and by little exercising in other works’. Such prejudices against women are far removed from the high place Dante assigned for women. At the point when Dante senses Beatrice’s presence beneath her white veil in the Earthly Paradise he turns to his left, in the direction of his heart, to Virgil for reassurance only to find that Virgil, like Euridyce leaving Orpheus to return to the underworld: had left us deprived of himselfVirgil, most sweet father,208

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and, turning his tear-stained face towards the veiled lady, he is assured that he will soon have further occasion to weep more after she has spoken to him. This moment symbolizes the movement from the patriarchal Roman world of Inferno and Purgatorio to the matriarchal, Catholic otherworld of the Resurrection. Beatrice’s appearance has been preceded by a procession of twenty-four elders, and the griffon and chariot, culminating in the appearance of St John, the author of the Book of Revelations. The procession shows the ending of time and the Roman temporal world with Christ’s judgement, heralded by the appearance of the lady Beatrice.209 Dante’s pilgrimage culminates in his following the light in the eyes of Beatrice, the light that first warmed him as an infant at his mother’s breast; but in the Convivio he had described how a child may cling to its mother’s breast as soon as it is born, but as soon as ‘light appears in his mind he ought to turn to the correction of his father’.210 This anticipates the way in mid-fifteenth century England it was the patriarchal, Roman world of Virgil that predominated, and medical and scientific prejudices about women had political implications for the body politic. In alchemical writings of the fifteenth century, the instability of mercury, and the alchemist’s frustrated attempts to fix this volatile substance, was linked to the erratic and unstable behaviour of women, subjected to the fluctuating moods caused by the wandering of their wombs. Even Lucretia was seen in The Fall of Princes as concupiscent, confessing to her reluctant enjoyment of rape at the hands of Tarquin: Lust enforced generates a false appetite Through the frailty that is included in Nature; Despite the will, there follows a delight … To you openly my guilt I will confess. Although I was against my will oppressed, There was a sort of constrained lust in the deed Which for no power can be redressed.211 Lydgate, interested in the psychology of a fallen woman, and sympathetic to her tragic plight, caught between her ideals and the biological facts of nature that he so brutally and forensically examines, is nevertheless clear that a woman’s unwilling sensuality has been the downfall of the Roman monarchy, and the relevance for Humfrey, faced with the consequences of Eleanor’s misguided passion, was apparent. Political instability in the period between 1440 and 1460 was frequently linked by chroniclers to the unstable behaviour of the first water or mercury, symbolized by Melusine, the spirit of nature, the primal substance and the foundation of life, which was both a medicine and a poison. It is for this reason that Fortune (closely identified with the changeability of nature and forces of disruption) was always depicted as a woman. The question of the body politic being turned upside down by the assertion of women was raised in the course of the Hertford Mummings when the court without a king ruled that ‘the wives franchise will stand whole and entire and no man can withstand it until someone finds by process of law that they should by nature in their lives have sovereignty over prudent wives,’212 205

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thereby raising the possibility that in the wider national sphere, while a child was in charge, there was a lack of masculine authority. This was confirmed by the 1440s: Henry VI may have begun to assert himself in such matters as the cessation of Anjou, but to many observers he was beginning to behave like a woman, unstable, unpredictable, dominated by the watery humour of phlegm, instead of the masculine humour of choler which governed his formidable father’s behaviour.213 In a genealogical tree, in a manuscript containing the Latin Life of St Alban, the evolution of the English royal line is shown alongside a diagram depicting branches from the primordial chaos to the various alliances of the four elements and the different combinations of the sanguine, melancholy, choleric and phlegmatic humours. England, in consideration of the long reign of Henry VI, is defined as a phlegmatic land governed by the moon.214 Gilbert Kymer, who with Henry VI’s physician, John Somerset, petitioned the mayor and aldermen of London to found a college to ensure the better education and control of physicians and surgeons practising in London,215 was a member of the 1456 alchemy commission which diagnosed Henry VI’s illness as premature senility. Disturbances of the body politic were linked to incidents of wet, cold weather, which was considered to be indicative of the rising of the negative, female humour of phlegm, associated with witchcraft and solar eclipses, where the choleric energy of the sun was believed to have been swallowed up by the dark, chthonic, watery elements of the moon. When Henry VI’s phlegmatic impotence became apparent, chroniclers, physicians and citizens began to look for incidents of bad weather and eclipses; believing witchcraft to be behind such phenomena, they became increasingly preoccupied with water and storms associated with disorder. The Brut Chronicle recorded increasingly destructive wet summers that spoiled harvests. The English Chronicle recorded the appearance of an eclipse of the sun in 1433: ‘whereof people were sore afraid’.216 The author of The English Chronicle and a Welsh Chronicle, written in the household of Edward, earl of March, recorded a great frost on St Valentine’s Day in 1431, and crop failures and consequent high wheat prices and famine, which were linked to the defection of Burgundy and the Siege of Calais.217 Southwell and Bolingbroke, the Duchess of Gloucester’s astrologers, were accused of trying to harness an unfavourable conjunction of watery planets to push the king over the brink into madness. The English Chronicle described the striking of St Paul’s steeple by lightning and fire in 1444 and claimed no man had seen anything like it.218 The account is followed by notice of the landing in England of Lady Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s future bride. Her nickname of ‘she wolf ’ is perhaps alluded to in Lydgate’s description of Olympias, mother of Alexander, devotee of a serpent cult who, setting her plesaunce in lust, murder and vengeance, governed Macedonia ‘like a shewolf ’.219 Margaret’s arrival, presaged by storms, was seen as proof of the effeminizing of the body politic, and her husband seemed to get weaker and more feminine as she grew stronger. Humfrey was an outspoken opponent of the king’s cessation of Anjou as a wedding present to his bride, and his subsequent arrest, described in The English Chronicle, was depicted with the observation that in 1446, in the months of November and December, there fell great thunder and lightning, huge great winds, and the same

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writer observed that when Humfrey arrived in Bury for his supposed audience with the king, there was an extreme frost that killed many people. 220 All of these scientific, medical attempts to define women and the body politic represented a radical departure from Dante’s idealization of women and, with the exception of the cult of the Virgin, this would be most notably manifested in a complete disregard for any connection between the love for and of a woman and a concept of salvation which was central to Dante’s conception of the afterlife. However, Dante’s legacy in the period 1370–1450 was to give women like Beatrice, Francesca, Piccarda and Nella a voice, to historicize them, and this was elaborated in different ways by Boccaccio and Chaucer and followers such as Richard Roos. Unfortunately a more longlasting legacy was that of Petrarch, who was beset by dualist fears of eros from which he yearned to be healed by a higher power and who, in writing for men, turned back to courtly love traditions, especially in his portrayal of the submissive, obedient wife Griselda. Petrarch’s views triumphed over Dante’s, and he became more popular with subsequent generations of Italian and English poets such as Sir Philip Sidney in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.221

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Figure 9  Sandro Botticelli illustration to Paradiso v. The transition from the Moon to Mercury where Beatrice declares her love for Dante, c. 1480. (Kuperstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

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CHAPTER 7

THE PRIMUM MOBILE AND THE EMPYREAN: LOVE AND THE AFTERLIFE

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And Cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy. – William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood1 Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice. (Look at us well! Truly I am, truly I am Beatrice.) – Dante, Purgatorio2 I will attach feathers to your thoughts. By which they may rise to the heights so that all tribulation will be done away, and you by my guidance, and on my path, and with my conveyances, shall return safe and sound to your homeland. –Chaucer, Boece (his translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy3 The gap between Dante’s world and that of English intellectuals of the period between 1370 and 1450 is most poignantly demonstrated when considering Dante’s views on the close relationship between love in all its manifestations and his faith in a literal resurrection and an afterlife, a hope that, he believed, sets man apart from the animals and which is confirmed in dreams: ‘I say that of all follies the most foolish, the busiest and most pernicious is the belief that beyond this life there is no other … I shall pass to another and better life after this one, where my body lives in glory.’4 This conviction rested on the belief that the afterlife should be understood in terms of the perpetual enjoyment of all that is best in this life, which is the phenomenon of unconditional love. Unconditional love for Dante was manifested in the light coming from the Empyrean, the eye of God, reflected from the Ninth Heaven of the primum mobile, flooding the lake of light in the Empyrean, and then the entire universe and the lake in the pilgrim’s heart. The source of this light could also be located in the pupils of the eyes of the devoted

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Beatrice. The pilgrim, searching for his loving home, was granted a first glimpse of this Heaven as a nine-year-old child when he met Beatrice and had his first tangible glimpse of Heaven. It was a vision remorselessly rejected by Chaucer, for whom love was a mysterious natural, procreative urge that comes and goes, as impermanent as anything in nature. Sunlight for him was nothing more than a harsh beam exposing illusions to the glare or reality. For Chaucer there was no otherworld of justice, punishment and bliss, merely a sky containing the echoes of all the voices of humanity proclaiming false vows. His characters are preoccupied with the earth: they avoid looking up at the heavens, and his art was focused on the gossip and loves of ordinary, earthbound pilgrims. The writers in the Plesaunce circle were equally focused on the earth. Humfrey duke of Gloucester had access to new translations of Greek philosophers for whom transcendence was achieved only through the hard logic of abstract thinking, and in the alchemical philosophy available in his household in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and The Book of Husbandry, there is a conviction, in contrast to Dante’s sense of a linear pilgrimage to the heavens, that there are only endless circles of change brought about through the natural cycles of death, birth and decay. The duke of Gloucester’s funeral arrangements reveal him anticipating that he would only enter the realm of the spirit, in the sense of the release of his quintessence, after disintegration and sublimation of the four elements of his body, recycled into earth.

Dante and Guido: From carnal to heavenly love Exile, wandering and longing for home are the themes of the procession of sacred history, the sufferings of the church and its journey, following the rising and setting of the stars, to its heavenly home in the East, a procession the pilgrim will witness at the conclusion of his climb to the summit of Mount Purgatory.5 The Divine Comedy itself is an epic journey, full of associations of travelling with pilgrims, exile, river crossings, dark forests and mountain paths, and allusions to ocean voyages, nautical references to boats, sailing masts, shipyards, perilous waves, whirlpools, and tentative allusions to home in the form of city walls and harbours. Life is conceived as a pilgrimage, in which the pilgrim, whose greatest desire given his nature is to return to his beginning, walks in his search for knowledge, along a road never travelled before, looking at every house he sees, believing it to be an inn, ‘so great is his soul’s yearning for its supreme good’.6 Love in The Divine Comedy is the feeling of coming home after a long journey or trip. On the pilgrim’s first day on the beautiful island of Purgatory, near the seashore at twilight where the newly deceased arrivals disembark and form a restored community, the closing in of evening is accompanied by inevitable melancholy feelings, a shared experience of disorientation, and an aching nostalgia and longing for homes and bodies far away: It was already the hour that turns back the desire of seafarers and softens their hearts, on the day they have said farewell to their sweet friends, 210

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the hour that pierces the new pilgrim with love, If he hears a bell far off that seems to mourn the dying day.7 The recently deceased have arrived from the port of Ostia on Easter Sunday morning, after the celebration of the Easter Liturgy, Exultet, commemorating the night God first led the children of Israel out of Egypt. Their numbers are swelled by the recent announcement of the Papal Jubilee in Rome,8 and they are singing the psalm: ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’ (When Israel went out of Egypt).9 Egypt represents the world of the living; the Red Sea symbolizes death; the Sinai Desert is the equivalent of the island of Purgatory; Eden is at the top of the mountain and Heaven beyond is the promised land.10 This was the psalm that would have been sung to accompany their bodies as they were born to church for the Office of the Dead, celebrating the soul’s liberation from the corruption of earthly life; and during the Paschal procession on Easter Sunday from the cathedral of Santa Reparata to San Giovanni where mass baptisms would take place (involving Dante as a child, a father and a witness) of as many as 5,500 to 6000 people a year, according to Giovanni Villani.11 But although the ‘dying day’ is a prelude to a joyful homecoming, the shades are still unsure as they disembark from the felucca powered by the angel about the nature of their real home. It is likely that they have been misled by Boniface’s Jubilee Indulgence and believe the stain of their sins has been erased and they are entering Paradise. They have come from the Tiber, the embarkation point for voyages to the Holy Land and Jerusalem, exhorted by a mosaic over the entrance to the arcade of St Peter’s Basilica, completed in 1300 by Giotto, showing St Peter’s bark with sails directed by an angel’s breath arriving on the shore of Galilee and being greeted by Jesus. Their hopes that they are in Paradise would have been strengthened by the mountain in front of them, traditionally associated with Zion and the heavenly Jerusalem, while Purgatory was widely understood to be an underworld of torments similar to Hell, like St Patrick’s Purgatory.12 However they are instead greeted by Virgil and Dante who deny the validity of Boniface’s decree when Cato asks them how they have arrived here: ‘Can the laws of the abyss be broken, then? or has some new counsel been adopted in Heaven?’13 The musician Casella, who died in December 1299, alludes to Boniface’s promises when he greets his friend, but his suffering and three-month wait on the shores of the Tiber for a felucca to Purgatory persuades him that, like all the arrivals on the shore of the island, he is there not because of the jubilee but because he is confessed and contrite. They are all rebuked by Cato to cease listening to Casella’s music and to begin their ascent up the slopes of Purgatory to their real home, which will involve the natural inclination of their diverse natures towards distant ports over ‘the great sea of being’.14 Their painful longing will ease as they make their way up the mountain, towards their original, eternal home, and its lure becomes stronger as their compulsions unwind, now that they are free 211

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from planetary influences, so much so that when Dante meets his old friend, Forese, on the terrace of gluttony who asks him: ‘When will it be that I see you again’, he replies: ‘I don’t know’ I answered him, ‘how long I am to live, but my return will not be so soon that in my desire I shall not have reached shore Sooner.’15 This faith in love, in an afterlife free from the forces of mutability, beyond the fixed stars, in a realm of light and divine love with angels radiating in uniform motion around the central point of light that is their origin, may not have come easily, and there is a haunting encounter in the sixth circle of the heretics that hints at some of the youthful conflicts that preceded Dante’s affirmation of the transcendental power of his love of Beatrice. Just inside the city walls of Dis there is a vast cemetery (inspired by the necropolis of Alyscamps at Arles),16 strewn with sarcophagi, containing the shades of the Epicureans who followed the ancient Greek philosopher in denying the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife, and because they think life ends with the grave, their contrapasso is to spend eternity in a tomb. The empirical perspective the inhabitants of this necropolis share in Inferno ensures that they are preoccupied with events and affairs among the living. Dante encounters two Florentines sharing a single tomb. The first to emerge from the waist is Farinata degli Uberti (d. 1264), whose descendants Dante met in Verona in 1303, the leader of the Ghibbelines of Florence who, with the Pisans and German cavalry, routed the Florentine Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti in 1266. He was posthumously tried in 1283, declared by Florence’s Franciscan inquisitor a Paterni or a Cathar heretic, and his body was exhumed and burnt at the stake. Farinata, a stoic unbeliever, whose iconographic imago pietatis pose ironically underlined his denial of the Resurrection, reveals in his questions to Dante his continuing obsession with affairs in Florence and his implacable hatred of the White Guelphs. The other occupant of the tomb is Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti (d. 1280), the father of Dante’s ‘primo amico’,17 his closest friend, Guido Cavalcanti, son-in-law of Farinata, and fellow White Guelph. Cavalcante is described by Boccaccio in his commentary as an Epicurean who denied the existence of the soul after the death of the body;18 he too is preoccupied with affairs among the living and looks anxiously around when he sees Dante unaccompanied by his son: It looked around me, as anxious to see whether an another were with me, and after its peering was entirely spent, weeping it said: ‘If through this blind prison you are going because of your high genius, where is my son, and why is he not with you?’19 Cavalcante’s anguished enquiry about whether his son is dead or alive (as an Epicurean he is indifferent to Guido’s ultimate fate) hints at so much about a complex relationship 212

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between two once inseparable friends who shared a common genius and vocation for the poetry of the Dolce stil Nuovo (Guido was described by Benvenuto da Imola as the other eye of Florence). Their exchanges in their poetry suggest the relationship was very intense and Dante would have to pass through the bolgia of the sodomites feeling somewhat compromised. His susceptibility to homoerotic impulses is hinted at in the warm greeting of Brunetto Latini, the rhetorician who returned from his Paris exile to Florence after the Guelph victory of 1266 to become a prominent public figure and orator in 1289. While in Paris Brunetto wrote in the French vernacular, an encyclopaedia, Li Livres dou tresor, which he described as an account of the creation of the world, antiquity, the nature of things, of the vices and virtues and the rules of rhetoric (including the teachings of Cicero),20 which we translated into Italian as Tresoro and which gives some indication of the learning he imparted to Dante. As a teacher and surrogate father imparting the seeds of wisdom to his son, he aroused in his pupil anxieties about the educational legacy of the inter-generational erotics of the Greeks and their intellectual heirs Virgil and Ovid.21 Dante had a more intimate relationship with him than with any other of the dead Florentines he meets in the otherworld. Latini greets him with the words: ‘What a marvel’,22 before taking him on an evening walk with the literary sodomites along the dikes of the River Phlegathon, that recall the flood defences of the Flemmings and Paduans, human constructions against destructive tides and the inevitable backup of water as it makes its way to the sea; the implication being that moral, sexual constraints and labels can do little to eliminate the blurring of sexual identities which are all part of nature’s fluidity.23 In Purgatory where lust is the least serious of sins and the desires of same and opposite sex are treated equally, a similar warmth is shown in the greeting of the pilgrim’s friend, Forese Donati: ‘What grace this is for me,’24 to which Dante replies: ‘If you call back to mind what you used to be with me, and I with you, the present memory will still be heavy.’25 Forese walks with Dante before breaking off to join his friends, just like Brunetto. Benvenuto thought Forese’s greeting implied an improper relationship between the two, and Bertoldi was more specific in maintaining they were comrades in various lascivious behaviour that they engaged in mutually and together.26 When the pilgrim in the circle of the sodomites sees the Florentine nobleman and Guelph, Iacobo Rusticucci (whose sin is extenuated because of his unhappiness with his fierce wife), with a group of lower noblemen and homosexuals, eyeing him like wrestlers looking for a hold, the pilgrim reflects: If I had been protected from the fire, I would have thrown myself down there among them.27 Boccaccio interpreted this compassion as a sign of the poets’ complicity in homosexual acts. Guido’s own epicene tendencies were hinted at by the Black Guelph thug, Corso 213

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Donati, who suggested there was an element of sexual deviancy in his behaviour (in contrast to the stoicism of Farinata, and perhaps Guido's father when he gave Guido the nickname cavicchia (bolt or peg).28 Inevitably there was also, as the fond father’s reference to the shared genius of the two men implies, an element of competition and perhaps envy in their relationship (although with his confidence in his many gifts Dante denied he was susceptible to this sin). In Purgatory, when meeting the illuminator Oderisi, and reflecting on how he has been surpassed by Cimbaque and Giotto, Dante cannot resist noting how he as a poet will eclipse Guido Cavalcanti just as Guido had eclipsed Guido Guinizelli: Just so, one Guido has taken from the other (Guido) the glory of our language, and perhaps he is born who will drive both of them from the nest.29 Competition and envy were followed by betrayal implied in the father’s enquiring why his son was no longer with his friend. Dante had been elected as one of six White Guelph priors of Florence (a new institutional structure which freed Florence from the control of the Angevins of Naples and, since the Ordinamenti di giustizia (order of justice) of 1293, excluded seventy-two noble families, defined as having blood relations with a knight, the Cavalcanti were excluded from eligibility for office. Dante was a representative of one of the six sestieri, appointed on 15 June 1300 to serve for a twomonth period with responsibility for censuring leaders of warring factions (no longer Ghibbelines and Guelphs but the Black Guelphs and White Guelphs). To this end on 24 June 1300, Guido Cavalcanti was exiled to Sarzana, in Liguria (Dante would spend part of his twenty-year exile here). Although Dante ended his office in mid-August 1300, he was widely thought to have been instrumental in persuading the new priors to allow their political comrades (the Cerchi) back from internment at Sarzana. This partisan act led to a renewal of violence between the Cerchi and Donati factions and the beginning of the papacy’s hostile moves against Florence and its alliance with Charles of Valois. According to Bruni ‘their return was due to the infirmity of Guido Cavalcanti, who fell sick at Sarzana from bad air and died soon after’, which suggests the order was inspired by compassion for Dante’s sick friend and that the poet had intervened on his behalf.30 It was too late. Guido died attempting to return to Florence on 29 August 1300, three months after the meeting between Dante and Guido’s father in the circle of the heretics (from a malarial disease or quartan fever that would also claim Dante when he was travelling through the lagoons of the Comachio in the Po Delta on an embassy from Ravenna to Venice in 1321). Dante had to negotiate the ninth circle of Cocytus, reserved for traitors to kindred, brothers and party, which would have personal implication for his relationship and perhaps unavoidable betrayal of Guido, but also worrying implications for his role in turning against his city through his involvement in forming a coalition at Gargonza in 1302 of White Guelphs with the Ghibbelines, Florence’s oldest enemy, who included Farinata’s nephew, Lapo di Azzolero degli Uberti, against whom he had fought at Campaldino. 214

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Dante resumed the writing of Inferno in 1306 around the time he went on a diplomatic mission for the Malaspina family of Lunigiana to the marsh of Sarzana where his friend had the fatal bout of malaria.31 In addition to this cocktail of jealousy, competitiveness sexual attraction and betrayal in Dante’s mind in 1306, when writing this canto in Sarzana about the Epicureans, is the possibility that he felt compromised because he at some point shared his friend’s scepticism about the existence of an afterlife. As a student of Aristotle, Guido probably accepted Aristotle’s denial of individual immortality. Boccaccio, in the ninth tale of the sixth day of the Decameron, relates a story about Guido Cavalcanti, son of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, who was held to be of the opinion of Epicurus: ‘and indeed it was reported of common folk that his speculations consisted in seeking if it might be discovered that God was not’.32 Boccaccio relates how Guido was cornered by a party of Florentine noblemen in the Roman cemetery of the baptistry of San Giovanni (its monuments were emptied and used by Florentine aristocratic families until 1296 when they were razed or removed to Santa Reparata to open the public space of the Piazza San Giovanni). It is a setting that echoes the sarcophagi where Dante's pilgrim meets with Guido's father in Inferno. The revellers are frustrated and intimidated by Guido's aloofness which they believed was the result of his engagement in abstract speculations, and they taunt him saying: ‘Guido you refuse to be of our company but when you have found that God is not what have you accomplished.’33 Guido, hemmed in, replied: ‘Gentlemen may say what you will to me from your home,’ then laying his hand on one of the tombs he made off, much to the amusement of one of the company, Messer Betto perhaps (Dante’s mentor the scholar, Brunetto Latini d. 1294).34 In this courteous and pithy response, Guido was suggesting that in death they would all inhabit the same dwelling as his father. Dante at one time seems to have shared some of Guido’s scepticism. In Vita Nuova, in his notes to a sonnet on their respective ladies, Giovanna (Vanna) and Beatrice, which he addressed to Guido, he entertained a blasphemous comparison when he suggested Vanna’s name came from Giovanni (John) who preceded the light saying: ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ to imply the pairing of Giovanna and Guido as John the Baptist and Beatrice and Dante as Christ, the Messiah.35 Dante had also exchanged blasphemous insults in an exchange of sonnets with another friend, Forese Donati (brother of Corso), in which he suggested that Forese was illegitimate and that his father had as little to do with him as Joseph had with Christ; he compounded this offence by rhyming Cristo (Christ) with Tristo (sad)36 and then attempted to rectify the insult in the Paradise of Mars and in Jupiter, where Cristo is always repeated so it rhymes with itself, in lines proclaiming that only those who believe in Christ will be saved.37 Guido, as a Guelph nobleman, naturally looked to the house of Anjou and its imperial representatives in the Italian peninsula, Charles of Anjou, count of Provence and brother of King Louis IX of France, and his grandson Charles Martel, both inhabitants of Dante’s celestial universe, and to the military and troubadour culture of Occitan Provence.38 As an elder, aristocratic mentor (heir to one of the city’s largest fortunes) to the bourgeois Dante, he influenced the Florentine condottiere pose of mounted soldier that Dante adopted at the Battle of Campaldino (June 1289), the decisive engagement between the league of Guelph cities of Tuscany led by Corso Donati against the Ghibbeline forces of 215

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Arezzo led by Buonconte da Montefeltro, and his attempts to make the dolce stil nuovo (the new sweet style, which argued that anyone with a noble heart, regardless of status, could love) an elitist, aristocratic poetic rival to the poetry of the Provencal troubadours; and one which moreover could resolve the tensions expressed by the Sicilian troubador love poets in the conflicts between their love of God and their love for women by theologizing a courtly love (epitomized by Beatrice) that does not separate the lover from God but leads him to God.39 However Guido also brought to the civilizing ideals of courtly love, that is service to a lady, the idea from Ovid that service to a lady could also lead to insanity. He encouraged his younger friend to write poetry that explored the philosophical, psychological and social effects of love, and it is in this love poetry that doubts concerning the existence of a love that could lead to Heaven are expressed. Guido’s sceptical attitude was revealed in his interpretation of the dream Dante sent to him which inaugurated their close friendship. It concerned a sleeping Beatrice, held in the arms of the god of love, who wakes her so that she hesitantly eats the dreamer’s flaming heart, at which point the god of love departs weeping. Dante, after Beatrice’s death, would deny Guido a prophetic interpretation of the dream that he provided in his sonnet in answer to the first sonnet of Vita Nuova: Love took the heat from you, knowing That Death was calling for your lady And fed her with the heart,40 but he was intrigued by the more cynical analysis Guido expressed in his sonnet S’io prego questa donna che Pietate (If I should beg this lady that true pity): Then crying in my mind a melancholy Lady, comes to see my heart die.41 The woman to whom Guido prays is unable to relieve him because it is not her he loves but an idealized projection of his mind, nothing but ira (wrath) and imperfection. The lady of his dreams is a ghostly phantom that devours his heart and the real woman does not understand and is irrelevant, like the sleeping Beatrice, and this is why the god of Love in Dante’s dream departs weeping. For Guido love emanated, not from Venus but, as he demonstrated in Donna me Prega (A Lady Entreats Me), from the choleric planet of Mars: Like translucence from light from a shadow of Mars it came and lives.42

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The very fact that Dante’s friendship with Guido was predicated on this interpretation of his dream suggests that for a while he shared his friend’s doubts concerning a quest for a perfect redemptive woman and the existence of an afterlife of unconditional love: Guido’s Giovanna and Dante’s Beatrice are both seen as mortal and fallible. In E’ m’incresce di me si duramente (I pity myself so intensely) written when Beatrice is alive and unobtainable, Dante writes: She cares nothing for the suffering she sees, indeed, so much lovelier than ever now and more full of joy, she seems to laugh; and she lifts her death dealing eyes and cries out in triumph over who laments at departing: ‘Away with you, wretch, away now!’43 Guido too has no faith in the meekness and grace of a woman that can purge wrath because he is uncertain of a hereafter. His love poems attempt to find a balance between the sensitive capacity, the appetites and desires of the body, which humans share with animals, and the intellect. He had a pessimistic view on what humans can achieve and maintained that the intellect can never be brought, through the exercise of reason, into harmony with bodily desires. In Donna me Prega, Guido anatomizes love in an almost forensic way: where is it located; what can it do; what is its essence; what alterations does it cause in the mind, and what makes us call it love? His probing Aristotelian investigations into its causes had a profound influence on Dante’s preoccupation with the eyes. When a woman’s glance meets the eyes of a man, the potential for love (if the object has the potential to accomplish it) grows into a passion, a spirit that possesses all of its faculties. Such a passion needs more love to satisfy its growing appetites, and desire inevitably outsprings human limits, leading to insanity and death. In such a bleak outlook, concentrating on the dark, destructive power of love grounded in the technical processes of nature, there is no sense that the love, discerned in the light of the beloved’s eyes, could ever signify any form of redemption. For Cavalcanti love led to death rather than to redemption and life. Guido’s pessimistic outlook certainly influenced the younger Dante when he was still writing his earlier lyric poetry under the influence of his older friend’s spell when he too explored the role of the eyes in love and came to the same conclusion that desire cannot be reconciled with the aspirations of the spirit: From my lady’s eyes there comes a light so noble that where it appears are seen things that no one can describe, so sublime and wonderful are they …. When I reach that place, alas, see, they are forced to close; the desire which brought them is extinguished there.44

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In another lyric bearing the influence of Guido’s Donna me Prega, contemplation of the beloved’s eyes leads to almost the same bleak conclusion: Who will ever look without fear into the eyes of this beautiful girl, which have reduced me to such a state that now I expect only death, a bitter death.45 Dante even described Beatrice’s eyes in an early lyric as ‘homicidal’ evoking the sort of fear associated with Cavalcanti, and in Lo doloroso amor he lamented the sorrowful love that caused him to die for one whose name ‘is Beatrice’.46 However at some point the two poets went in different directions, as Dante began to seek the inner freedom of an interior law and to introduce a new ethical dimension to the poetic image of love’s experience and destinies, which would give a religious, salvatory purpose to love and ideals of citizenship in the heavenly afterlife inhabited by Beatrice and such imperial figures as Charles Martel. Hints that Dante’s changing attitudes towards love involved a religious conversion occur in his account of the misdirected romantic love of Francesca for Paolo. When Francesca tells the pilgrim, after reading the romance of Lancelot, that she and Paolo read no more, there is an echo of Augustine’s conversion from his delight in the love story of Dido and Aeneas when he read St Paul: ‘No further would I read.’47 But it was a conflicted conversion, reflected in the ambiguity of Dante’s treatment of Francesca whom he was anxious to both judge and yet exculpate. The ghost of Guido Cavalcanti hovers over this canto as Dante struggles to disown his early adherence to Cavalcanti’s doctrine of love as a death force that excludes light and flourishes in darkness as an all-consuming passion leading to the sort of oblivion of the self that deprives Paolo of the powers of speech. Dante too had been driven by the winds of passion to which he gave expression in the sort of love lyrics read by Francesca: ‘And there will be no wind so mild that will not sweep me along until I fall down cold,’48 and in sympathy with Francesca who tells him: ‘love led us to one death’; he falls ‘as a dead body falls’.49 However, Virgil’s exposition on love (a keystone of the poem) demonstrated that his pupil was no mere passive victim of love (as Francesca saw herself in accordance with the fashionable tenants of courtly love). Dante came to believe that Beatrice first entered the castle of his heart like a seal, imprinting the substantial form of her essence on the wax of his soul,50 and Beatrice will teach him, because not all forms or seals are good, that the soul has the freedom of will to admit or refuse entrance to these impressions.51 With such caveats Dante began to conceive that the feelings of love inspired by the vision of the eyes could be ratified in an afterlife. One of Guido’s poems, Voi che per li occhi mi passaste l core (You who’ve pierced my eyes to my heart), addressed to his lady Vanna (Giovanna) perhaps hints at this divergence of views on love and the afterlife that would cause a rift in their friendship. After declaring that The virtue of love that has undone me came from your fair eyes,52 218

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he resolves not to send this account of how desire has ruined him to his friend Dante. The fair eyes for Guido are merely a metaphor; they do not betoken the existence of an afterlife, just a doomed conflict between body and intellect, leading to melancholy and perhaps worse. He was a Ulyssean figure who disdained from Giovanna the sort of assistance his friend sought from Beatrice. Dante would come to see the eyes of his beloved in a very different way in his Divine Comedy, which mentions occhi (eyes) 263 times,53 as beacons inspiring his ascent to Paradise, the theme of his epic. When asked by St John the Evangelist in the heaven of the fixed stars to explain the causes of his love of God, he begins by recalling his first sight of Beatrice, a love that leads him to love of the creator, and he confesses to being drawn from the sea of ‘twisted love’54 and placed on the shore of right love. In the course of this rationalization of the place of his lyric love poetry in his progress to Paradise he refers to a personified love dictating to him the lines: ‘I will make you see every goodness’55 paraphrasing the first line of Guido’s answer to his first poem narrating the dream of Beatrice and Love: ‘You saw it seems to me all worthiness.’56 This divergence of outlook lies behind Dante’s cryptic response to Guido’s father asking him why his equally talented friend is not beside him: I do not come on my own: he who is waiting over there leads me through here, perhaps to one your Guido had in disdain.57 Guido had rejected his friend’s faith in the ability of Beatrice to lead him to heaven, and Dante’s conversation with Guido’s father ends with a tragic misunderstanding when he innocently uses the past tense, and Cavalcante takes this to mean that his son has died: Of a sudden risen to his feet, he cried: ‘How did You say? “he had”? Is he no longer alive? Does the sweet light no longer strike his eyes?’58 The dead unbelievers can see into the distant future and make prophecies, but as the future comes closer to them they lose all knowledge of the present and the immediate future in the world of the living (an appropriate contrapasso for epicureans living only for the present moment). So, at the end of time, their tombs will be shut permanently, for them all consciousness will end. Dante gives no indication if the sweet light will strike his friend’s eyes; it is an issue that will obsess him and he will return to it many times. But these haunting lines sum up the key issues in his concept of love and the afterlife: the importance of light, for which all the inhabitants of Hell have a profound longing, as proof of God’s love and the immortality of the soul. This light can be seen in the loving eyes of a woman (in Dante’s case Beatrice, who tells him God created her so that his reflected light might shine back at him) and can lead the pilgrim home to Paradise. It was this concept that caused the irrevocable split between the two friends; as Virgil reminds Dante: 219

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‘And now pay attention here,’ and he raised his finger: ‘when you are before her sweet ray whose lovely eye sees all, from her you will know the journey of your life.’59 If love for Cavalcanti represents a dead end sapping a lover of vitality and integrity, for his friend it had become a life-giving redemptive force which he would endeavour to affirm in his later works in contradiction to the dark cynicism of Donna me Prega.

Beatrice and the light of divine love The beginning of this journey to the heavenly home is traced in Vita Nuova to May Day 1274, Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice, who was dressed in crimson, when he was at the end of his ninth year and she was approaching the beginning of her ninth year. He expressed the importance of this occasion in a letter: ‘I have passed my days in fellowship with love, E’er since the arching sun my ninth year closed.’60 In Vita Nuova the slow movement of the fixed stars was used to calculate her age at eight years and 213 days.61 However, Dante claimed in the canzone written perhaps in the first half of the 1290s before Beatrice’s death, E’ m’incresce di me si duramente (I feel such deep pity for myself), that as soon as Beatrice was born, when he was nine months old, it was as if his childish body was struck by lightning and he lost consciousness ‘so suddenly that I fell to the ground’, and in this canzone he refers to this fulguration as a memory, presumably derived from an account of his illness from relatives who nursed him.62 His conviction that his fainting was a divinely inspired affliction, a form of epilepsy (which he described with the medical term of ‘oppilation’) that he shared with Julius Caesar, gave to his encounters with Beatrice a prophetic and visionary quality. Another meeting would take place nine years later, in 1283 when they were both eighteen (8 + 1 = 9); she passed him in a street on the ninth hour of the day, dressed in white between two older women, as was fitting for a married woman, and she returned his salutation.63 At this time it would not have been usual for a woman of marriageable age to return a greeting in a public place and would have been regarded as a tender act. After receiving her greeting Dante retired to his room to write the sonnet and dream sequence ‘To every loving heart and captive soul’ which he would send to Guido and other Florentine poets. The date of 1283, when the poet reached the age of eighteen and adulthood, proved to be the knot tying together all the crucial threads of Dante’s life: the onset of his mature love for Beatrice, the beginning of his friendship with Guido and the start of his career as a public poet.64 Tradition has this meeting with Beatrice occurring near the Santa Trinita Bridge next to the River Arno or outside the Portinari family chapel at Santa Margherita de Cerchi. Six years later she died, probably in the Bardi house of her husband in the Oltrarno area on the main road leading to Porta San Niccolo, the gateway to Siena and Rome.65 In Vita Nuova Dante describes the pilgrims crossing Florence along this main 220

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thoroughfare through the middle of the city on their way to see Saint Veronica’s veil in Rome, knowing nothing of the great loss suffered by the city where Beatrice was born and which was identified with her the way Bethlehem was with Jesus.66 Her death, which presages the start of his journey following her through Hell, is rationalized in Vita Nuova when he imagines an angel speaking to God of her radiance which spreads up to Heaven, which lacks nothing but this lady. The angel implores the Lord to have her brought up, and God reserves the right to decide how long she will remain on earth: With one down there who dreads the loss of her, who when in Hell shall say to the damned, ‘I have beheld the hope of heaven’s blessed.’ 67 Beatrice cannot be possessed because she is dead and Dante must learn to love the transcendent part of her which will reconcile him with God. The direct comparisons of a lady to an angel made by Guinizelli become metaphors for Beatrice’s assimilation into and appropriation of divine power so that she blesses and brings to life that which cannot possess her, and the theologized courtly love of the Stil Nuovo makes way for the incarnational poetics of The Divine Comedy.68 When the determined day occurred Dante, instead of going into the circumstances of her death, concentrates on the symbolic patterning of the number nine and its square root, the Trinitarian number three, the basic structure of the universe and Beatrice herself. She died on the eve of 8 June 1290, and Dante consulted Arabic and Syriac calendars that begin day at sunset and the new year in autumn to accommodate her death with the number nine, so that the eve of 8 June becomes the ninth month of the year; her relation to the number nine is derived from the ideal arrangement of the nine spheres at her creation. This attempt to reconcile the awkwardness of the date of her death to the numerical significance of the number nine has rightly been seen as verification of Beatrice’s existence.69 Nine is Beatrice's friendly number: she appears before Dante on earth nine times, and his final vision of her makes up the number ten. In the first of the last nine hours of the night Dante wrote his first sonnet about Beatrice at 10 o’ clock on the evening in May 1283; her appearance in Purgatory is preceded by sixty-three cantos and is followed by thirty-six cantos; she is mentioned by name sixty-three times and her name is used as a rhyme nine times. Her entry into Heaven was preceded in Purgatorio by the midmost ninth and tenth out of seventeen mentions of her name which frame how her eyes reflect the Christ-Gryphon for the pilgrim to represent her entry into Heaven. The source of Beatrice’s magnetic power is the light that flashes from her emerald green eyes. This light, the threefold divine light released from the three-stringed bow through the universe, will became the lifelong inspiration for Dante’s journey into Paradise, and whenever Dante falters in his pilgrimage through Hell and Purgatory, Virgil encourages him by reminding him of her shining eyes. The key to the importance of the light in Beatrice’s eyes is provided by the symbolism of the number nine. The Neoplatonist thinker, Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, known to Dante,70 argued that the multiplicity of all things proceeded from God as a kind of radiation of the triunified light of God’s creative power, the sensible and unifying factor 221

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in creation. Grosseteste, using Aristotle’s Meteorology and On the Heavens and Euclid's Optics, argued that light was the first matter generated from an original point, infinitely multiplying itself in all directions without a shadow, which gave rise to the dimensions of time and space.71 This intense point of super radiant light in the Empyrean (God) was reflected from the convex surface of the primum mobile, the Ninth Heaven beyond the fixed stars and beyond time and space, upwards in an opening funnel back to the Empyrean, to form the vast lake of light around this central point: There is a light up there that makes the Creator visible to those creatures that have their peace only in seeing him, and it spreads itself out in circular shape so great that its circumference would be far too large a belt for the sun. All of its appearance is made of a ray reflected from the highest point of the first mobile, which from it takes life and power.72 This ray of light forms a giant ‘sempiternal rose’73 with a yellow heart, the divine light of the Tenth Heaven beyond sense perception, an intellectual light full of love. Dante conceived this Empyrean as a hemisphere, with one half hidden and one half visible, with God as the unseen hemisphere, manifesting the hidden intellect through the eye, the mind’s window, in the manner of the human eye.74 The ray of divine light emanating from the Empyrean was a manifestation of the extramissive theory of sight endorsed in Dante’s Convivio and derived from Calcidius’s commentary and translation of Plato’s Timaeus (the only part of Plato’s oeuvre familiar to readers in Western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries).75 For Dante the eye sends visual rays that touch the visible object returning an image to the mind. However, he was also aware of and accepted the more scientifically correct intromission theory of Grosseteste, derived from Aristotle’s On Sense and the Sensible,76 whereby vision originated from external light rays that acted upon the senses to penetrate the mind (otherwise Aristotle maintained if sight took place as a beam of light, it would not go out in the dark). Both theories were necessary and compatible for Dante when he considered the effect of the beloved’s glance on her lover and how God is present to the beautified in Heaven – in other words the effect light has on the pilgrim Dante’s soul. For Aquinas sight was the most spiritual of the senses and touch the most material. At some stage in the Vita Nuova Dante’s desire for an unmediated vision of Beatrice may have involved a bold and possessive extramissionist desire that approached touch, but by the end of this work and in The Divine Comedy this was transformed into a vision of Beatrice who becomes a medium (like the atmosphere conveying a beam of light) for the contemplation of God. Vision, in accordance with the extramissive vision theory in Augustine’s De trinitate,77becomes intellectual and spiritual and touch merely a metaphor for the way the extramissive beam of light imprints the eye of God on 222

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the intromissive eye of the lover and his soul.78 In the Empyrean the central lens, the source of the divine light of the eye of God, sends forth extramissively the beam of light that reflects back intromissively from the vast and invisible primum mobile to the Empyrean, forming the lake of light that is far greater than the sun (the Nile springs, as a little stream, from its source).79 This light (luce), occurring seventy-nine times in Paradiso, is the divine love that bathes the universe. It is no wonder that the damned in Inferno reflect poignantly on their banishment from the light; it is not just sunlight but divine love, salvation and the immortality of the soul that is denied them. Darkness for Dante was merely the shadow cast by the earth and the human body. Its most extreme manifestation was an eclipse of the sun, one of which occurred when the Son of God was eclipsed on the Cross. Beyond the eighth sphere of the fixed stars there was not the darkness of outer space but brilliant light, the foretaste of which could be experienced in the morning sun. The human body, a fragile container of mulberry-staining blood, acts, Virgil explains, like a wall blocking this light: Without your asking, I confess to you that this is a human body you see, by which this light of the sun is split upon the ground. Do not marvel, but believe that not without power that comes from Heaven does he seek to surmount this wall.80 But just as walls can emit chinks of light, like the aperture in Ugolino’s Hunger Tower and the wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe communicate,81 so too the body allows this light to pass through its apertures, especially the eyes and a smiling mouth, the face acting like a balcony where the loving soul appears in the windows of eye and mouth,82 revealing the light of the divine spirit to which the travellers in Purgatory gravitate through a chink in the rock of the mountain,83 and through the attenuated wall of fire, to finally see Beatrice’s eyes and mouth as her veil is removed.84 Love, movement and light are inextricably linked throughout this epic. It is the moving power of love that starts the momentum of the pilgrim’s journey, when he is inert through fear and hears Virgil repeating Beatrice’s words that come to him from the edge of Hell: ‘Love moved me and makes me speak.’85 Love gives Beatrice her power, she is ‘donna di virtu’, and behind her power, as she acknowledges, is the moving power of love, the same power acknowledged by Francesca. Just as Medea’s love and power secured for Jason the Golden Fleece, so will the power of Beatrice’s love secure Dante’s entry to Paradise, and this, despite all the pilgrim’s audacity and genius, places him in a position of almost infantile dependence and propels him on his journey, and unlike Jason, who betrays Medea, Dante will remain faithful to Beatrice. The medium for this love, and the movement it generates, is light; for the pilgrim’s journey will be upwards towards Heaven, the natural progression of light or fire, to the sphere of fire below the sphere of the moon and beyond. He begins this journey when he first sees the flame in Beatrice’s eyes: ‘If I flame you in the fire of love’, when he is a child of nine. However, it may have originated 223

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earlier when he claimed to have convulsions at the time of Beatrice’s birth and when he first became aware of ‘that sun which first warmed my breast with love’.86 This sun from the primo amore (the first love or primum mobile) which warms him will continue to give him greater life. His journey through the heavens will not follow the coordinates of space and time; movements from sphere to sphere happen instantaneously, a spatial metaphor for instantaneous intellectual understanding, through the energy released by love, as the intensity of light and understanding increases.87 Light implies illumination, as well as warmth and love, and there will be, under Beatrice’s tutelage, a schooling of the will so that it will no longer resist the intellect, trained and reformed by the sun-like rays of her instruction. It is a very different form of education, infused with light and love, than the one he received from the lady Philosophy, and this is alluded to when the composer Casella sings Dante’s lyric: ‘Love that discourses with me my mind’88 and he is curtly interrupted before the gateway to Purgatory by Cato, who hurries the penitents on, urging them to cast off the slough that keeps God from being manifest to them,89 because Dante’s redefining of both courtly and philosophical notions of love brings it back to this primal source of warmth and light.90 It is the thought of the compassion in Beatrice’s ‘gleaming tearful eyes’, therefore, that first coaxes Dante out of the dark wood, but her eyes are also a liminal conduit to the heavens: they function like the Empyrean and the primum mobile in that they reflect the rays of God’s light and send forth these rays of love to the nine-year-old Dante. The child, on first seeing this light in her eyes, experiences an epiphany an intimation of the point of divine light from the lens of God’s eye in the Empyrean, transmitted via the seraphim, the sphere that loves the most, and moves most rapidly at the centre of the primum mobile, to become the splendour of the light that floods the heavens, the light beyond the sphere of the fixed stars. When he finally enters this invisible sphere, the ‘angelic temple’, bounded only by the light and love of God in the Empyrean, he is able to see that the primum mobile is a torch reflected in the mirrors of Beatrice’s eyes, and unlike Virgil who cannot turn to see the lantern of love he is carrying, the pilgrim is encouraged by his lady to turn around to see the fiery point of light and love at the centre of the primum mobile – the first glimpse of Heaven he had seen as a nine-year-old.91 The sunlight and the stars in the night sky, which the pilgrim evokes at the end of each of the three canticles of his poem, may be emanations of this divine light, but it is the light he sees in Beatrice’s eyes that brings him face to face with the point of light that is God who seems to be enclosed by that which he encloses, in the same way that the divine light in Beatrice’s eyes seems enclosed by what it encloses, implying the divine encloses Beatrice in the poem. Once Dante is reunited with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise at the top of Purgatory, her eyes hold and beckon him, and he is constantly reminded, as they walk through Eden, of the significance of the light from her eyes that will take him from the primum mobile to the Tenth Heaven of the Empyrean: So she walked along, and I do not believe she had taken her tenth step upon the earth, when with her eyes she dazzled mine.92 224

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Before they make their ascent, she looks steadily at the sun, more steadily than an eagle, looking beyond, towards the vaster second sun of the primum mobile, and as her charge looks at the spark of light in her green eyes, what he sees is no mere reflection, but the light of Heaven. In the sphere of the heavenly moon, as his gaze followed the vanishing Piccarda, he turned to Beatrice: My sight, which followed her as long as possible, when it lost her turned to the target of greater desire, turned altogether to Beatrice; but she flashed so brightly in my gaze that at first my eyes could not endure it,93 and instead of announcing her love for him she says to him in the sphere of the moon: If I flame toward you in the heat of love beyond the measure that is seen on earth, so that I overcome the power of your sight, do not marvel.94 She adds that this flame of light is the light from the eye of God, the motivating force of the universe; the light of her eyes ‘that surpassed the splendour of the stars’, is to be taken literally and all the different manifestations of love relate to this point of light from the Empyrean: I see well how the eternal light already shines in your intellect, the Light that, when seen, alone and always kindles love, and if some other thing leads your love astray, it is only some vestige of the eternal Light, ill understood, that shines through it.95 Light, mediated through the eyes, is the medium through which all things in life can be loved as part of the divine love ‘that moves the sun and other stars’96 in a universe bound together by love, and because it is light it is automatically reciprocated, something understood by Francesca even in the darkness of Hell.97 This is conveyed to the pilgrim in the Earthly Paradise in his final dream of Rachel, representing the contemplative life, who is never distracted from sitting in front of her looking glass ‘desirous to see her lovely eyes’ which are ultimately the eye of the Empyrean.98 Dante’s conception of the revolutionary and epic scope of his treatment of love is revealed on his arrival in Purgatory. He has emerged from Hell’s dead realm to see in the dawn sky in the East, Venus: ‘the lovely planet that strengthens us to love’99 (whose brightness is only exceeded by the eyes of Beatrice).100 On the first terrace of Purgatory, where the proud 225

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are punished, he takes part in a discussion with a manuscript illuminator who had been active in Bologna (where Dante had met him), Oderisi da Gubbio. Oderisi’s penance for taking pride in his artistic achievements is to bear heavy stone weights, and Dante’s awareness of his own susceptibility to this form of vanity (a family failing for his greatgrandfather, Alighiero, was, according to Cacciaguida, purging himself for this sin on the first terrace of Purgatory)101 compels him to think of the corbels, in the form of crouching figures with their knees touching their chins in discomfort as they support the roof of a ceiling, images of the weight of past ego, and he addresses the reader, with these words: ‘piu non posse’ (I can’t bear any more).102 This does not however prevent him from reflecting that just as Giotto (who according to Benvenuto da Imola met Dante during the latter’s stay in Padua in time to witness the artist’s completion of the frescoes of Heaven, Hell and the Last Judgement c. 1305–6)103 has surpassed Cimbaque, so he will surpass the love poets of the Dolce Stil Novo who preceded him, such as Guido Guinizella (c. 1230–1276) and Guido Cavalcanti, in his radical, epic treatment of a love that will embrace all forms of affection, and the fate of the soul in the next life.104 Dante’s view of love departs from the troubadour traditions, the concept of suffering unrequited love at the hands of la belle dam sans merci. Francesca, in the circle of lust, indicated this change of direction when she says one who is loved is compelled to love back, just as Beatrice returned Dante’s loving gaze. It is a reciprocal phenomenon, based on the principle of the universal distribution of light and divine grace, which is God’s love for his creation, and therefore it is manifested in many different ways, a principle understood and explored in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is not just love between a man and a woman; it is the love between parents and children, and friends; the love of and the pursuit of knowledge; love of one’s city and homeland, and of one’s own body. For Dante love is the basis of all human behaviour underlying all acts, good or bad, and it can therefore be found in Hell in the Epicureans attachment to all things that are not God such as Farinata’s love of his native city, which he saved from destruction at the hands of the Ghibbeline army, and Cavalcante’s love for his son. On the second terrace of Purgatory, reserved for the envious, the sun’s rays strike the pilgrim’s brow, forcing him to shade his eyes and to think deeply about this abundance of light.105 Despite his belief that he was free from envy, Dante was nevertheless anxious to learn about this sin of the serpent from the penitents who remember the wretched valley of the Arno, where the dogs, foxes and wolves of envy inhabit its twisting banks, setting their hearts on earthly things which cannot be shared, so that envy propels their sighs; when the one thing that can be shared by all, and which in its distribution enriches everyone, is light, the ineffable good rays of love which binds together the universe and which will be manifested in the pilgrim’s poem.106 On the fourth corniche of Purgatory, where sloth as a deficiency of love is purged, Virgil explains to the pilgrim, in the centre of the central canto of the whole poem, that love is the central principle of all things and love and desire are the driving forces of all human activity and interaction; love of the Creator, where no error is possible, and love of creatures natural and elective, which always involves the exercise of free will, the capacity to love those things outside oneself, such as possessions, sex and food, none of which are bad in themselves, unless they are 226

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loved too little, or in excess, at the expense of loving God.107 By the time he has ascended to the Empyrean, Dante has resolved this conflict between intellect and will, because his will is now conformed to the divine will; love or light holds everything together like a wheel revolving with an even motion: My mind was struck by a flash in which its desire came. Here my high imagining failed of power; but already my desire and the velle (will) were turned, like a wheel being moved evenly by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.108 Sunlight, the manifestation of God’s love, is the mother’s milk that sustains all life, and Beatrice’s smiling face merely reflects this as she points out to Dante when they are looking at the primum mobile: Why does my face so enamour you that you do not turn to the lovely garden blossoming under the rays of Christ?109 This light, this union of intellect and feelings, is the pulse of the universe; nothing impedes it except the earth and the body. It enables Dante to celebrate its beauty and harmony, whether it is the light of the stars, the morning sun, or the smiling face and shining eyes of the woman he loves. In his last glimpse of her he is aware of her sweet smile, remembered as the 'beam of sunlight'.110 In the tenth sphere of the sun, he has a vision that encapsulates a universe beating with the pulse of love: two circles of the lights of the spirits of two Dominican and Franciscan preachers, imagined as fifteen of the brightest stars in the sky, along with seven comprising the wain (Great Dipper) and two forming the horn of Ursa Minor to form, from the sun’s rays, a double rainbow: in the primary circle, representing intellect, Thomas Aquinas (who was made a saint two years after Dante's death) celebrates the life of St Francis, and in the second circle, representing the will, Bonaventura praises St Dominic. The two circles representing two orders who were intellectual rivals move in the same direction, the primacy of the intellect (Dominican) dictates that it leads, to be echoed by the will (Franciscan) which, with its various appetites and compulsions, obediently follows. Love therefore starts with the intellect, with light and sight (as in the pilgrim’s first glimpse of Beatrice), for love at first sight is nothing more than intellect leading the will. A dance of reciprocity between these two circular roses celebrates the union of will and intellect in an image that praises the mystery and harmony of love that pervades the universe and the mystery of God’s grace: it is the opening and closing in unison of the eyes of lovers as they kiss, the circular organs of sight or intellect moved by desire or will, a baffling and powerful manifestation of unconditional love that reaches its highest manifestation in the son of God: 227

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After the solemn dance and the great rejoicing, both of the singing and of the flaming of light with light, joyous and affectionate, ceased altogether in one instant and with one will, like eyes which by the pleasure that moves them must always be closed or lifted together.111 The way this image of eyes opening and closing in unison with a kiss suggests the operation of divine grace is underlined in the sixth sphere of Jupiter, the realm of justice, where Dante learns of the mysterious working of Divine justice and mercy. Here he sees the imperial eagle, composed of the lights of the souls of those saved by grace telling him to look up into its flashing eyes. The eagle was believed to be able to look directly into the sun and this bird’s eyes could, through the eye of faith, penetrate the unfathomable mystery of God’s grace, invisible to the intellect of mortals: grace that flows from so deep a fountain that never creature’s eye pierced to its first welling.112 Five lights form the shape of its eye: in the centre is the singer of the Holy Spirit, David; around the pupil shines Constantine, saved despite his disastrous donation, because of his good intentions, but it is when the pilgrim sees the first light, that of the Roman Emperor, Trajan, who has been saved because he consoled a widow; and the fifth light, that of a virtuous pagan, the Trojan Ripheus, who is in the heaven of Justice because Virgil described him as ‘iustissimus unus’ (the one who was among the Trojans the most just), and not just among Trojans, that Dante exclaims: Who would believe, down in the erring world, that Ripheus the Trojan would be the fifth of the holy lights in this round?113 The eagle, seeing that it is the blinking of the lights of the two pagans that most surprises him, replies: The first life of my eyelid and the fifth cause you to marvel that you see the region of the angels adorned with them.114 And he urges him as a mere mortal not to presume to judge what he cannot comprehend: And you mortals, hold back from judging, for we, who see God, do not yet know all the elect, 228

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and such lack delights us, ….what God wishes, we wish too,115 which is a variation of Piccarda’s ‘in his will is our peace’. The eagle’s words are punctuated by the sparkling of the lights of these two most astounding instances of God’s grace and love, and as he watches this display, before ascending to the realm of Saturn, Dante is reminded again of the arresting image of the opening and closing of a pair of lovers’ eyes: Thus, while it spoke, I remember that I watched the two blessed lights, as the blinking of two eyes agrees, moving their flames with the words,’116 which evokes the love and compassion behind the salvation of these and other virtuous pagans, such as Statius, and the redemption of those redeemed at the moment of death by invoking the Virgin, like Buonconte da Montefeltro, the Ghibbeline captain killed in the war between Florence and Arezzo at the Battle of Campaldino, in 1289 in which Dante participated, and who, as his bleeding body was washed down the Archiano into the Arno, died uttering the name of Maria.117 God’s strict decrees can be overcome by love and hope, and he wills it, which is why pagans can be saved: Regnum celorum (kingdom of heaven) suffers the violence of burning love and lively hope that overcome God’s will.118

The pilgrimage home This conviction that there is a harmonious working of love throughout the universe even extends into the depths of Hell: the sinners have all loved the world: sex, food, possessions, each other or themselves, immoderately or insufficiently, at the expense of loving God, and they are either purged and refined in Purgatory or left in Hell to eternally re-enact these misdirected loves. Most of humanity, however, is confined to the outskirts of Hell because they have not been fully alive; in other words they have not loved. This is why the souls in Inferno are still capable of great feeling, and the expression of longing for the beauty of this world they have left. Indeed Dante’s landscapes of Hell and Purgatory are looking-glass worlds, full of similes evoking this beauty of the earth, because they are analogies of the world beyond, authentic imitations of God’s book of the universe which, in their familiarity, serve as analogies of the other strange, figured world traversed by the pilgrim:119 whether it is the pathless and forested lower slopes of the Appenines that he navigated in his exile, that influenced his depiction of the trackless wood where he is lost; the snow and frozen lakes of Hell, formed from the fourth river, Cocytus, reminiscent of the frozen river Danube;120 the Appenine mountains that melt 229

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under the warm North African Sirocco, like the pilgrims icy heart after his penance; the souls croaking like frogs beneath the surface of the black, boiling pitch evoking the caulking of ships in the Venetian Arsenale;121 the sulphurous boiling river of Phlegthon, which reminds the pilgrim of the hot springs of Bulicame where the prostitutes bathe;122 the giant Antaeus who looks like the leaning tower of Garisenda in Bologna (which Dante had described in a sonnet during his stay there for a few months between 1386 and 1387 while studying the Latin classics of Ovid, Statius and Virgil),123 as he lowers the two poets into the last circle of Hell;124 or the penitents on the slopes of Purgatory, resting like herdsmen with their goats, watching the star of Venus in the East.125 Even in the frozen pools of Cocytus, reserved for traitors to city, family and friends, the sins of betrayal evoke memories of the innocence in the world above, the peasant woman in early summer dreaming of gleaning,126 and the children saying Mama and Papa in a language that should not be debased to speak of the miseries of this word at the base of the universe.127 Even his vision of the Empyrean, where Mary and Lucy are seated opposite one another in the amphitheatre, was preceded by a meditation on two imaginary cities, Lucy and Mary on opposite ends of the Earth viewing the orbit of the Sun.128 The tangible connection between this life and the afterlife is expressed in the commingling of the dead at the seaport of Ostia on the mouth of the Tiber, where the salt and freshwater meet,129 preparing to embark on their voyages, either across the Southern Ocean to Purgatory or across the River Acheron to Hell. However, it is the bonds of love shared between the shades and the living, whether in Hell or Purgatory, that haunt the poem. Death cannot break the bonds between the living and the dead: the shades in Purgatory crowd around the living pilgrim as if he is a visitor in a prison, beseeching him to take back messages to their families. This epic celebrates the bonds of friendship that exist between this world and the next. Dante’s closest relationships are with an inhabitant of Inferno, Virgil, and an inhabitant of Paradiso, Beatrice, and the poem is full of reunions between fellow poets whose deaths may have occurred either a few years ago or over a thousand years ago. When Virgil meets the Mantuan troubadour, Sordello (d. 1276) at nightfall they embrace as fellow Mantuans: And the shade, all gathered in itself. rose toward him from the place where it had been, saying, ‘O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your city!’ And each embraced the other,130 while the observing Dante reflects that they share a bond closer than the living, feuding citizens of the Italian towns: And now in you living are not without war, and of those whom one wall and one moat lock in, each gnaws the other!131 230

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These bonds are so close that the difference in substantiality between the living and dead is sometimes forgotten: when Dante approaches the shore of Purgatory he sees his old friend, the musician Casella, and they attempt to embrace: I saw one of them draw forward to embrace me, with affection so great that it moved me to do the same. Oh empty shades, except in appearance! three times I clasped my hands behind that shade, and as many times I drew them back to my breast.132 Purgatory is more than a place of punishment and reform: it enables relationships between the living and the dead to continue to evolve, as is demonstrated by Forese’s reassessment of his widow’s love for him as she continues to pray for him to secure the rapid progress of his soul up the lower slopes of the mountain. One of the most moving aspects of love expressed by the dead, and by Dante on his pilgrimage through the otherworld, is the love for one’s homeland and for one’s material body, for the two are intimately connected. In the sixth bolgia of Inferno, containing the hypocrites, Dante, in reply to being hailed by two friars from Bologna who notice his throat throbs when he speaks and recognize his Tuscan speech, identifies himself in this manner: I was born and raised beside the lovely river Arno in the great city, and I am here with the body I have always had.133 In the wood of the suicides, after hearing the testimony of a Florentine transformed into a bush stripped of its leaves, who hung himself in his house, and who recounted the protective influence of the statue of Mars on the Arno, Dante, ‘compelled by the love of my birthplace’, gathers together the fallen leaves and returns them to the speaker.134 In his encounter with his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, born in the San Piero quarter where the horse race is run on the Feast of St John the Baptist, powerful feelings of nostalgia well up for his ancestral family (he maintained that a body is naturally stronger in the place where it was generated),135 and he is reminded of the shade of Anchises reaching out to his son Aeneas, and he thinks of Florence bounded within the first ring of city walls (thought to have been built in the time of Charlemagne’s empire) and of the sestiere, the small district bounded by the Ponte Vecchio and the baptistry, where they were both baptized and where Dante and Beatrice grew up: Tell me then, my dear first harvest, who were your ancestors, and what years were recorded in your childhood; tell me of the sheepfold of San Giovanni, how large was it then.136 231

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This longing and continued love and care that the souls of the departed feel towards their home and their bodies are poignantly evoked by Virgil when he and Dante are walking towards Purgatory, with the sun at their backs, and the living man panics, because he can see his shadow but not Virgil’s. His mentor exclaims: ‘Why do you distrust?’ he began to say, turned fully toward me. ‘Do you not believe that I am with you and guiding you? It is already vespers there at the tomb of the body within which I cast a shadow; Naples has it, from Brindisi it has been taken. Now in front of me no shadow falls.’137 Virgil, now that he is spirit, does not impede the sunlight, for in death the body is transformed into light, light which gives the shades a shape that speaks and feels. This is explained by Statius on the terrace of the lustful. A soul set free from the body carries some of the formative power which the pure blood of semen possessed and this passes into a shade, as a spirit, or light, infusing the surrounding air with its former bodily image (a reflection perhaps of the intense experience of being alive), in the same way that the moist air reflects the sunlight as the colours of the rainbow, creating a shadowy body that represents the mythical tradition of an underworld peopled by shades.138 Body and spirit, through the medium of light, are inextricably bonded in Dante’s thought. He and Beatrice enter the seven planets as sunlight enters water, a metaphor for the immaculate conception of the Virgin and for the union of human and divine: ‘how our nature and God’s became one’.139 Light enables the pilgrim to conceive of this final vision of God at the culmination of his pilgrimage in the ascent to the Tenth Heaven as a partly physical experience, and even in Paradise, in the sphere of the sun, the blessed reveal how much they long for their dead bodies and those of their parents before they become eternal flames. The affection that the living and the dead feel for their home, their city and their bodies, this celebration of the material world, are all aspects of a conviction that love and salvation, the afterlife, could be seen in terms of coming home after a long trip or pilgrimage. The notion of the city and the desire for citizenship, a concept derived from Aristotle, was connected with thoughts of exile, home and Heaven. In Convivio Dante described the approach of death in old age as the process of returning from a long journey, arriving in port from the sea and being met by the citizens of one’s home town as the gates open.140 As he enters the wall of fire in Purgatory that will deliver him to Beatrice he hears a sound coming from the light: ‘Venite, benedicti patris mei’ (come ye blessed of my father) words which he must have seen in his sheepfold, on the Last Judgement mosaic of the Florence baptistry.141While he was in exile, writing Paradiso, Dante imagined himself in the realm of the fixed stars, schooled by Beatrice to avoid intellectual dangers, and about to be examined on his faith by St James, prior to his departure from the Ptolemaic universe into the Ninth Heaven, and his thoughts of salvation are inextricably bound up with his imagining his return to his childhood home in Florence, the ‘pitiless stepmother’ that turned on him, the way Athens turned on Hippolytus,142 or Rome on Ovid,143 a city inextricably bound up with thoughts of love, rejection and exile: 232

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If it ever happen that the sacred poem, to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand, so that for many years it has made me lean, vanquish the cruelty that locks me out of the lovely sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy of the wolves that make war on it, with other voice by then, with other fleece I shall return as poet, and at the font of my baptism I shall accept the wreath: for there I entered the faith that makes souls known to God.144 Love and redemption are conceived in terms of circles: the poem originates in the baptismal waters of San Giovanni, which act like the Catalia, the spring of the muses in Delphi, and the writing of The Divine Comedy is an attempt to secure the forgiveness and love of the Florentines as well as the heavenly court. The epic unfolds as a series of circular journeys: to Florence; to the poet’s childhood; to the natal home in the stars; to his ancestor; to the first father, Adam (whom he addresses as ‘ancient father’ and who shows the same joy in meeting his descendant as Cacciaguida);145 and ultimately to God, to a love that will not fail him as Florence has. Beatrice, once a citizen of Florence, the town widowed by her death, describes Paradise as ‘nostra citta’ (our city), and in showing him Paradise and exclaiming: ‘See our city, how much it encircles,’146 she is reminding Dante of the enfolding walls of Florence, the mother who betrayed him, and assuring him that the heavenly city will provide a love that will not fail. Intimations of this eternal home were inspired by the pilgrim’s memories. It was as an innocent, prepubescent nineyear-old that Dante first glimpsed his home, a reflection, in the eyes of a nine-year-old girl in the heart of the quarter where he was born and baptized, of the rose of the Empyrean, transmitting divine light, like the rose window Dante would see during his exile in the church of San Zeno in Verona and which may have inspired this original conception. As he embarks on his journey from Purgatory to the heavens, Dante is continually inspired by childhood memories of Beatrice’s eyes and her smile. On the threshold of the Earthly Paradise Virgil encourages him to wait among the flowers: Until the lovely eyes arrive in their gladness which weeping made me come to you.147 At his first sight of Beatrice, ten years after her death, after she has taken ten steps, prefiguring Dante’s entry into the Tenth Heaven of the Empyrean (the perfect Pythagorean number in the 100th canto), she is dressed in a white veil, and green mantle, the colours of the marble-cladded baptistry of San Giovanni, the focus of his childhood, and a flamecoloured dress recalling the colours she wore when he first saw her and evoking the rising sun:148 233

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I have sometimes seen, at the beginning of the day, the eastern sky all rosy, and the rest adorned with cloudless blue, and the face of the sun rising shadowed, so that by the tempering of vapours the eye endured it for a long while: so, within a cloud of flowers that from the hands of the angels was rising and falling back within and without, her white veil girt with olive, a lady appeared to me clothed, beneath a green mantle, in the colour of living flame.149 The way Beatrice’s veil and mantle reflects the green and white marble cladding of the baptistry of San Giovanni is no coincidence. The procession in the Garden of Eden with flowers, lights and chanting, resembles the progress of a Corpus Christi procession bearing Beatrice, glorified as the image of the Host in the chariot or church, which appeared before the pilgrim at the moment when the angels sing the hymn: ‘Blessed art thou who dost come’, which occurs before the sacring of the Mass and moves towards the high altar, mirroring the memories of this homesick exile who lamented the taste of another’s salt bread longing for the bread of angels; the exile who broke the baptismal font in a moment of Ulyssean folle; but unlike Ulysses he is now moving eastwards towards the high altar of his sheepfold where he would have observed many times the procession of the Corpus Christi host (Beatrice would probably have been in the congregation) towards the high altar where the Resurrection takes place and where the Host, his Beatrice, will lead him eastwards to his new life (vita nuova) in the afterlife150. The trembling Dante experiences recall the fainting fit he experienced when he unexpectedly saw Beatrice at a marriage feast151 (it is a recurring motif for in the imperial court of Heaven, at the wedding feast of the lamb, St Peter and St James dance around Beatrice, who watches ‘like a silent and unmoving bride’)152 and the pilgrim is transported to the confused and uncertain feelings he had as a nine-year-old child when he first saw her at a feast: And my spirit, which already for so long a time had not known in her presence the awe that overcame it with trembling, without having more knowledge through the eyes, because of the hidden power that moved from her, felt the great force of ancient love. As soon as my sight was struck by that high power that had transfixed me before I was out of boyhood, I turned to the left with the appeal with which a 234

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little boy runs to his mama when he is afraid or when he is hurt, to say to Virgil: ‘Less than a dram of blood is left me that is not trembling: I recognise the signs of the ancient flame!’153 This is a return home to childhood, a recapturing of the lost time that Beatrice accuses the pilgrim of wasting: instead of fulfilling his destiny of leading ‘sua vita nova’ (his new life)154 by turning towards the right and following her youthful eyes, he, after the commencement of her second life, gave himself up to temporal matters and presumably another woman.155 Proust’s lost memories of his childhood would be similarly recaptured with the elevation of the Host (the lifting of the madeleine to his lips and his hearing a ringing like the sacring bell; but for Dante’s pilgrim more was at stake than the passions and loves he expressed in the Vita Nuova and the subconscious memory of the sunlight of his mother’s smile. In the reunion in Earthly Paradise the pilgrim, named Dante for the first and only time, witnesses the miracle of Beatrice’s resurrection, the ‘reclothing of the voice’,156 a vision in his imagination of her not as she is but as she will be after the Last Judgement, because only Christ and the Virgin are in Heaven in their bodies. She is there to lead him to his true home away from his life of exile in the widowed Northern Hemisphere (which includes Florence) up the holy mountain in the Southern Hemisphere into the heavens beyond time, a journey compared to the turning of the helm of his boat, following the Pole Star of Ursa Minor into the port,157 where he will understand fully the significance of the light in her eyes. When he finally looks: ‘Into the yellow of the sempiternal rose’ he has to be coaxed from looking at Beatrice’s face: Why does my face so enamour you that you do not turn to the lovely garden blooming under the rays of Christ?158 and Beatrice draws near to him before taking her place near the top of this giant amphitheatre, telling him: ‘Behold how great is the convent of white stoles!’159 and he has at last: come forth from the largest body into the Heaven that is pure light: intellectual light, full of love.160 Comparing his Ave Maria to the feelings of pilgrims to Rome gazing at the veil of Veronica, he is no doubt in his joy remembering the sorrow he had felt when witnessing the passage of pilgrims through Florence, past the Bardi house where Beatrice died, to Veronica's shrine. Salvation and paradise have been found in Beatrice’s face, a culmination of the presageful vision of a nine-year-old boy looking into the eyes of a nine-year-old girl: 235

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From the first day I saw her eyes in this life, until this sight, my song has not been cut off from following.161 In her eyes he has witnessed the point of light from the primum mobile reflected back ten years after her death into the Tenth Heaven, the hub or pupil, like a human eye, around which radiate vertical spokes forming the iris, and the concentric rings of the white of the eye, the sclera, the seats of the blessed, clothed in white, in the amphitheatre or rose.162 Dante’s ability to see this light directly for the first time is proof that his will is no longer conflicted and is solely in tune with the divine will: There is a light up there that makes the Creator visible to those creatures that have their peace only in seeing him.163 This is the peace Piccarda Donati promised when she recommended submission to God’s will – the surrender of the will to a higher power. The secret of happiness is something that trusting infants naturally possess, dependent as they are on their parents and lacking a personal will, and this explains the sense of lost time and longing for the paradise of childhood that accompanies maturity. The soul is created in a moment of happiness by a loving God: From the hand of him who desires it before it exists, like a little girl who weeps and laughs childishly, the simple little soul comes forth, knowing nothing except that, set in motion by a happy Maker, it gladly turns to what amuses it.164 The image of the soul as a laughing young girl of course evokes the memory of the nine-year-old Beatrice. Everyone has an innate desire to find this happiness again, but the soul, as it grows, seeks this happiness in earthly things instead of God. The infant soul is closer to God, to things that bring joy, and the maturing soul loses this sense of the divine in the light. There will be nothing like Dante’s recapture of lost time and the happiness of childhood until the surfacing of Proust’s lost unconscious memories of the time of the May tree blossom in his childhood, his lost paradise, with his attachments to Combray, his mother and his childhood love, Gilberte, triggered by incidents far into adulthood in the realms of lost time. Proust’s conception of these intimations of a supra reality paralleling Plato’s forms in that they are not of this material world, yet found within the human mind, were defined as types which, in their defiance of sequential time, hint at a cognitive resurrection but not the literal resurrection which is the object of Dante’s pilgrimage. 236

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Another conflict Dante experiences on his pilgrimage is the struggle with his alter ego, his Gemini twin, Ulysses, whom he will follow in his restless search for knowledge (which he claimed in Convivio 'lies our ultimate happiness') and in his wanderings as a homeless exile. The memory of his encounter with Ulysses’s shade, and the story of his lonely fate, continues to haunt him. On the shores of Purgatory he is close to where Ulysses’s ship perished: Then we came on to that deserted shore, which never saw any man sail its waters who afterwards experienced return.165 The crisis reaches its head in the realm of the fixed stars, occupying six cantos, where he spends six hours. He is taken up to his native sign of Gemini (‘pregnant with great power’) under which ‘he first felt the Tuscan air’, in May 1265, when the sun was rising and setting, and a conjunction of Saturn and Mercury endowed him with his intellectual qualities and communicative skills. Although the only aspect of human nature exempt from the direct influence of the stars was the intellect (Aristotle detected no physical organ housing the intellect), the human body was believed to have been fashioned in the womb under the influence of the heavens and remained so daily, and many faculties were believed to be related to the bodily organs such as memory, inspiration and judgement, which all determined artistic gifts.166 The pilgrim at this stage of his journey, when he is especially conflicted as he contemplates the earth below, the conquests, journeys and wars fought in this little threshing floor, is especially dependent on Beatrice’s eyes to lift him away from the paths his ego would take him: The little threshing floor that makes us so ferocious, as I was turning with the eternal Twins, appeared to me, all of it from the mountains to the river mouths. Then I turned my eyes back to her lovely eyes.’167 As he is about to leave this sphere for the Ninth Heaven, he looks upwards at the souls of the blessed ascending upwards like snowflakes,168 and he looks back again: So that I saw beyond Gades the mad crossing of Ulysses,169 who set sail through the Pillars of Hercules erected to warn travellers not to pass beyond them, to the left, in an illicit journey across the Southern Ocean, never to return home, and he thinks again of the little threshing floor and summons his lady’s eyes: My enamoured mind, that ever courts my lady, more than ever burned to turn my eyes back to her,170 237

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and he is almost violently taken up from his natal home, the nest of Gemini, and his earthly, artistic preoccupations, to the ninth crystalline Heaven above the primeval waters over which God moved, by Beatrice’s smiling eyes: And if Nature of art have ever made bait to capture the eyes and so gain the mind in human flesh or paintings of it, all, gathered together, would seem nothing next to the divine beauty that shone on me when I turned to her smiling eyes. And the power her glance instilled in me uprooted me from Leda’s lovely nest and lifted me up to the heaven that is swiftest.171 In this conflict between worldly ambition, curiosity and ego on the one hand and love and longing for home on the other, it is love and home that wins. However, the experience of love could encapsulate many conflicting emotions: from faith in God, sexual passion, to affection for parents, and all of these are embraced and resolved towards the conclusion of the pilgrimage. At the crucial moment, when the pilgrim is about to mount the golden ladder of Saturn to the stars, when he is more afraid than at any time in the course of his journey through the otherworld, he turns to Beatrice as a child does to its mother; she becomes the focus of his earliest infantile impulses and insecurities when he hears the thunderous cries of souls crying out for vengeance on the papacy and clergy: Stunned and bewildered, I turned to my guide like a little child that runs always where he most has confidence, and she, like a mother who quickly helps her pallid, breathless son with a voice that has the power to calm him. said to me: “Do you not know you are in Heaven?”172 These infant impulses are projected onto Dante’s longing for Heaven. As he is led by Beatrice from the primum mobile towards the river of pure light that sheds sparks of light and flowers along its bank, and he is told by her that he must become ‘the candle ready for its flame’ to drink through ‘the eaves of my eyelids’ the pure intellectual light of Heaven when the river transforms into a circle (an image found in the mosaic of the Florence baptistry showing the baptism of Jesus) and becomes a round rose, he thinks of himself as an infant eager to drink his mother’s milk: There is no little child that more quickly rushes with his face toward the milk, if he 238

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awakens much later than his custom, than I became, to make better mirrors of my eyes, bending toward the wave that pours forth for us to be bettered in it; and as soon as the eaves of my eyelids drank from it, then it seemed to me, instead of being long, to have become round.173 There is also a cluster of maternal imagery around the Virgin, a crown of lights, forming a garland with a melody around her round womb ‘the dwelling place of our desire’: the oven nurturing the bread that would become the Host, bringing eternal life to humanity, reinforcing the shared bond between God and man through the love between Mary, whose face resembles Christ, and her son, the mother who brought the pilgrim lost in the wood onto the right path to further equate the ultimate homecoming with the way a baby instinctively stretches its arms towards its mother. A further ratification and fulfilment of filial emotions in Paradise is suggested by the pilgrim's witnessing the presence of our original parents, Adam and Eve in the Empyrean. Dante’s acceptance and celebration of the body and its concomitant emotions are integral to his concept of the resurrection. A true homecoming, after all, includes a reunion with the physical body in its entirety when the happiness of the blessed (and the suffering of the damned) will be enhanced.174 In the sphere of the sun, Beatrice asks Solomon to tell the pilgrim what will happen to the light with which the souls of the blessed shine when they are reunited with their bodies, and how their eyes will be able to bear the light of Heaven. His reply envisages a mutual intensification of body and soul so that the eyes of the body will be able to see this intensified light. The response of the blessed shows their eagerness to be reunited with their perfected bodies and those of their beloved ones: So swift and eager were both choruses to say ‘Amen!’ that they well showed their desire for their dead bodies, perhaps not for themselves alone, but for their mamas, for their fathers, and for the others who were dear before they became sempiternal flames.175 The dead desire their bodies so that they can love fully those they loved on earth. Difference and individuality are not a commodity that can be relinquished in death. Each inhabitant of the otherworld retains his or her essence, what Aquinas called the habitus, the memory that dominates his or her existence, the residuum of the history of a person’s soul, for every action, every exertion of the will, leaves a trace, a modification of the soul and each soul reveals to the living pilgrim his or her essence, the totality or habitus of the body and soul,176 because Dante has distilled their quintessence their aura, the essential part of a lifetime’s experience into a gesture, such as Brunetto Latini’s taking the hem of the pilgrim’s garment and exclaiming ‘what a marvel’ or Pia 239

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de’ ’Tolomei tenderly asking the pilgrim to pray for her after he has rested after his long journey.177 Cunniza, da Romano, many times married and the lover of Sordello, accepts her relatively low position in Paradise in the heaven of Venus as a blessing, a confirmation of her unique identity, the essence of what makes her Cunizza.178 This reunion of spirit with the body could even include the sexual instincts, a sanctification of eros, which in the pilgrim’s case have been purified and made subservient to his will, and it is an erotic woman, the object of all Dante’s desires since childhood, who makes a place for sexual love in the beatitude, who encourages him to contemplate the white rose of the Empyrean, with its yellow pudenda, and reassures him about the validity of his sexual excitement: The deep desire that now enflames and drives you to know what it is you see, pleases me more the more swollen it becomes (piu quanto piu turge).179 Dante may have had his first reflected intimation of the Ninth and Tenth Heaven in Beatrice’s eyes, but this was still the heaven of prepubescent childhood, when his father was still alive and his surrogate mother was the focus of all emotional instincts; and the full realization of the light of Heaven, attained through Beatrice’s guidance when he is at last looking directly at the heavenly rose itself, and the eye of God (intimations of which he would also have had when looking up at the golden eye in the Florence baptistry ceiling above the high altar) reconciled these infantile impulses with the sexual instincts of adulthood. Also reconciled as he looks into the Empyrean and sees his home is the bliss of preconscious infancy,180 the state of primal innocence before the separation from the breast-created unfulfilled desire, with the egotism of a fully developed intellect and the formation of the language of the sacred poem communicating the awareness of separation from the object of desire. The pilgrim conveys the human inadequacies of expression and memory in recalling his vision of the Trinity, of the single moment of that eternal present, in terms of Neptune’s memory after 2,500 years of uninterrupted sunlight bathing his realm of that moment when Jason’s Argo sailed untraversed seas blocking the sun’s rays. The sea god can only recall this interruption of the light by means of the shadow the Argo cast on the water’s surface, all but obliterated by twentyfive centuries of forgetfulness (Argo rhymes with letargo or forgetfulness in the poem).181 From this awareness stems memory and longing. Dante may approach the comforting silence of an infant at the breast before it has learned to say mammella and babbo, which is the nearest equivalent to the joy of eternity that, according to Beatrice, is experienced by the angels who have no need to remember ‘by divided concepts’,182 a single moment of joy that can neither be remembered nor formed into language because it is beyond temporality and therefore beyond the principles of desire and fulfilment. But the ship’s shadow is also the poem of the new Jason, Dante, who steers the ship of his poem over unknown seas, casting a shadow, yet showing by this interrupted light of Paradise that his light exists,183 while at the same time recalling the audacity of the voyages of Jason, Ulysses and the pilgrim who cleaves the waves in pursuit of the final vision, a vision 240

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of another Golden Fleece, that he imagines bringing back in triumph to the Florence sheepfold.

Chaucer and the tragic mysteries of love Chaucer was profoundly influenced by Dante’s treatment of love and the afterlife in The Divine Comedy, and his response was governed by his scepticism and sense of the omnipotence and mysteriousness of the natural world and the place in it of the sentient being that is man. The persona in Chaucer’s writings is very different from Dante the pilgrim and lover. While he is a scholar, he is merely an observer of love, an outsider who only knows about it from books, and he insists on his ignorance of love, both in the sense of his emotional experiences and of any comprehension of a higher purpose behind it. In The House of Fame he is a celibate student with only a vicarious experience of ecstatic, romantic love, who is visited by an eagle sent by Jove to teach him about love because he pities him for spending his time humbly working in his study, making songs and rhymes about love and his servants, honouring him while living in abstinence. There may be a sly dig here at Dante who, in Vita Nuova, addressed his sonnets to a personification of Love, idealizing Beatrice on what he claimed to be a few brief meetings. When Dante sets out on his journey to Purgatory to meet Beatrice he boasts of his talent, his inspiration from the muses; Chaucer, adapting these words at the start of his epic exploration of a love affair between Troilus and Criseyde, denigrates his own abilities to write about love, claiming he is just a naive translator of his Latin source (this ambiguous claim could equally refer to either of his Italian original sources, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (1335?) or Dante’s The Divine Comedy), with the same experience of love that a blind man has of colours: Therefore I will have neither thanks nor blame for all this work, but I pray you meekly, Blame me not if any word be lame, For as my author said, so say I. Also though I speak of love unfeelingly, It is no wonder, for although nothing new is: A blind man can not judge well in colours.184 Dante, in the opening canto of Purgatorio, describes himself confidently setting off across unchartered seas to sing of Purgatory, where he will be purified to become worthy of ascent to Heaven, but Chancer’s simple narrator sees this dark ocean representing the complex, turbulent and inexplicable emotions of Troilus, of which he has neither experience nor understanding and which are as unfathomable as Dante’s ocean of divine justice. Claiming to lack empathy with the feelings of the lovers, he instead subjects the affair to the scrutiny of reason. For Dante, sunlight is both the medium of communication between lover’s eyes and an aspect of the divine light and love of the creator. Sunlight, for 241

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the lovers in Chaucer’s epic, represents the harsh glare of reality, of reason. Their trysts always occur at night, and they hate and resent the approach of the morning sun because it exposes the reality of their situation: that this is an illicit affair between a recently widowed Greek woman, still in black mourning clothes, and a Trojan prince: But cruel day-alas the dawn began to approach, as they by signs knew, At which they thought they felt deaths wound. So woeful were that they began to change their hue, And day they began to despise anew, Calling it traitor, envious and worse, and bitterly the day’s light they curse.185 And Troilus resolves: And since the Sun him hastens thus to rise, I shall never do him sacrifice.186 The morning sun also banishes the romance and mystery. Pandarus warns his niece that she does not have much time to deliberate over Troilus for the morning sun will all too soon reveal the gathering of crow’s feet around her eyes: The king’s fool is wont to cry aloud, When he thinks a woman bears herself high, so long may you live, and in all ways proud, Until crow’s feet grow under your eye, And send for a mirror then for you to pry In which you may see your face in the morrow.187 Love, for Chaucer’s narrator, is an unfathomable aspect of nature that defies analysis, philosophical or religious. His epic of doomed love provides none of the sort of answers about the origins of love, whether emotional or religious, that the poetry of Dante and his Italian contemporaries, such as Guido Cavalcanti, provides. For Chaucer love is as unpredictable and changeable as all the other forces of nature, and for men fidelity may only last as long as the procreative imperative. Reflecting on this, Criseyde may observe that it is an extremely powerful feeling, but she concedes that no one knows where it comes from, or where it goes to, when a man turns to another love: How often times has it known be The treason that to women has been done! To what end is such love I cannot see, Or what becomes of it, when it is gone. There is no person that knows, I believe, 242

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Where it comes from. Lo no person knows What before was nothing, into nothing it returns.188 Love’s consequences are equally baffling: it can lead to bliss if reciprocated, or to Hell if not, as the inscription on the gates of the park in The Parliament of Fowls indicates, and, as the proceedings of the parliament of birds on St Valentine’s Day show, it is fundamentally a reproductive urge, and like all things in nature it does not last. This viewpoint was influenced by the realistic and cynical additions made to the Romance of the Rose, by Jean de Melun, who believed in neither faithful love nor the chastity of women. He placed in the mouth of Venus an appeal for sensuality. Nature, occupied in the task of preserving the species, was engaged in an eternal struggle against death, and she complains that of all creatures, men alone transgress against her commandments by abstaining from procreation.189 When Chaucer comes to describe the fluctuating, storm-tossed love of Troilus and Criseyde, he follows the principles outlined on the gate of the garden of nature in The Parliament of Fowls and characterizes it as moments of extreme emotion, oscillating between heavenly bliss and the pains of Hell, and both of these places are set firmly in this world. The concept of Heaven applies only to sexual consummation, an ecstatic climax that approaches a parodying of Dante’s entry into the upper heavens: ‘And let them in this heavenly bliss dwell That is so high that I cannot all of it tell!’190 and to Pandarus Troilus says: ‘You have in heaven brought my soul at rest From Phlegathon, the fiery flood of Hell.’191 If Chaucer is subtly drawing a parallel between the consummation of Troilus and Criseyde’s love affair and Dante’s entry into Paradise, he is more explicit in suggesting that, through the course of their relationship, they are entering the circle of lust in Inferno: Troilus’s journey is the reverse of Dante’s pilgrim, from expectations of Paradise towards compulsions and a surrender of the will. Chaucer’s detached and analytical perspective exposes what lies beneath the passion and courtly love conventions: deception and delusion. Troilus and Criseyde’s relationship, like that of Francesca and Paolo’s, is compromised by incest, in this case the unacknowledged feelings of an uncle for his niece. Pandarus plays a key role in facilitating his friend’s sexual enjoyment of his niece in a way that suggests his vicarious enjoyment of the process. He jokingly tells Criseyde that he is lovesick, slyly tells Troilus not to swoon again, and sits in their room while they are making love, reading a romance. The lovers also inhabit a world of night, like the shades in Inferno, fearing the sunlight. They share a ‘dreadful joy’ in a dark room accompanied by the sound of thunder and smoking rain.192 But the hell on earth that they will ultimately inhabit is Cocytus, the circle of betrayal, an icy pit where emotions, like those of Ugolino’s, are frozen. This is because there is betrayal at the root of their 243

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relationship. Troilus falsely accuses Criseyde of infidelity to gain her sympathy, and he fails to defend her (unlike his brother Hector), when a hostage exchange is proposed. The two lovers had both independently protested that betrayal merits damnation: Troilus maintained if he ever sought solace in another woman he would become a fiend, and Criseyde promised that if she were ever untrue to Troilus, let her dwell eternally in the pit of Hell. When she goes to the Greek camp and finally betrays him, Troilus finds himself wandering through a Troy bereft of Criseyde’s presence, like Florence in Vita Nuova undone by the death of Beatrice, but rendered by Criseyde’s betrayal into the frozen wastes of Cocytus: ‘Like frost, he thought, his heart began to chill’193 (‘the towers high’ of windy Troy must have seemed like the tower-like giants of the deepest circle of Hell). He visited the places they used to meet, haunted by the words of Francesca: ‘There is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness,’ words that Boccaccio placed in his introduction to his Il filostrato194 and Lydgate included in his Fall of Princes.195 It is in this great love story that the collision of the two worlds jars most forcefully. For Chaucer the sceptic there was no otherworld of justice, punishment and bliss – no contrapasso. Troilus merely experiences the icy numbness of the pit of Judicea, alone in this world, in the streets of Troy, and there is no pathway to the heavens to follow by gazing at, or remembering, his lover’s eyes. He thinks of her eyes when he visits the temple where he first saw Criseyde: And in that temple, with her eyes clear, I caught first my right lady dear.196 But it is becoming apparent that the beauty and lustre of her eyes enclose nothing more than reflected light, which for Chaucer signifies the unremitting glare of reality; they will not lead Troilus to Paradise; instead he must pace the cold, empty streets of Troy without faith or hope. Specific and ironic allusions are made to Dante’s contrasting progress by following the light in Beatrice’s eyes through the nine spheres of Heaven to the primum mobile, where he sees her crowned in the Tenth Heaven. Criseyde made a promise (by the mutable moon) to return to Troy on the tenth day, and it is while awaiting her return on the tenth day that Troilus composes his lament: ‘O star, of which I have lost all the light.’197 There is no guiding light for him, for Criseyde’s eyes are beginning to focus on another, and the imagery in this song, steering his ship in a dark torrent towards the tenth day when she is due to return by, ‘the guiding of thy beams bright’,198 is an ironic reference to Dante’s voyage to the Tenth Heaven by the light of Beatrice’s eyes. Criseyde abandons her intention to return to Troilus from the Greek camp on the ninth night and instead, on the tenth day, Diomede approaches her tent and begins his seduction, a parallel to the taking of Troy itself. This icy betrayal is anticipated in her dream (an ironic allusion to Dante’s dream of the lord of love taking his heart in Vita Nuova) in which a white eagle, representing Troilus, rips out her heart and puts it in his chest, while he places his heart in her chest. On one level the

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dream suggests the entry of Troilus into her affections, but it also resembles Guido’s interpretation of Dante’s dream of the lord of love in that Criseyde feels nothing.199 On the tenth day, when she succumbs to Diomede, there is another pointed description of Criseyde’s eyes: And, save that her eyebrows joined together There was no fault, in aught I can espy. But to speak of her eyes clear, Lo, truly, those that saw her write That Paradise stood formed in her eye. And with her rich beauty evermore Love strove, in her, as to which was more.200 The divine origin of the light in her eyes is of course an illusion, indicated by the telling detail of her eyebrows joining too closely together. Chaucer was familiar with Dante’s reconciliation of the extramissive and intromissive theories concerning the relationship between light and sight, and he employed both to show Troilus’s eyes piercing through the crowd in extramissive fashion when he first sees Criseyde and subsequently his spirit ‘flies forth out of my heart’ to follow always Criseyde201 as a passive intromissive recipient who is trapped in the net of her gaze remembering after she has abandoned him that she ‘used to give you light,202 but Criseyde’s eyes are not touched by the light of God and they cannot reform and redeem Troilus’s soul, which has merely retained an idolatrous image of a ‘heavenly perfect creature’,203 who is a flawed, vulnerable woman. This is not just Chaucer writing in a pagan context;204 it is a reflection of the erosion of faith and the doubt that seeps into English intellectual life. Troilus’s hoped-for reunion on the morning of tenth day, during a new moon, will only bring about his cuckoldry, anticipated in his song to Latona: Certainly, when you are horned anew I shall be glad, if all the world be true! I saw your old horns also by the morrow When hence rode my true lady dear Who is the cause of my torment and sorrow.205 Criseyde’s pragmatism and changeability accord less with the ideals of faith in The Divine Comedy and more with the law of nature that decrees that nothing will last, first outlined in the Book of the Duchess and proscribed in The Parliament of Fowls, where the goddess herself dictates destinies through the procreative urges. The ideals of love are easily betrayed when you follow the course of Fortune and allow yourself to be subjected to the inevitable changes in nature: even the compulsions, the ‘twisted’ loves that afflict shades such as Francesca and Paolo and paralyse their wills do not last in Chaucer’s Troy, and Troilus’s fate is to be commemorated in the temple of Venus as one of the victims of

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love, illustrating the confrontation of spiritual and sexual imperatives. Even his death and ascension to the heavenly spheres are tinged with cynical realism. Unlike the ascension of the pilgrim and Dante (the two I’s now joined) it is posthumous: Troilus cannot return to report what he has seen. He says nothing and looks and laughs to himself, and it is not the silence of Dante’s pilgrim unable to express the ineffable. The account that follows of Troilus looking down on the little earth (like Dante observing the tiny threshing floor) contrasts the transience of Criseyde’s feelings, the way she has completely erased him from her memory, with the eternal harmony and beauty of the spheres;206but Troilus’s explicit rejection of the world and its aspirations and loves could just be the poet’s own speculation, soon followed by Chaucer’s own withdrawal and silence,207one born, not out of wordless religious ecstasy but a failure to understand. Chaucer is unable to ascertain the validity of Troilus’s posthumous understanding because he does not know what ‘end’ he had; the only certainty is his death: And forth he went shortly for to tell where Mercury sent him to dwell.208 Unlike Dante, he cannot impose a retrospective salvation on Troilus, and he distances himself from the question, consigning his poem to ‘pagan antiquity.’209 By ending with Dante’s prayer to the Trinity:210 ‘Thou one, and two, and three, eternally alive’,211 Chaucer may affirm the supremacy of the word, but he is also asserting that Dante’s insights into the realm of the dead are beyond the scope of poetry, and as fiction they belong among things of the world.212 The expression of love in Chaucer’s works is a convention; abstracted from its context it could never signify transcendence and permanence: Diomede employed the same conventions of courtship as Troilus. Such mutable relative words bear more relation to the chattering and noise in the house of tidings, and the language of love in Chaucer’s works therefore has none of the centripetal force it has in Dante’s poetry: it does not serve as a pole star to guide the wandering pilgrim. The eagle, sent to educate Chaucer’s pilgrim on the true meaning of love, conveys a very different message when he takes him up into the sky to the House of Fame, composed to the tidings of humanity. The concept of a house of fame is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is a place between the land, sea and sky, conforming to the lack of destination in all Chaucer’s works, at the limits of the three fold universe (a term originally from Ovid which Chaucer took from Dante along with the threefold structure of his poem) where a great ear of humanity receives every human utterance: That every sound must to it race, And whatever comes from any tongue Be it whispered, spoken or sung, Or spoken securely or in dread Certain it must thither have sped.213

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The eagle explains (following Dante)214 that everything goes to the place where it belongs, to where it naturally gravitates: stones fall to earth; fire and smoke ascend upwards to the realm of fire; everything seeks its own proper mansion, including sounds and speech; for every word spoken moves the air around it and goes upwards towards the element of air in the House of Fame: That every word that spoken is Cometh into Fame’s House yes.215 Love therefore is nothing more than the displaced element of air, just one of the many sounds produced by the sea of humanity, and unlike Dante’s sea of primal love, moving naturally upwards towards the source of its pleasure in God, an ocean of love that impels the universe, it is merely a cacophony of words: manifold protestations of love, all evanescent. Chaucer’s pilgrim asks his guide what these sounds mean and he is told: ‘The great sound,’ Said he, ‘that rumbles up and down In Fame’s House, full of tidings, Both of fair speech and chidings’.216 It is in this house of tidings of ‘this or that, / Of love or such things glad’,217 that the pilgrim is made to realize that protestations of love are nothing more than a minute part of the noises issued by humans during their lifetime, like the beating of the waves of the sea. In this gigantic cage of twigs, truth and lies, as they struggle to get out, are all relative, and words like ‘I shall never from thee go, But be thine own sworn brother!’218 are nothing more than the whistling of the wind: Thus saw I false and true compounded Together fly as one tiding.219 This is the context for Criseyde’s protestations of love and her false promises. A heartbroken Troilus, after seeking his death at the hands of Achilles, is taken to the hollow concavity of the eighth sphere of fixed stars. He shares the same visual perspective as Dante of the little plot of earth below, but he does not share the Tuscan poet’s affirmation of the harmonious relationship between the two worlds of Heaven and Earth. Instead (if his vision can be accepted as his and not just a speculation of the poet) he ends his life totally disillusioned with love and all his hopes and endeavours, and although he sets his heart on a notional view of Heaven, his rejection of the validity of his life’s experiences gives a hollowness to this otherworldly vision: 247

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And down from there he began to spy this little spot of earth that with the sea embraced is, and fully he began to despise This wretched world, and held all as vanity Compared with the true felicity That is in heaven above. And at the last, Down where he was slain, his gaze he cast, And in himself he laughed outright at the woe Of those that wept for his death now past: And damned all our work that follows so the blind lust, which cannot last When we should all our hearts on heaven cast.220 Chaucer ostensibly commenced writing an epic love story in which the protagonist, following Dante’s pilgrim, hoped to attain Heaven through love. He has been ennobled by love, and Criseyde fell in love with him because of his virtue, and although he hoped to attain heaven through his love, this is unattainable because he is a pagan. He is therefore not punished like Francesca for putting romantic love above her love of God, and while there is no Hell there is no Paradise either, just doubt, a negativity that cannot just be explained by the pagan setting because it potentially reflects the doubts of Chaucer and his readers contemplating a world where time and change cause things to fall apart, a world bleaker for the absence of Hell and Heaven. Chaucer’s narrator ends the tale unsure of who Criseyde really is and what conclusions can be drawn about a time long ago subject to so much change, and so although he has been constant in his pilgrimage, Troilus’s fate remains in doubt: Such ending has he this Troilus for love Such ending has all his great worthiness.221 The narrator has raised the same questions as Dante regarding Trajan and Ripheus: what happens to good people who are not Christian? But unlike Dante he abandons this good man to doubt and uncertainty disavowing ‘Pagans cursed old rites’.222 Chaucer, in this historical epic of old Troy, explicitly rejects the supernatural dimension of Dante’s epic and turns towards the Earth, remaining silent on questions of soteriology. He replaces judgement with compassion and begins the poem with a plea to remember his lovers with ‘pity’ and he ends it admitting in sorrow: ‘Yes, I would excuse her yet for pity,’223 and despite Criseyde’s acknowledged betrayal and her new-found love for Diomede: ‘To Diomede always I will be true,’ he refuses to confirm this: ‘Men say it – not I – that she gave him her heart’. The poem makes clear the extenuating circumstances: her pagan world, the destructive ideology of courtly love, Pandarus’s manipulations, and Criseyde’s moral responsibility are therefore not wholly decipherable. Such definitions are reserved for God in eternity.

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An afterlife of tidings The combative approach to Dante’s otherworldly visions begins in the good-natured farces of Boccaccio’s Decameron, narrated in Fiesole near Florence, which feature many of the characters from Dante’s otherworld such as the prodigal Philippo Argenti, the glutton Giaccio and the sodomite Guiglielmo Borsiere, going about their daily lives, flourishing in their vices, dining and entertaining. A more specific satire of Dante judging his fellow Florentines’, consigning them to their fates in the next world; his accounts of demonic possession of living sinners; his celebration of Beatrice’s celestial beauty; and the pilgrim’s winged ascent to Heaven and enjoyment of the joys of the heavenly rose; is provided in a tale in the Decameron that is as sardonic as any of the tenzones between Dante and Forese that in fact Boccaccio incorporates into the Decameron.224 Friar Alberto da Imola, who behaves as if he owned Heaven and assigns to every man who dies a position of greater or lesser magnitude, visits the lady Monna Lisetta da Quirino in Venice and convinces her that the archangel Gabriel visited him in a pool of light telling them to visit her because of her celestial charms and to inform her that he will spend the night with her by inhabiting the body of Friar Alberto, whose soul meanwhile will be set down in Heaven. The friar, dressed in white raiment and feathered angels’ wings, joins her in bed, and as he is a vigorous man his approach is very different from her husband’s, and at the climactic moment Boccaccio turns to Dante’s Paradiso when Cacciaguida informs the pilgrim that Beatrice has ‘clothed you with the feathers for your high flight’ and to the climax of the pilgrim’s journey into the rose of the Empyrean when St Bernard in his prayer to the Virgin declares: If anyone wishes grace and does not turn to you, his desire seeks to fly without wings;225 and this celestial moment becomes for Boccaccio’s feathered friar a sexual climax where: ‘here he flew without wings several times before the night was over causing the lady to shriek with delight at his activities to which he supported with a running commentary on the glories of Heaven’.226 When the lady Monna Lisetta visited the friar to tell him of her annunciation he says his soul was set amid a multitude of flowers and roses more wonderful than any seen on earth. This explicit, ribald satire of Dante's consummation of his heavenly vision of Beatrice inspired Chaucer, who would have encountered the Decameron while dealing with Tuscan merchants in the port of London and during his visit, and possible meeting with Boccaccio, in Florence in 1373.227 He incorporated many threads from these tales into his Canterbury Tales and he was no doubt encouraged by Boccaccio’s irreverent approach to Dante’s treatment of the afterlife (in many ways the ribald art of Boccaccio and Chaucer is defined and appreciated by its relationship to Dante); Chaucer even followed Boccaccio’s example by adapting the same lines from Bernard's prayer to the Virgin in Paradiso in the middle of Troilus’s prayer to Venus, his Mary,

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asking her for grace to accomplish his love (thinking of the same carnal pleasures as Friar Alberto) and has Troilus declaring that without Venus’s help ‘his desire will fly without wings’.228 Chaucer however would adopt a more serious and comprehensive approach in providing alternatives to Dante’s otherworldly vision. In his next work, The Legend of Good Women, written as a penance to the god of love at the request of a queen at Richard II’s court, either Joan of Kent, mother of the Black Prince, or Anne of Bohemia, Richard II’s queen, to restore the reputation of women, damaged by his treatment of Criseyde, Chaucer questioned Dante’s assumed role as the divinely inspired poet claiming firsthand experience of the afterlife, by suggesting his depiction of Hell was gained from his reading of Virgil and his vision of Heaven from St Bernard of Clairvaulx, who was closely associated throughout the Middle Ages with his devotion to the Virgin and his vision of the ‘Star of the Sea’. Doubt, Chaucer maintains, is inevitable because no one has had direct experience of these other worlds and we are dependent on our reading to fortify our faith in them: A thousand times have I heard men tell That there is joy in Heaven and pain in Hell, And I agree well that it is so; But, nevertheless, I know well also That there is none dwelling in this country That either has in Heaven or Hell been, Nor can know of them in any ways Except as he has heard told or found it written; For by experience no man can it prove. But God forbid that men should believe No more than a man has seen with his eye! A man should not judge everything a lie Unless he sees it himself or else does; For God knows, a thing is nevertheless true, Though every person may not it see. Bernard the monk saw not all, indeed! 229 Experience, the bliss of seeing the light and the Resurrection, is limited to the pleasure the poet has when he leaves his books on a May morning to see the red and white flowers, the opening of the daisies in the morning sun in the spring meadows: When it rises early on the morrow, That blissful sight softens all my sorrow,… As she that is the flower of all flowers, And ever alike fair and fresh of hue; And I love it, and always this love renews, And ever shall, until my heart shall die.230 250

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nature remains Chaucer’s queen, the sole source of any intimations of the miracle of transmutation. Chaucer’s conviction that there can be no actual experience of the otherworld is also revealed when he follows Dante in describing voyages into the underworld and the heavens, while insisting that these are not visions in the sense of Dante’s fiction that The Divine Comedy is not a fiction, but merely dreams, dreams of a scholar whose only real experience is of reading books. In The House of Fame he follows Dante into Lethe to learn about Aeneas, but while Dante vividly describes an actual journey into Hell itself, Chaucer, maintaining the persona of a dull scholar, merely dreams of a temple where he reads stories about Aeneas on the walls. Dante and Chaucer had very different responses to Cicero’s Dream of Scipio: in The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer describes his reaction to reading Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, which, with its description of a universe composed of nine celestial spheres revolving around the still centre of the Earth, partly inspired Dante’s account of his celestial voyage. Dante, at the beginning of Inferno, describes how he sets off on his epic journey at the approach of evening when all living creatures take their rest. Chaucer, for the beginning of his journey, evokes the same atmosphere by describing the approach of evening with animals returning from their tasks, but he merely fumbles around for his book before going to bed. Dante claims to be setting out on a journey of visionary experience; Chaucer merely has a scholar’s dream about Scipio and the book he was reading before going to sleep, just as a hunter will dream of a wood or a lawyer of hearing pleas. The dream takes him no further than the park where he witnesses nature’s laws, and even when, in The House of Fame, he dreams about an ascent towards Heaven, it is only into the upper reaches of air, and it is devoid of wonder: his host, the eagle, just points out ‘the airy beads’. Another of Chaucer’s Italian sources, his contemporary Boccaccio, similarly detached himself in his Fortunes of Famous Men from the allegorical weight of Dante’s eagle and the limitations of the vernacular to aspire to eternity: ‘I now realize that I do not have the feathers with which I might penetrate the heavens to see the secrets of God, and then having seen them I could reveal them to mortals.’231 By contrast, as they ascend to the sphere of the fixed stars, Beatrice urges Dante to direct his gaze towards the wonders in the sky and the lights of the blessed: As she pleased, I turned my eyes, and I saw a hundred little spheres, together making each other more beautiful with mutual rays.232 It is in their respective attitudes to light and sound that Dante and Chaucer are at their most diametrically opposite. Light cannot always be trusted in Chaucer: the clear light in Criseyde’s eyes could signify deception and even her ultimate coldness in forgetting Troilus and her feelings for him. Dante however is constantly moved by light and especially by the light in the eyes of devoted and faithful women such as Beatrice and Lucia, the patron saint of sight. In the sphere of the sun he sees the souls of the blessed, clothed in the sun’s rays. forming a vast cross-shaped galaxy: 251

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O Helios, how you clothe them! As, varied with lesser and greater lights, the Galaxy shines white between the poles of the world and makes the sages doubt.233 This is in marked contrast to the dour preoccupation of Chaucer’s eagle and the pilgrim with labelling and naming the Milky Way and the signs of the zodiac. Beatrice informs Dante: ‘That you must have your eyes clear and sharp, … so that your heart may present itself as joyfully as it can through this rounded ether,’234 whereas Chaucer’s eagle stresses to the pilgrim the importance of hearing. For Dante the image of a dead person is reassembled through the reflected light of the spirit; for Chaucer it is achieved through speech assuming the shape of the speaker: Whoever that word on earth spoke, In red or black be it cloaked; And has so truly their likeness, That spoke the word, you would guess That the same body it must be Man or woman, he or she, And is not this a wondrous thing.235 The climax of their heavenly voyage is not an eye, as was the case in Dante’s Empyrean, but a giant ear, the house of tidings in which can be heard the sounds of truth and falsehood: ‘Hearest thou not the great roar’? ‘Yes indeed’ said I, ‘well enough.’ ‘And what sound is it like?’ said he. ‘Peter! Like the beating of the sea,’ Said I, ‘against the rocks below’.236 If Dante is the poet of light, Chaucer is the poet of sound, of speech, the noisome clutter of human life and this has implications for their profoundly different views on reality. Dante, the divinely inspired convert, claimed to reveal the objective truth about the nature of the universe – the word of God made manifest in the shape of the imperial eagle in the heaven of Jupiter and to explain history as a phenomenon of the providential unfolding of events in God’s book. Chaucer’s noisy garrulous eagle reveals that history and indeed all literary culture are nothing more than the speeches of human beings talking in particular voices even when they are claiming to utter universal truths. Geoffrey hears the poets who perpetuated the fame of Troy as a babble of conflicting voices and sees reading as an aural experience and writing as merely visible speech and tales, or tidings, constantly changing in the process of transmission. Chaucer’s scepticism 252

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about tidings undermines Dante’s claims for the vernacular as a basis for a single version of truth; instead he saw multiple versions of historical events. There can be many tidings of a single event, no objective truth in any religious sense: ‘false and true compounded fly together as one tiding’.237 For Dante objective truth is so apparent that some of the power and fascination of literature lies in the ability of the artist to commit fraud and deception, but for Chaucer falsehood and uncertainty are facts of communication and history, and the only reality or certainty is the identity of the individual teller of tales, the fundamental basis of Chaucer’s art, and pilgrimage merely leads to the world inside a narrator’s head, ‘what in my head imagined is’,238 and therefore lacking in objective authentication.239 Literature too is reduced by Chaucer to the level of arbitrary and subjective articulation of sounds that enter the House of Fame, some to be forgotten, others to achieve immortality according to the whims of the goddess of fame. Heaven, Hell and the Resurrection are all reduced to a concept of immortality as the survival of reputation, either infamous or glorious. The goddess of fame replaces Dante’s vision of Mary and she is addressed by her supplicants in a parody of the Lord’s Prayer: Hallowed be thou and thy name Goddess of Renown or Fame.240 As the different voices of humanity struggle to escape the cage that is the house of tidings, they fly to the goddess, who summons Aeolus to blow one of two trumpets: one smelling of roses (a comic allusion to Dante’s empyreal rose) signifying a good posthumous reputation, and a black trumpet, ‘stinking like the pit of Hell’, to announce infamy on a departing soul. The allocation of good or bad reputation is purely arbitrary, like the decrees of Fortune, and Chaucer’s pilgrim, like Dante in the Inferno, feels pity: ‘Alas that these guiltless creatures shall be shamed’, but this is the only way to secure immortality, while for most of humanity there is neither fame or infamy. Here too there is an ironic parallel with the fate Dante assigned for the bulk of humanity outside of Hell, which becomes clear when Chaucer’s pilgrim is taken up by the eagle to the house of tidings, a colossal structure 60 miles wide, composed of nothing but twigs and air, flimsy but durable like humanity, that never keeps still and makes a noise like rattling stones. It evokes Dante’s vision of ‘a flag running in circles so rapidly that it seemed to scorn all pause’. The long train of people that follow it prompts the pilgrim’s observation: ‘I believe death had not undone so many,’ and it is replicated in The House of Fame in the sounds of a countless horde of humanity entering and leaving the spinning house of twigs: But such a congregation Of folk I saw roam about, Some within and some without, As was never seen, nor shall yet; That certainly, in the world is not left 253

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So many formed by Nature Nor have died so many a creature; So that scarcely in that place Had I a foot’s breadth of space.241 Just as Virgil contemptuously dismissed the followers of the flag as unworthy to enter Hell or Purgatory, ‘speak not of them they are of no consequence’, the goddess of fame, in the presence of the pilgrim, informs the petitioners for fame: No man shall speak of you, indeed, Neither good nor harm, nor that nor this.242 There is, for Chaucer, no resurrection of the body, merely the disturbance in the air caused by the sounds made by people in their lifetime (like the twenty first century internet). When Chaucer, the pilgrim, is approached and asked if he himself seeks fame, he replies that it is sufficient for him when he dies that no one has heard of him: I came not hither, in faith, For any such cause, by my head! Suffice for me that when I am dead, That no man on my name sets a hand. I know myself best how I stand; As to what I feel or what I think, I will myself all of it drink.243 His claimed indifference to the afterlife, and questions of posthumous reputation, is in marked contrast to Dante’s concern with his fame and posterity; all Chaucer claims to be concerned with is his art and this also reveals a difference in attitude towards the obscure and humble and the purpose of art, which takes him in a very different creative direction, away from following Dante in describing epic journeys to the other world, to writing about the travels in this world of ordinary people. When he arrives at the house of tidings, where he hears whispers, gossip, the chatter of war and peace, of marriages and journeys, of death and life, love and hate, he announces that he is here to learn something about love that will serve his art: Certainly, for the greater part, In so far as I know my art … The reason why I stand here: Some new tidings for to hear, Some new things, I know not what, Tidings of either this or that, Of love or such things glad.244 254

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The fact that the roof of the House of Fame built of tidings is supported by the pillars of the foremost poets may contain Chaucer’s hint that Dante’s construction of Inferno depended after all on gossip. What survives of us is not, as Philip Larkin would have it, love,245 but tidings: gossip and chatter. In the house of tidings one person speaks to another, continually exaggerating, so every word, from mouth to mouth, speaker to speaker, increases until a city is formed. Even myths, the life force of Dante’s poem, are put into a prosaically realistic perspective as merely exaggerated tidings. Reginald Pecock would go even further, in a dialogue between a father and his son known as the Book of Faith, when he applied this perspective to scripture. A father cautions his son how ‘a tale of tiding, by the time it hath run through four or five men’s mouths, taketh patches and clouts and is changed in diverse parts and turned into leavings and all for default thereof of writing’. For this reason Pecock deemed that the Book of Genesis could not have been the product of oral transmission (or the divine revelation of Moses) but the result of textual transmission from pages of writing preserved from before the flood in Noah’s Ark.246 This chattering, the loves and aspirations of ordinary people would form for Chaucer the multiple perspectives of different pilgrims, rather than the vision of one monumental ego. For Dante most people do not merit the infamy of Hell and Purgatory and the glory of Heaven, because they have not fully lived and loved, but it is these very people, rather than the tragic and great, like Troilus and Criseyde, who will be the subject of Chaucer’s last work, The Canterbury Tales. Returning to his roots, Chaucer will base his art on the tidings he has heard as a JP associating with lawyers, and as a controller of the port of London dealing with merchants ‘the fathers of tidings’ whose livelihood depended on their ability to distinguish good tidings from false as they engaged with Fortune (aventure), whose motherhood was likened in the House of Fame to the sea. So successful will he be that the Man of Law (another pilgrim closely associated with the author) when accosted by the host to tell a tale will plead that Chaucer has cornered the market and told all the good tales of England, marking him as an artist who moved in his last work closer to Boccaccio than Dante. Pilgrimage provides the original inspiration and the narrative structure for both the Canterbury Tales and The Divine Comedy, but while Dante’s pilgrimage to Rome inspired him to write about a journey across the sea from Ostia to Purgatory and to the heavens, Chaucer’s pilgrimage from London to Canterbury and back again leads nowhere and remains rooted in the earth. The protagonists may also be pilgrims, but they are caught between London and Canterbury: they never arrive and merely impart stories (as in the house of tidings) about different forms of love. On one side of their journey there is a noisy tavern of revellers and on the other a noisy saint’s shrine, crowded with sick petitioners. By making these obscure people the subject of his art, a circle is completed from the ordinary Londoners of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the clerks and typists of Eliot’s Wasteland, cementing in turn the intimate relationship between London and Dante’s Florence, two very different worlds. Any hint of transcendence or supernatural experience is for Chaucer only liminal. For Dante the human eyes were the membranes leading the pilgrim to another world but liminal spaces only occur in Chaucer’s world at borderlines, between two worlds on the 255

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edge of woods, stiles, anchorage windows and shrines, and at the end of the Canterbury Tales in the Parson’s Tale in the space between the saved and the damned,247 and these borders between a known world and the unknown are potentially between being and non-being. For Chaucer the afterlife is only a notion for which there is no real evidence. Many of the pilgrims focus solely on this material existence, like the worldly friar who visits his sick client, cynically exchanging trental masses for food and gifts, as he brushes the cat from the bench and lays down his cap and stick, or the summoner, who crudely satirizes Dante’s evocation of the hum of golden-winged bees as the angels and blessed spirits enter the empyreal rose, when he describes the gathering of friars like bees around Satan’s arse, and when he further alludes to the Empyrean and the music of the spheres in a fantasy of a twelve friars seated around a wheel on which a friar sends farts down the various spokes. Other pilgrims reject the material world for a merely notional expectation of an afterlife, and significantly, they employ Dante’s prayer to the Virgin, which presages his journey to the Empyrean, but in their case this prayer never leads to Paradise, merely to further expectations of salvation through their rejection of the world and its suffering. The prioress, in her prologue to her tale of a child martyred by Jews, says this prayer, and what follows is the murder in an alley of a seven-year-old child singing a Marian hymn, the outpouring of sentiment for his mother at the monastery where he is buried, and the torture of his murderers. The second nun’s prologue to a version of the life of St Cecilia of Trastevere, who wears a hair shirt and is devoted to virginity, contains St Bernard’s invocation to the Virgin, followed by an interpretation of the name of Saint Cecila, signifying the white lily of Heaven and the burning light of her good deeds: And just as these philosophers write That heaven is swift and round and also burning, Just so was fair Cecilia the white Full swift and busy ever in good working And round and whole in good works persevering, And burning ever in charity full bright.248 This rather bland description of Heaven hardly justifies Cecilia’s assertion before her martyrdom: Men might well and reasonably fear This life to lose, my own dear brother, If this were the only life and there were no other But there is a better life in another place, That never shall be lost, fear thee not.249 The prayer to the Virgin in this tale concludes, not with a vision of Dante’s Empyrean, but the translation of Cecilia’s relics to yet another saint’s shrine.

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The reader of The Divine Comedy is always made aware of the immanence of the next world, whether it be Hell, Purgatory or Heaven, and Chaucer sardonically satirized this concept after reading about the fate of Friar Alberingo of the Guelph family of Manfredi, who eventually died in 1307. Dante encounters this friar in 1300 in the third zone of Cocytus, Tolomea, reserved for traitors to guests and named after Ptolomey, captain of Jericho, who murdered his visitors. Alberingo tells him he has no idea how his body is faring up in the world, but his soul was taken by a demon and fell into this cistern because he invited his relatives to a feast, and during the fruit course he had them assassinated.250 In Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, a devil accompanies a summoner on a search for souls. When they encounter an old woman, the summoner tries to extort money and she curses him to go to the Devil if he does not repent. He abjures the sacrament that promises absolution by declaring that he has no intention of repenting. The fiend consequently takes his soul to Hell where he will become a greater authority on this otherworld than Virgil or Dante.251 This tale of demonic possession is also a cynical take on repentance, a diabolical version of Dante’s demonstration that Heaven is accessible through the power of divine grace, so that a sincere prayer to the Virgin, even if, as in the case of a wounded condottiere, Buonconte da Montefeltro, only the first two letters of her name are uttered, is enough to secure salvation. The Friar’s Tale is a parody of the fate of this condottiere’s father, Guido da Montefeltro, who under the tyranny of time confuses intention and repentance by securing a papal absolution before he sins by counselling Pope Boniface VIII to level Palestrina to the ground along with the Colonna family. The summoner damned himself, not by confusing the sequence, but by cutting himself off from the possibility of a future that differs from his present damned state.252 In both cases a tyranny of time operates and the devils are remorselessly legalistic and logical, but Dante’s metaphysical world is not as concrete and unyielding as Chaucer’s for he is conducted on a redemptive pilgrimage by a pagan born before the Incarnation of Christ, and as we will see, the possibility is even raised in the Convivio that Guido da Montefeltro, convicted in the eternal present of Inferno, will be able through faith and love to join his son in Paradise. There is in all Chaucer’s tales, even the hagiographical ones, none of Dante’s sense of the interconnectedness between the two worlds of the living and the dead; no final destination or homecoming for the pilgrims caught in a limbo between the fleshly comforts of the tavern and the notional expectation of an afterlife at the saint’s shrine. The eagle who, like Virgil, promises to conduct the pilgrim safely through the labyrinth of the house of tidings is not there to teach him about salvation and repentance; he has been sent by Jove to dispel his gloom by showing him the sights and tidings of ordinary people. Chaucer’s artistic profession to avoid depression by writing about the tidings of ordinary folk, instead of seeking consolation in the afterlife, may be a consequence of his rejection of Dante’s more hopeful, transcendental vision of reality, the implications of which will be explored in the next chapter. Unlike the writers of the twentieth century, Chaucer did not idolize Dante as a Virgil-like mentor and father figure; instead he confronted him with a very different, sceptical version of reality in a true collision of worlds. 257

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Plesaunce and the divine within the earth Not until John Milton’s Paradise Lost would anyone attempt to write another epic about the next world. The writers that followed Chaucer would be as concerned as he was with this world, and they focused on its pains. The fates of great men and women, historical and mythical, were explored in this world in both Boccaccio’s The Fates of Illustrious Men and in Lydgate’s version of this work, The Fall of Princes. Both authors projected Dante’s vision of Hell onto ‘the nightmare of history’. In his appeal for financial assistance from Duke Humfrey to complete ‘his book of sorrow and displeasure’, after marvelling at the fall of princes from Fortune’s wheel, Lydgate expresses the sense that history’s catalogue of suffering can numb the mind and that the sufferings of princes, while as traumatic as anything described in the Inferno, occur without the consolations of Dante’s conception of contrapasso, with no reference to the afterlife. In all the laments of the visitors to the study of the original author, Boccaccio, there are no complaints about fate in the next world: they are all preoccupied with the sufferings they endured in this life, and this is even applied to the shade of Dante himself. In the Fortunes of Famous Men he appears in Boccaccio’s study: ‘I saw coming that most famous of men, one worthy of the highest praise, the famous poet Dante Alighieri,’253 and Lydgate describes him as being ‘with full heavy cheer’. Dante is reminded of the cruelty of Florence and his ‘piteous exile’, but the Florentine poet, visiting the writer's study from the next world observes contemporary events and is preoccupied with his city’s attempts to maintain its independence, drawing attention to the tyranny of the Duke of Athens, Walter VI, Count of Brienne, the protege of King Robert of Naples, the overlord of Florence 1313–22, who was invited in 1342 by the ruling class of merchants to be seignior of Florence for a year but changed his title to a life dictatorship with absolute powers before he was forced from the city after ten months: ‘No’, said Dante, ‘but here stands one behind, The duke of Athens: turn towards him your stylus, His unknown story briefly to compile.’254 Dante seems to be denying the validity of his otherworldly vision and regards his life and destiny solely in terms of events on earth, and he is as preoccupied with the struggles of his native Florence as the atheists he consigned to Hell like Farinata degli Uberti, who questioned him so urgently on the fate of his party and his ancestors who were driven from the city. For all the protagonists in The Fall of Princes Hell, and by implication Heaven, is in this world; there is no escape from the wheel of Fortune and nature, no reference to any form of otherworldly existence that can be understood in terms of the experiences of this life. Heaven and Hell are in this life, and there is no escape from history, no vision of the stars. Lydgate’s perspective is just as earthbound as Chaucer’s. In the Secrets of the Philosophers, discussing the secrets of nature, he denies he can be 258

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so bold, or climbing in my desires, To scale the ladder above the nine spheres.255 This is a very fundamental difference between the two worlds of Dante and the early Renaissance. The ancient Greeks, especially the Epicurean philosophers who were adopted by Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti and his son, may have cast doubt on the existence of an afterlife, but it was two other Greek influences (one apocryphal), in the circle of Humfrey duke of Gloucester at Plesaunce, that encouraged the application of reason and a scientific exploration of the natural world, at the expense of a transcendental, religious affirmation of the proximity and accessibility of another world that is an intensification of the beauty of this world. These were the discoveries of abstract Greek philosophy, especially in Plato’s Republic, which was translated for the first time into Latin for Humfrey duke of Gloucester, and the alchemical theories propagated in the same community, which were widely believed to be Greek in origin. Both of these disciplines emphasized that any intimation of transcendental reality can only come through the hard work of philosophical dialectics or the clinical investigation into the nature of matter, the only things about which we can be sure. Both of these disciplines were pursued in the Plesaunce circle, because they could work in tandem to show how human meditation on the tangible and real, whether through abstract philosophy or alchemical distillation, could lead to a perception of a spiritual reality inherent in the human intellect and matter itself, which involved an inevitable conflict of the opposites of spirit and flesh. Inherent in the philosophy of the Republic is the concept that the spirit longs for the flesh and the flesh for the spirit: all men hunger for spiritual truth, and those who possess it (the philosophers or guardians) need the contact and communion of their fellow men. Anyone who has undergone the quest outside the cave into the abstract forms must, therefore, journey back into the cave to impart this knowledge, a drama played out in the natural world every day as the sun sinks into the earth in the West, and in the alchemist’s athenor and retort in the processes of exhilaration, evaporation and distillation, as spirit is constantly released from and reintegrated into matter. This resolution of the conflict between flesh and spirit within the earth itself is what forms the still centre of the revolving wheel of Fortune, and it is the central problem of consciousness, the conflict between Dionysius and Apollo, played out in the conflicting demands of the active and contemplative lives and in matter itself.256 Nothing therefore really dies, for the divine can only be found within the world of matter and within human intelligence with no reference to another worldly existence. Plato in Phaedo, which was read by Gloucester and Whethamstede, who cited it a number of times in his Granary, demonstrates that nothing in the world can be destroyed: there is a constant circularity to all existence; wakefulness comes from sleep; life from death and ashes (a process which alchemists were observing in apparent metamorphoses in nature such as beetles emerging from dung). Opposites, such as life and death, may emerge from opposites but they cannot destroy one another: when an odd number, say death, approaches its opposite, an even number such as life or spirit, the opposite simply goes away (Socrates favourite phrase 259

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for death), it cannot be changed into its opposite, any more than an even number can be changed into an odd number, even though the result of the sum may be an odd number or death; the life or spirit (the form) simply moves on.257 Opposites cannot perish; otherwise there would just be a straight line (not the narrative line of Dante’s conception of history) but stasis, nothing but death or sleep (the undifferentiated primordial chaos, the antithesis of the differences that Dante needed in order to write). Nothing dies. Petrarch founded his hope in the hereafter on Plato’s Phaedo and the Dream of Scipio, but such logical approaches to the question of the immortality of the soul were hardly an endorsement of Dante’s assertion of the survival of the integrated personality, body and soul. Beatrice, in the sphere of Mercury, explained that Adam and through him all his descendants were created directly by God and therefore, along with the angels and the heavens, the soul of man enjoys perpetual existence, unlike the four elements and their compounds and the souls of plants and animals, formed by the secondary cause of the stars and planets guided by angelic intelligences and therefore subjected to corruption and extinction. For Dante there could be no conflict between flesh and spirit as long as someone uses God’s gift of the free will which had been imposed on Adam’s soul in the form of a stamp or seal and resists (when it is necessary to do so) the pull of the influence of the stars and the planets. Such obedience and conformity to the divine will, bequeathed to man through Christ’s judicial punishment and sacrifice as god and man, ensured that there would be no conflict between flesh and spirit: they were seen to be fundamentally the same, emerging from the same source of all matter and life, which was light, the spirit of divine love.258 However, Platonic philosophy taught that there was an inherent conflict between the two because spirit was inherent and trapped in the material world. The Semitic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, emerged from an arid, hostile environment; they are transcendental and refute the belief that God is in nature by asserting he is either in the laws of a chosen people; in the sacraments of the baptized; or in the faith and teachings of a prophet, and man’s spiritual destiny is not in the natural world. Plato however, in the Phaedo, argued that the life of the spirit must be negotiated in the natural world: the philosopher can only aspire to escape from the wheel of joy and suffering when the spirit ceases to build its prison in the flesh out of its own desires and fears. Souls unable to escape unalloyed and pure, and still attached to their bodies, tend to linger around cemeteries.259 Readers of such passages would recognize their challenge to the doctrine of Purgatory popularized by Dante; the concept of an institutional connection between this world and the next through chantry chapels, the imminence of God in the Mass, the conviction of a divine justice working through history, and above all the demonstration of the complete unity of body and soul in the educative process up the slope of the mountain where penitents’ bodies are bowed down by the weight of stones. These things are largely absent in the Greek classics, and in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and replaced by the cruelty of nature and human nature, and the eternal conflict between flesh or earth and spirit. The belief in an afterlife premised on the joys and sorrows of this life was weakening. The Platonic philosophy attracting the attention of fifteenth century intellectuals also departed from the Christian concept of a resurrection of the body and 260

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soul deemed to be separate from the natural world; instead it was maintained that the body was merely pliable wax, ready to receive the impressions of different forms. In the vision of Er in the Republic a wounded soldier is granted a vision of the afterlife and learns that the number of souls is always constant: at death they choose another life in a mortal body, choices determined by previous life experiences, preternatural memories. Ulysses (Odysseus), who for Dante represented the excitement of adventurously crossing of the fatal boundaries of God’s decree, is merely the last in line to choose a new life. Weary of his endless travels and exploration he gleefully chooses an ordinary life, the inspiration for his reincarnation as Leopold Bloom.260 The concept of reincarnation of souls was fully outlined in Plato’s Phaedrus with philosophers granted the shortest stay in enduring this life.261 The same issue of attempting a reconciliation between spirit and matter solely within the confines of this natural world informs the science of alchemical practices in the Duke of Gloucester’s circle. Alchemical writers believed that spirit, the divine, primeval substance of mercury, was hidden within base matter, represented by sulphur in a marriage where each needed the other. The mercurial spirit (the philosopher’s stone) was not to be found in the heavens or in another life, but in matter itself after long, arduous work and relentless curiosity and peering into the nature of matter and repeated procedures of alchemical distillation. Underlying such theories and practices is the same conviction that nothing ever really dies, summed up in the conclusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses by his account of the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls: Everything changes; nothing dies; the soul Roams to and fro, now here, now there, and takes What frame it will, passing from beast to man, From our own form to beast and never dies. As yielding wax is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls Are still the same for ever, but adopt In their migrations ever changing forms.262 The pliant wax yielding to multiform seals is a marked contrast to Dante’s concept of a permanent seal imposed on the human soul by God, and Ovid’s philosophy involves a rejection of the existence of an afterlife, pagan or Christian: You race of men whom death’s cold chill appals, Why dread the Styx, the dark, empty names Sad stuff of poets, perils and a world that never was?263 Nature for Dante was sacrosanct because it was God's creation and its laws were therefore sacred. This was why he placed alchemists so far down the funnel of Hell, for 261

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in toying with nature in their various transmutational experiments they were usurping the role of the priest in the Mass. In late fourteenth and fifteenth century England some of the transcendental mystery of the phenomenon of transubstantiation of the Eucharist had been tarnished by the attacks of John Wyclif and the Lollard priests who followed him: but even orthodox alchemical writers in Gloucester's circle were becoming more interested in the actual physical transmutations they observed in nature. The author of The Book of Husbandry (Thomas Norton), Gilbert Kymer and John Lydgate – were also fascinated with the fundamental principles of change and circularity, and unlike Dante, who focused on transmutations that illustrated the immortality of the soul and the Resurrection, these observations were founded on the premise that this world is all there is. The Book of Husbandry is a hymn to nature and its endless circular transmutations, whether the distillation of grapes into wine; the activities of bees producing honey; or plants producing fruit, and the most fundamental of all transmutations, the processes of decay and regeneration which echoed the primeval fluidity in the earth’s infancy described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These same organic, circular rituals were described by Lydgate in his version of the Secrets of Secrets. The recently translated writings of Plato must have helped those interested in, or practicing, transmutation, to develop a more spiritual conception of alchemy, where the philosopher’s mercury was seen as something akin to the forms described in Plato’s Republic, and there is evidence to suggest that Plato’s philosophy was on Humfrey duke of Gloucester’s mind when he spent his last years designing his funeral monument. There is no record of any official visits to the abbey after Whethamstede’s retirement as abbot in 1440, but the chantry tomb, similar in style to Henry V’s chantry in Westminster Abbey, was completed around 1444, during the abbacy of John Stoke at a cost of £433 6s 8d in a burial crypt on the South side of the shrine of St Alban. All of the duke’s burial arrangements resonate with classical and alchemical symbolism emphasizing the transience of life and the imprisonment of spirit within matter. Humfrey was frequently given the appellation, the flower of princes, and this tomb, with no effigy, is decorated with badges showing images of the garden of Adonis (the vases containing the flowers of Adonis, god of beauty, desire and vegetation).264 Plato in Phaedrus mentions Adonis’s pleasure gardens where seeds were sown among pottery shards in midsummer so they could grow, bloom and die over eight days.265 Athenian women in the summer festival of Adonia used to expose these fragile, short-lived herbs, symbols of the transience of life, the insecurity of human affairs (mirroring the theme of The Fall of Princes), to the intense sunlight of their rooftops where they would quickly grow and whither before being taken out to sea with an effigy of Adonis as offerings. In 1447 an Epithalium was commissioned by the St Alban’s Cathedral chapter for the duke, possibly written by Lydgate, Norton or Kymer, that would have originally been used for exhibition around his tomb for the edification of the duke’s followers, the monks of the abbey and visiting pilgrims.266 The refrain ‘Have mercy on him buried in this sepulchre’ suggests the scroll was exhibited near the tomb at the time of his burial. It is replete with alchemical symbolism. The acrostic, salt (which suggests Norton’s authorship), appears as the initial letters of the lines of the opening stanza, all highlighted in red capitals.267 In the sixteenth century salt 262

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constituted one aspect of the alchemical trinity in the thought of Paracelsus, but even in the fifteenth century it was an important part of the alchemical process, a corrosive that assisted the disintegration of the flesh that prefigured its transmutation into spirit, into the ashes of the bird of Hermes. Salt, because of its whiteness, was associated with this name, 'Albanus' by interpretation is compounded is of whiteness’. It also signified the bitter tears and truth of wisdom, the salt tears shed by St Alban, an appropriate symbol for the duke, who saw himself as a classical scholar, philosopher and potential martyr. The crypt, in which the soon-to-be martyred duke had designed for his burial (like Antigone he chose to be symbolically wedded to the memory of a dead brother), was a foetid, dark underworld, and the fiery combustibility of salt would ensure that his flesh would be transmuted into spirit (a process akin to Dante’s journey through the nigredo or the dark wood into Hell and through the flames of Purgatory but without the heavenly consummation). The dark crypt represents the body and sulphur, the realm of the will and sin, and the transformation, through the corrosive and thinking agent of salt, is achieved through spirit, pneuma or breath, which is mercury (the same imagery was employed in Amphibalus’s sermon to St Alban and would soon be visually depicted in Botticelli’s hymn to the earth, Primavera).268 The epitaph, which evokes the alchemical trinity of spirit, soul and body, suggests that the duke’s devotion to the Trinity, can be seen in more than one way and emphasizes the transmutation of Humfrey’s flesh, via salt and ashes, into spirit, which is the goal of the philosopher king in the Plato’s Republic. Humfrey’s death is depicted in the Epithalium in terms of a conflict between the four elements: O elements four set in great variance, Your strife continual hath my lord down laid,269 as he undergoes the process of being forged in God’s image: through merciful Christ he becomes God’s alloy, refined gold: And since he is turned into that which began, Into the earth, mean I … Put far from him the prince of darkness And take him near- he is thine own alloy, forged by thy hand.270 A similar process was envisaged in George Ashby’s Prisoner’s Reflections, in the Fleet: And as precious gold is thoroughly purified From the foul lead metal and clarified Just so is the soul through trouble cured.271 The resolution of the acrostic salt with alchemical gold is suggested in one fifteenth century copy of the Epithalium by adapting the letter O, in a line suggesting the resolution of the conflicting four elements: ‘O elements set in great variance’,272 to the alchemical 263

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symbol of gold, a circle with a dot in the middle. The fusion of the Duke’s twin interests, Plato’s Republic and alchemy, is suggested by the placing of his tomb in a cave-like crypt facing a wall painting on the east wall, at the feet of the Resurrected Saviour (the sun), and echoing Humfrey’s deliverance at the feet of his brother at Agincourt; around Christ’s waist there is a scroll saying ‘have mercy on me’, and from his body pours the red and white blood and water into chalices (the sign for mercury, horns over a moon also represents a chalice).273 The references to salt are reminders of the salt used in the foundations of the buildings and to cure olives in The Book of Husbandry, and the appearance of red and white quintessences evokes the red and white flowers in the gardens of Plesaunce and the red and white wines in the cellars at Greenwich (stored for the symbolic number of forty days). Just as the Crucifixion dominates the crypt, so it forms the central part of the Epithalium in the seventh of thirteen stanzas, and it echoes the conclusion to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, which begins with the depiction of the serpentine sulphur in the Garden of Eden and ends with envoys to the mercurial, crucified Christ who resolves the conflicting four elements: ‘perfect and stable in Jesus Christ’.274 This wall painting in Humfrey’s cave-like crypt is a visualization of the central metaphor of The Republic: the duke, the philosopher king, turning away from the illusions of the material world, the images on the wall of the cave, to face the sun, the light of wisdom in the form of Christ. The same image appears in Humfrey’s Book of Psalms, chosen by the duke himself between 1420 and 1430,275 which shows the duke ushered by St Alban into the presence of Christ, the man of sorrows, who is rising from a tomb; the imago pietas recalls the appearance of Farinata in the circle of Epicureans in Inferno, and the supplicating duke kneeling before the image may have been similarly focused on this world. From the image of Christ there pours red and white blood and water which flows into a chalice276 with a round white Host above;277 these same images of red sulphur and white mercury were used by Humfrey’s Cacciaguida-like crusading warrior ancestor, his great-grandfather, Henry the first duke of Lancaster, in his Book of Holy Medicines who, as Edward III’s first lieutenant and right-hand man, provided his great-grandson with a role model as a protector of the realm. Christ is depicted in the Book of Psalms hurling golden beams of the sun, echoing the imagery of Plato’s cave and Humfrey’s crypt. The tone of the Psalms, and the interplay of light and darkness, emphasize the duke’s identification with David the Man of Sorrows, persecuted and misunderstood for his wisdom (he was so described by Whethamstede in an eulogy delivered after he was posthumously cleared of treason in 1455).278 The complex Christological and Marian symbolism within the crypt, the Fibonacci sequence of the numerical patterns in the Epitaphium (thirteen stanzas composed of eight-line stanzas), and the Five Wounds, which are repeatedly emphasized in five stanzas, lends the whole scene an occult significance that resembles another work of art in a sacred place, the Wilton Diptych, dedicated to the wronged and betrayed servant of the Virgin, Richard II, with whom Humfrey spent a part of his childhood.279 The thirteen stanzas, and references to the Last Supper, suggest betrayal of an innocent man, and Humfrey, the protector of England, the Virgin’s dower, though unable to secure an audience with the earthly king, Henry VI is, like Richard II, ushered though the intercession of the Virgin (whose joys are also described in five stanzas), into the court of Heaven: 264

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Take thine image and with thine angels draped In thy perfect joy … He was true father and protector of the land, England, I mean, that is thine own dowery.280 The same intimate relationship between a work of art and its location occurs in both the St Alban’s crypt and the Wilton Diptych in Westminster Abbey, and rumours of sanctity and martyrdom also occurred in both places. Humfrey’s body was preserved in an alchemical distillation and in 1703 when his body was exhumed an aromatic embalming fluid was discovered. If there is an overriding theme in the writings of Chaucer, the translations of the works of the Greek philosophers and the alchemical meditations of writers in the duke of Gloucester’s circle, it is a turning away from Dante’s aspiration to reach the stars, to place conceptions of the soul or the spirit firmly within the spheres of the realities of human behaviour and the laws of nature, science and logic. In other words there was a preoccupation with the earth which would have implications in making English intellectuals of the early Renaissance increasing susceptible to religious doubt, pessimism and despair.

Figure 10  The exterior of the Rose window in the Basilica of San Zeno, Verona, showing the wheel of Fortune. Alamy

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Figure 11  The interior of the Rose window of San Zeno Verona showing the manifestation of

God’s providential love from the Empyrean in the form of light flowing through the window into the chancel. Alamy

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CHAPTER 8 SATURN: MELANCHOLIA

Shall I ever see the end of your work, melancholy? When I escape from you in the evening; I am back in your clutches the next morning. – En verrai ge jamais la fin, Charles of Orleans1 Why are the times so dark. That men do not know each other, But governments move from bad to worse as we see? The past was much better. Who reigns? Affliction and Annoyance; Justice nor law are current; I know no more where I belong. If the time remain so, I shall become a hermit, For I see nothing but grief and torment. – Eustache Deschamps, 1346–1406/7, quoted by Jan Huizinga, in The Waning of the Middle Ages2 Saturn was identified in the fifteenth century with melancholy, with a lost golden age and with lead, the debased philosopher’s gold which alchemists attempted to recapture. There was certainly a shared sense of nostalgia in the households of the Duke of Gloucester and Sir John Fastolf for the lost glory years of Henry V that accorded with Dante’s nostalgia for the Florence of his childhood and his ancestors. However for Dante Saturn’s connotations were more positive. On 31 March 1311 when Henry VII entered Italy Dante wrote that the successor of Caesar and Augustus, the bearer of the Tarpeian standard, represented the return of Saturn.3 It was the most remote planet of the contemplatives, demarcating the boundaries of the seven planets and containing a ladder to the stars. Boundaries were important to Dante and in Il Convivio he quoted Solomon in the person of wisdom: ‘I was there; when he (God) set a circle on the face of the deep with a fixed law and a fixed circuit; … when he encircled the sea with its boundary and decreed that the waters should not transgress their bounds,’4 and despite the temptations of intellectual curiosity, Dante chose to write and live within these bounds because for him they represented the finite and enclosed, conventual world of a loving god. From 1370 however, boundaries were being crossed in the fields of exploration, philosophy and alchemical science, and the consequent lessening of faith in an afterlife and a physical resurrection that occasioned Pope Leo X to set forth a constitution at the Lateran Council of 1513 in defence of the immortality and individuality of the soul led to feelings of doubt and despair that were associated with this planet. English intellectuals in this period lived like the pagan philosophers in Dante’s Limbo, reading the classics and Plato, exercising their intellects, but living lives without faith or hope. Confessional writings by Lydgate and Hoccleve expressed a sense of

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despair at the inevitable approach of death and the lack of a sense of centrality in a world of constant change and flux. The Fall of Princes and the civic rituals of this period convey the perception of life as a tragedy, a chantepleure of ceaseless alternations of joy and sorrow for which the only consolations were intellectual activity and admiration for the harmony and beauty that existed in works of art if not in nature, and this consolation was provided in Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

The boundaries of Saturn The death mask of Dante in the Palazzo Vecchio is now thought to have been cast in 1483 from a lost sepulchral effigy onto which a melancholy appearance, attributed to long years of exile, has been projected; an earlier fresco of Domenico di Michelino, painted in 1465 in the Duomo of Florence for the bicentenary of the poet’s birth, shows him laureled, holding his poem but standing outside the gates of Florence, his gaunt appearance testifying to the long years of exile, while his image is posthumously displayed within the cathedral that dominates the skyline.5 However, the earliest known portrait, a frescoed figure from before 1337, once attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Palazzo del Podesta (the Bargello) in Florence, displays no such melancholia. Dante lived life in faith, hope and expectation. Why were the times so dark fifty years after his death? Why did the melancholy goddess seated in the heart of James Thompson’s nineteenth century vision of London6 seem to preside over the city from the second decade of the fifteenth century? For Dante, Saturn occupied the extremes of the physical and moral universe. A remote planet, composed of pure crystals of ice frozen over a long period of time, its purity, silence, solemnity and remoteness, determined in its negative capacities the icy, cold floods of Cocytus, where Satan chewed the bodies of traitors, like Saturn devouring his children. But the good Saturn, with the golden ladder leading to the heavens, determined the personalities of recluses and contemplatives, such as Peter Damian, who greets the pilgrim on this planet and who once lived in a hermitage in Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, 680 metres up the North Eastern slope of Monte Catria near Gubbio. Saturn was therefore also the purveyor of the highest spiritual wisdom and furthermore associated with the golden age: Within the crystal that bears the name, as it circles the world, of that dear ruler under whom every malice lay dead.7 Writers of the fifteenth century tended to take the negative view of Saturn: ‘Melancholic and slow of motion’,8 seeing the political, social divisions following the death of Henry V in scientific, alchemical terms as ratification that they were living in an age of leaden Saturnian melancholy. John Gower, in The Lover’s Confession (1389), described the course of human history as a process of division, the fulfilment of Nebuchadnezzar’s 268

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dream, the disintegration of a statue with a golden head down into the earth, echoing the old man of Crete, composed of gold, silver, iron, bronze and clay.9 Lydgate, in The Fall of Princes, drew parallels with Rome at the time of Vitellius, a descendant of Saturn, in the aftermath of Nero’s suicide, when the empire was shared between four emperors.10 The alchemical significance of this division (the four conflicting elements of matter) becomes the cue for an alchemical digression on the golden age, when Saturn of uncorrupted gold ruled Crete, and all the metals were in their purified state: ‘there was no alloy in that metal seen’;11 Saturn was composed of pliable gold; tin did not crash; Mercury was not fugitive; and the Moon was immutable. With the fall of the Titans temperance was set aside, and the pure philosopher’s gold was lost as Saturn was devoured by Chronos to initiate the passage of time and the seasons. Saturn fled to Rome, all the metals deteriorated: ‘The golden world is turned into lead,’12 and Saturn became the god of time and nature who devours and was identified with lead, the primal but debased original gold of this lost time. Lydgate’s sophisticated attitude to myth was such that he was at pains to point out that the fable of Saturn did not point to an unnatural king but the circularity of ‘all devouring time’13 The goal of alchemy was to temper lead, to retrieve this lost gold hidden in the original Titan. This was why Saturn of the melancholic humour, prophesied to return as king again in Virgil’s Eclogues, was regarded as the wisest of the planets14 (in Scrope’s Epistle of Othea the knight is advised to model himself on the heavy, considered wisdom of Saturn), and why someone with alchemical, and classical interests, such as William Worcester, adopted Saturn as his emblem, and why Lydgate ended his digression on Saturn with an envoy to princes, including Duke Humfrey, exhorting them to show that ‘temperance / Can of your households have the governance’.15 However, when it came to tempering metals, experimentation was involved, and this could result in the crossing of forbidden boundaries which, paradoxically, risked further melancholia. In the fifteenth century Saturn came to represent melancholy introspection and restless, untrammelled intellectual enquiry, but for Dante Saturn was the last planet, whose slow and enormous orbit defined the boundaries of all the other planets. Its mysterious silence betokened forbidden mysteries and secrets. The pilgrim is unable to look at the planet or to hear it. Beatrice’s smile and the singing of the souls would shatter him, and he is unable to see the end of the golden ladder leading from the planet to the heavens: ‘my light could not follow it’.16 When he asks Peter Damian why he has been chosen to greet him, the hermit prescribes the limits to the boundaries of human speculation and warns him that predestination is beyond his comprehension, like the remote planet itself: ‘In the beyond of the abyss of God’s decree, that is severed from every created sight.17 Boundaries and borders, divinely sanctioned, were important for Dante: they represented safety, home and family. The pilgrimage through Purgatory is described as the crossing of a borderland towards home. Sinners in the flames call out to the pilgrim: 269

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Blessed are you, who from these border lands of ours, … … are taking on a cargo of experience, so as to die better.18 The act of writing is an attempt to travel within boundaries. At the conclusion to Purgatorio the poet exclaims: But because all the pages are filled that have been laid out for this second canticle, the bridle of art permits me to go no further.19 Working within rhymes and forming lines on the page to guide the pen establishes limits, in imitation of God’s creating the limits of the universe.20 Adam, our primal father, was the first to cross a forbidden line when he eschewed the protection of his garden on the mountain of Purgatory; Ulysses, in sailing past the Pillars of Hercules, left behind the warmth and safety of his family and the reassuring confines of a circumscribed world, and in an uncanny prediction of Britain’s future maritime destiny Dante has the imperial eagle proclaim: The thirsty pride that so maddens the Scot and the Englishman that neither can bear to stay within his bounds.21 Nevertheless, his own pride would not allow him to return from exile to the sheepfold of the baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence, the home of his childhood and ancestors. Piccarda had warned him: Indeed, it is fundamental towards this blessed esse to stay within God’s will, and thus our very wills become one.22 The collective voice of the eagle in Jupiter explained the working of divine ‘sempiternal justice’ in terms of light that can be observed near the seashore but is unfathomable in the depths of the ocean that so tempted Ulysses.23 Well aware of the temptations of intellectual curiosity, pride and ego, which encouraged men to cross boundaries, Dante imagined a universe that was itself bounded by parental love, a love however that could be challenged and transgressed by an assertive ego. The Divine Comedy is riven by paradoxical impulses, none more so than the desire for union with the divine parent in the one which conflicts with the individualistic instinct. The universe of Dante’s poem is constructed out of this conflict which is symbolized by the Trinity, three in one plurality, division and oneness, a paradox that runs through the consciousness of the poem’s creator, the egotist who aspires to submit to God’s will. 270

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Dante draws attention to paradoxes such as St Bernard’s prayer to the Mary as virgin, mother and daughter of her son and her father. This acceptance of the paradoxes at the heart of creation and consciousness runs counter to Aristotle’s proposition that contradictory positions cannot be true at the same time in the same sense,24 which leads to a tendency to iron out and dissolve the strangeness of paradoxes, something Dante did using syllogistic reasoning when he wanted to propel his narrative forwards, and which was the basis of much reasoning in the fifteenth century. In the period between 1370 and 1450, writers, clergy and academics in London, Oxford, Greenwich and St Albans were crossing these borders, none more so than Reginald Pecock. For Dante the tendency of humans to apply syllogistic reasoning to the study of reality was an indication that the mind, like all creation, reflected the threefold nature of reality operating through the Trinity, of which the tercets and tripartite structure of his poem was an example. For Pecock though, the irrefutable logic of a syllogism was a means to elevate reason above scripture and faith as a means to truth. The arguments of syllogisms give us ‘well nigh all things which a man know other wise that a beast knows’, and ‘from two reliable premises he will deduce a third that is also true though all the angels in heaven would say and hold that the conclusion were not true … logic never fails’.25 This elevation of logical reasoning over faith led to the bishop of Chichester and St Asaph being charged with heresy and forced to recant, specifically for attempting, in his Repressor of over Much Blaming of the Clergy (1449) and the Book of Faith (1456), to confute the Lollards with reason alone. However, borders could also be crossed through the mere act of reading Latin translations of the works of the Greek philosophers and finding in the philosophy and myths of ancient Greece, in Plato and Ovid, theories about abstract, mathematical notions of divinity, transmigration of souls, the age of the earth, and the close relationship between man and the natural world. So much in the philosophy and myths of Greece which were being absorbed by English intellectuals in this period represented a profound challenge to orthodox church doctrine and yet, while Reginald Pecock was deprived of his bishopric in 1458, there was no ecclesiastical censure or even response to any interest in, or endorsement of, the writings of ancient Greece. In part this was because much of this interest was shown by members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from Thomas Arundel (who left a copy of Aristotle’s Physics to Peterhouse26 and who was a friend of Coluccio Salutati) to William Grey, d.1478 bishop of Ely and chancellor of Oxford), and because the Lollard followers of John Wyclif ’s teaching were usually members of the lower orders of lay and clerical society, and any involvement in this debate over support for Wyclif ’s teaching, or the institutional church, involved the question of a threat to the established social order. However, this interest in antiquity, medicine, science and alchemy involved the same intellectual elite, and one of the consequences of the widening of these intellectual horizons was an increasing sense of doubt and feelings of despair. Dante’s view of the world was marked by a strong sense of justice and personal destiny, and a faith in a finite universe bounded by God’s love, and this was coming under threat in the period between 1370 and 1450 by advancements in natural science, alchemical medicine, speculative philosophy and theology, much of which was fuelled by the growing awareness of the 271

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literature of antiquity and the possibilities of new worlds beyond the Atlantic. Ulysses’s prophetic description of the island of Purgatory as terra nova (new land)27 suggests that Dante identified the earliest European ventures beyond the Pillars of Hercules: the Genoese voyage in 1291 of the Vivaldi brothers, who disappeared sailing along the coast of Morocco looking for a passage to India,28 to be followed by Lancelotto Malocello who, searching for the brothers, landed in Lanzarote in 1312, as ruthless, faithless and militarily destructive followers of Ulysses.29 By the fifteenth century the Portuguese voyages of discovery westwards to the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores in 1419 and 1427 and the coast of Africa after 1434 went well beyond the limits imposed on Dante’s Ulysses. Travellers' tales of the primitive lives of inhabitants of the Canary Islands reached Thomas Walsingham who saw this as a window into the distant past and confirmation of Ovid's depiction of a primeval golden age of innocence. William Worcester had something of Ulysses’s curiosity, and as an adopted native of Bristol he was excited by that port’s role as a centre of exploration: he took notes on Portuguese discoveries in the Atlantic and, in his Itineraries, he recorded his interest in the ship with which he was a part owner, with John Jay Jr., which began a voyage in 1480 from Bristol to what was thought to be the island of Brazil, west of Ireland, and which was forced to turn back after nine months at sea.30 Worcester attempted to establish order in the world around him, and he was a pioneer in exploring and mapping England. He was also interested in libraries, and he probably took notes from Gloucester’s library. The range of his interests included botany, geography, natural history, astronomy and astrology (he copied John Free’s notes from Pliny’s Cosmographia or Geography).31 Worcester’s copy of the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers recorded the adage: ‘The noblest thing that God hath made in this world is man, and the noblest thing that is in this world is reason.’32 Dante placed his pagan philosophers: Lucan, Socrates, Plato, Cicero and Virgil, the writers so influential in the period from 1370 t0 1450, in Limbo, on the outskirts of Hell, beyond the judgements of Minos’s tail. Here they inhabited a congenial enough environment, modelled on Virgil’s Elysium, with a fountain of wisdom and towers with seven doors, representing the seven liberal arts. Here they exercised their intellects in discussion and debate, living lives without faith and hope, deprived of the sweet light of God’s love. It is a destiny captured by Christine de Pisan, who described her version of Limbo, or Mount Parnassus, where the same poets and philosophers described by Dante are gathered, with the addition of her own learned father, Thomas de Pisan, a classical scholar: ‘You our father knew the place very well, and he certainly should have, because he often spent time there, and carried away great learning.’ Christine, like her father, was a student of the classics and she settled for his fate by only following Dante as far as Limbo. The protective talisman she took from Dante – ‘may long study avail me’ (an equivalent of Virgil’s golden bough in the underworld) and which served her rather than the cross or gospel – was not intended to deliver her to Heaven. Dante however, when confronted by Charon, received from Virgil the Christian cry: ‘It is so willed where will and power are one’:33 the true gold of the Word which evokes God’s elective salvation, and this is why Christine’s journey with the Sybil goes no further than the firmament of fixed stars as she ascends the ladder of speculation wondering at the beauty of the 272

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zodiacal signs and the Milky Way;34 but she goes no further and avoids the primum mobile and the Empyrean and returns to the First Heaven of air (following the progress of Chaucer’s pilgrim in the House of Fame) and ends in Limbo.35 Like Chaucer’s journey hers is a literary, non-visionary voyage, informed by knowledge and occurring in her library: science opposed to the imagination. This could be a description of the fate of many intellectuals of the fifteenth century who were reading the works of these pagan philosophers consigned to Dante’s Limbo, and in reading Dante they would be aware of what they had lost and could no longer fully endorse, living lives dominated by the forces of nature and Fortune. The summit of Mount Purgatory witnesses the painful leave-taking of Virgil and Dante, as the adoptive son follows Beatrice into the light of Heaven. An equally poignant leave-taking occurred for the early fifteenth century readers of Dante, and the classics that were his source, and this was the leave-taking of Beatrice and all she represented: she was replaced by the returning Virgil, as intellectuals, faced with the erosion over the previous hundred years of the elaborate infrastructure of The Divine Comedy, crumbling under the impact of the scientific exploration of nature, Greek philosophy, mathematics, alchemical science and abstraction, settle for the fate of Virgil in Limbo, described by the Mantuan poet Sordello in the antechamber of Purgatory as a life lived in shadows with no torments or outcries, resigned to sadness and sighs.36 It is a life without the consolation of a confident expectation of the bliss of the divine light of love, stretching, beckoning at the end of a straight line in space and time, and instead an acceptance of the circular rhythms of nature, of birth, death and decay.

The chantepleure and the turning of Fortune’s wheel The Cheapside conduit, flowing with wine on Henry VI’s entry into London in 1432, was intended ‘to exile us from all heaviness’, but it could not banish thoughts about the mutability of all things and the uncertainty of Fortune.37 Lydgate’s London Mumming begins on London Bridge with a description of Fortune. There is alchemical language in the description. Lady Fortune lives by the sea; she is always full of transmutations, and this implies that the mission of stopping her wheel is on the same level as the alchemist’s quest to fix volatile mercury. Dwelling on a barren rock, mysterious and inscrutable, and constantly changing, she leaves no allegorical message, conveying the same sense of mystery as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.38 On one side of her there is a small mountain like an island, with fresh flowers, diverse trees, birds singing in heavenly harmony, and a zephyr blowing with a temperate air (not unlike Dante’s Earthly Paradise on the mountain of Purgatory), but suddenly a wave destroys all the fresh flowers, and in the forest where the birds sang, every branch and bough is robbed of its beauty by the wind. A mansion is decorated on one side with rubies and gold and the other is daubed in ugly clay, soon to be assailed with wind and rain. Below a cellar has two tuns, one containing sweet, spiced wine, and the other is full of gall, and he who tastes one must taste the other.39 To withstand the lady of the house there are four fair ladies, the four cardinal virtues 273

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associated with England’s governing class: prudence, righteousness, fortitude and temperance. But this contest with Fortune cannot be sustained in a realm ruled by a minor, and they will remain in the household for a further year.40 The cosy ending to the New Year pageant is an illusionary Yuletide fantasy. The reality is outside, in a realm ruled by a child; there is, as the Hertford mumming shows, domestic unhappiness in a fatherless land, like Hamlet’s Denmark, ruled by an infant, and the cold winds of Fortune and death. The fear underlying these civic pageants is not of Hell, but of the turning of the wheel, and this illustrates Lydgate’s fundamentally tragic view of life. Chaucer was the first English writer to conceive tragedy as a living genre, and the source of his definition was Boethius: Tragedy is no other manner of thing But in its singing, cries for or bewail How that Fortune will always assail those With unaware stroke the reigns that are proud.41 But for Chaucer’s sources, Boethius, and Trevisa in his gloss, there was a moral dimension to the tragedy of the lives of the great which begin in prosperity and end in adversity, and even Boccaccio, in his Fortunes of Famous Men, emphasized the great impulses of despots that led to their fall. This penitential aspect is less significant in the writings of late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century England than the notion of an adamantine rule of the turning of the wheel, the oscillations of joy and sorrow in the chantepleure. For Chaucer’s Troilus, the wheel of Fortune determines that happiness is incubated and intensified by its opposite, sorrow, and the turning of the wheel is merely the rotation of a series of mutually enforcing opposites.42 This, rather than any moral force of justice, is what operates in The Monk’s Tale (which is an attempt to follow Boccaccio’s Fortunes of Famous Men cut short by the host); in The Knight’s Tale43 and in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. In all these works the term chantepleure is used to describe the oscillations of sorrow and joy. The sinful impulses of the great are therefore minimized, and instead there is a concentration on Fortune’s ‘unforeseen stroke’. Lydgate’s Troy Book, completed in 1420 for Henry V, outlines the concept of a non-linear view of history, dominated by fickle fortune, and defines tragedy, focusing on performance in the classical world, as Trojan tragedians, coming out with ghastly faces miming the poet’s words, conforming themselves to the chantepleure: Now sad, now glad, now heavy and now light, And faces changed with a sudden sight, So craftily they could themselves transfigure, conforming themselves to the chantepleure, Now to sing and suddenly to weep.44

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This conception of classical tragedy as the chantepleure, the turning of Fortune’s wheel, can be seen in an early fifteenth century frontispiece depicting a dramatic presentation of Chaucer’s verse in an idealized performance of Troilus and Criseyde around a semicircle of spectators, representing a mediaeval theatre around a central altar or pulpit, under which there are figures representing the lovers, the lack of facial definition suggesting the wearing of masks.45 The image endorses Lydgate’s notion of a classical performance. This is the tragic mood underlying the London pageants and The Fall of Princes, the fear, not of Hell, but of the chantepleure, the turning of the wheel, the force that will dominate Shakespeare’s great tragedy King Lear; in the words of the Machiavellian Edmund, ‘The wheel has come full circle. I am here.’46 Despite his declared intention to follow Duke Humfrey’s instructions to educate princes and provide a moralized account of their sufferings, Lydgate, in The Fall of Princes, communicates, under the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Heroides (The Heroines), a tragic, elegiac view of history,47 ‘sorrow mixed with gladness’48 and ‘worldly bliss mingled with bitterness’.49 His reaction to the meeting with the goddess Fortune is different from his two sources. Boccaccio is overwhelmed by her tall figure, and Premierfait calls out to God. Lydgate instead concentrates on the way her right hand holds some flowers and in her left hand winter, an image of the chantepleure, conveyed in the song that Lady Fortune sings to Boccaccio in his study: She hastens ever on the chantepleure: Now song, now weeping, now woe, now gladness, Now in mirth, now pains to endure, Now light, now heavy, now bitter, now sweetness.. Showing to us a kind of resemblance, How worldly wealth has here no assurance.50 The chantepleure is an oxymoron that courses like a refrain, with the word plesaunce, throughout The Fall of Princes to evoke the sadness and beauty of a life in which nothing lasts. Focusing on this life as it is can accentuate feelings of joy and melancholy: in the words given by Lydgate to Lucretia: For sweet and bitter, joy and adversity, We must weigh them both in one balanced scale, Balance our sorrows and our plesaunce, Entirely mix all things that are in doubt, Receive our fortune as it comes about.51 We must therefore, Lydgate argues, balance joy and adversity and accept Fortune and its mixture of sorrow and plesaunce. He applies to the fates of the mighty this concept of chantepleure, no longer defined as a penitential lament following joy, but a ceaseless alternation of the two.

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This is very different from the way Dante described the teleological meta-narrative in his epistle to Can Grande as a movement from the horrible to the happy, from Inferno to Paradiso.52 Even Dante’s oxymorons, ‘cold fires’ and ‘true falsehood’, are literal, and his shifts in register from tragic to comic, high and low style, were always kept separate; contradictions were resolved through such imagery as sparks in a fire or different voices in polyphonic music: for nothing could impede the relentless teleological forwards progression of his narrative.53 Petrarch however internalized oxymorons to express the psychological contradictions of a tortured soul, and in the fifteenth century, in an age of doubt, a forward moving narrative from sorrow to happiness had little relevance (Chaucer’s plots moved from happiness to sorrow, or in the case of the Canterbury Tales pilgrimages that lead nowhere); instead there was the ceaseless alternation of sadness and joy. In an envoy commemorating the misfortune of Cadmus and his wife, thrown from the wheel of Fortune and exiled from Thebes, the city he had founded, Lydgate comments: Is it not like unto the chantepleure, Beginning with joy, ending in wretchedness? All worldly bliss is mingled with bitterness.54 Lydgate fittingly ends his great epic by defining it as a black-clad, elegiac book, like the wheel turned by the goddess, an intermingling of joy and sorrow: Black be thy weeds of complaint and mourning Called the Fall of Princes from their felicity, Like a chantepleure, now singing now weeping, Woe after mirth, next to joy adversity, So intermingled there is no security, Just as this book doth praise and reprehend, – Now on the wheel, now set in low degree; Who will increase by virtue must ascend.55 Lydgate’s reference to his black book of mourning was picked up by one going by the name of Greenacre, twenty years after the completion of The Fall of Princes, in an envoy added to two of the manuscripts of the work. Greenacre who along with Benedict Burgh stressed Lydgate’s association with Boccaccio, suggested that The Fall of Princes should be bound in black and dedicated to Proserpina, dwelling in an anchorage on the River Lethe of forgetfulness: Black be thy binding and thy weeds also, Thou sorrowful book of matter despairing,… Go wail and weep with woeful Proserpine, And let thy tears multiply the flood Of black Lethe under the barren wood, Where the goddess has her hermitage.56 276

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This is not the sort of hermitage offering the salvation espoused by the English mystics fifty years earlier, but a union with the god of oblivion, the only answer to the melancholy of life, and in marked contrast to Dante’s treatment of Lethe, which he placed in Purgatory for cleansing penitents of their sins. But for Greenacre, consciousness is pain. We are close here to Leonardo da Vinci’s dictum that the greatness of a man is determined by his capacity to suffer.

Melancholia and the awareness of death The source of this melancholy view of life as a chantepleure of endless alternations of joy and sorrow was the awareness of time and mortality, the inevitability of the approach of the winter of death without the consolations of Dante’s faith in love and the afterlife (although in The Divine Comedy there is a distinction between the backward- and forward-looking salvation of the pilgrim and the poet’s anxieties about his ageing body and mortality) and this was given prominence in some of the rituals of the duke of Gloucester’s household that emphasized the way the transience of a man’s life echoed the pattern of the seasons. Gloucester’s usher, John Russell, in his Book of Nurture, indicates that Gloucester was afflicted with melancholy in his prescription of medicinal baths for his master containing various herbs for depression and insomnia such as St John’s Wort, wild flax and camomile, after which he would be carefully dried to preserve his bodily heat and led to his bed ‘to cure his troubles’.57 The elaborate feasts described by Russell at Plesaunce (a fusion of banqueting and philosophy that recalls Dante’s Convivio or Banquet, which concludes with a discussion of the four ages of man) were accompanied by ‘sotelites’ or mimed displays fusing Christian and classical myths. A three-course meat feast, probably for Christmas, was accompanied by a nativity scene showing, for the first course, Gabriel’s appearance to the Virgin; the second course showed the Annunciation of the angel to the Virgin, and the third course, accompanied with fruit and spices, showed the three kings giving gifts to the Virgin.58 This Yuletide joy, however, was followed by a more melancholy fish feast, accompanied with displays with couplets from the Salernitan verses, to illustrate the four passing seasons and four ages of man (a concept found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Bede), and humoral changes that occur during the pilgrimage of life. For the first course Pan, a wanton young man (spring), stood piping on a cloud to represent the element of air and the humour of blood. He was followed during the second course by Mars, a man of war (summer), standing on fire, representing fire and choler. During the third course, the guests would see a man with a sickle (autumn), standing on a river, symbolizing water and phlegm. By the time the meal drew towards its close, and the spices and wines were brought out, Saturn appeared ‘with his locks feeble and old’ sitting on the hard, stone earth, heavy, niggard of cheer, to represent winter, melancholy and the inevitable approach of old age and death.59 This pageant poignantly portrays the bafflingly different manifestations of the self throughout the courses or seasons of a man’s life and the inevitable approach of the melancholy mood that accompanies the culmination of life’s feast. For Russell and Lydgate the contemplation of the four seasons 277

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of man was accompanied by a sense of inevitable decline and the completion of a weary circle, but meditation on the four seasons of man in Dante’s Convivio was more dynamic. The lifespan of a pilgrim was conceived not as a circle but an arc, following the passage of the sun from east to west. All along this arc, or meridian, individuals are integrated into the human city and can contemplate their fellow citizens, looking forwards and backwards and showing the virtues appropriate to their ages, whether obedience and modesty in adolescence, or authority and communication in old age.60 A note of epic heroism is introduced into the notion of this arc with the realization that Christ died approaching his thirty-fifth year (Dante began his exile and the writing of his epic at the age of thirty-six), as he was reaching the apex of the arc, still rising, at the approach on noon, the apex of the arc and the noblest time of the day.61 This melancholic awareness of time and death was eloquently expressed by other writers in the Plesaunce circle. Thomas Hoccleve, a civil servant in the privy seal, developed his complaining style from listening to petitions presented by private individuals seeking redress for wrongs done to them, and which were handled by clerks of the privy seal (in a similar way Franz Kafka was to develop his emotionless dispassionate tone from writing up assessments of industrial accidents as an insurance assessor). Hoccleve too wrote mainly about himself, in particular his outbreak of insanity, or bipolar depression, which he recounted in The Complaint, which he began in 1420 and revised and dedicated to the duke of Gloucester between March and August1422.62 His illness began after 29 February 1416 and before 18 July 1416 and lasted several months before ending with a complete recovery on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1416.63 Five years later, on the same All Saints’ Day, Hoccleve began to write a confessional account, which he finished by the end of the month,64 of his struggle with this illness, describing how he lost his memory and looked like a wild steer with manic, ever-moving eyes, seeking every corner of a room; excessively self-conscious, he caught himself in the mirror reflecting on his unusual expression, his manic gestures and the effect his odd behaviour has on friends and colleagues: Many a sortie I made to this mirror Thinking if I look in this the same way Among folk as I now do, no error of a suspect look may in my face appear.65 His problems were compounded by his unease in society: afraid to incriminate himself, he is aware that men will judge him whether he goes to Westminster pavement or stays at home. He has the same difficulty integrating into society as the fourteenth century mystics, and he rationalizes his madness and his deliverance from it as divine visitations, and, as the duke of Gloucester would do, he uses as his frame of reference 278

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the Psalms of the suffering and misunderstood David: ‘they who see me run away from me’. This self-portrait is as intimate and revealing as any of the great self-portraits that would shortly emerge from the palette of Albrecht Durer. Moreover, Hoccleve’s accounts of his melancholy mood contains a brilliant parody of Chaucer’s description of spring in the opening of The Canterbury Tales, transposed to an urban setting in the autumn, the brown season of Michaelmas when, at the age of fifty-three, he is not aware of the warm spring rain reviving the roots in the earth, but of a melancholy despair that sinks into the roots of his heart and he has a foreboding impression of the ‘ripeness of death upon him’, with no possibility of resurrection, physical or spiritual: After harvest had gathered in his sheaves, And after the brown season of Michaelmas had begun to rob the trees of their leaves, which had once been green and of a lusty freshness And turned them into the colour of yellowness and thrown them down under foot, that change sank into my heart’s root.66 There is a pervading sense in the literature produced in Gloucester’s circle that the city of London in the first half of the fifteenth century had, like T. S. Eliot’s ‘unreal city’, become a wasteland. Hoccleve’s depression was linked with anxieties about death and a lack of the faith that informs Dante’s The Divine Comedy. As part of his convalescence for the depressive affliction of 1416 five years previously, he set out to translate the fifth chapter of Henry Suso’s Orologium Sapientiae as the Book of the Craft of Dying, ‘at the inciting of a devout man’, probably Gloucester, given that in the prologue to his complaint, Hoccleve revealed he had promised Humfrey a book in September 1421 and had been delayed by sickness, until finally taking up his pen on Gloucester’s return from France in August 1422.67 The Book of Dying takes the form of a dialogue between Death, in female form, and two friends, a disciple and a dying man, who is an imaginative projection of the disciple, in the manner of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio.68 The dying man protests his unreadiness for death; he feels like a partridge seized by a hawk, and his friend counsels him with religious platitudes on penance and faith in God’s mercy, which are of little comfort to a terrified alter ego in the clutches of a predator.69 It is a dialogue between friends who can no longer understand one another, and their friendship (between the body and the soul, the dying and the living) has reached its limits and breaks down. The dying man bitterly reflects that when the flames of Purgatory come he will not be able to depend on the prayers of 279

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the living: ‘Slipped out of mind; while I writhe about in sharp pains,’70 and he accepts that people can only understand that which pertains to themselves and they will all forget him. This study of the irreconcilable gulf between spirit and body, the living and the dead, is a bleak contrast to Dante’s evocation of the tender reunions in Hell and Purgatory between the pilgrim and the dead. Reciprocal exchanges of affection occur between the living man, who has a body and casts a shadow, and his departed friends, and the dead express affection for their own bodies, anticipating a reunion with them at the end of time, while remaining confident of the affection that the living still feel for them in their prayers. The pilgrim’s sin, for which he is castigated by Beatrice at the summit of Purgatory, was to forget her and to accept the finality of her death, when she was merely on the threshold of her second life. But she visited him in dreams and finally journeyed to Limbo to call him back. Grace, the physical resurrection, the efficacy of prayers for the dead, the indissoluble bonds between the dead and the living are all celebrated in The Divine Comedy in a poignant recognition of these fundamental principles of latethirteenth- and early-fourteenth century concept of penance. The dead on the first terrace of pride in Purgatory pray for the living: ‘for those who have stayed behind’, and the flesh-and-blood pilgrim following them is moved to say: If there they always call blessings on us, back here what can be said and done for them, … Surely we must help them wash away the marks they took hence, so that, cleansed and light, they can go forth to the starry wheels.71 This vision of the mutuality of all mutable beings under the starry heavens represents the high point of Catholic civilization, but such beliefs were no longer held so firmly in the hearts of intellectuals of early Renaissance England. Instead, in the face of the harsh realities of nature, there was an acceptance of the principles of change, dissolution and transmutation that underlay alchemical science. In Greek and Roman mythology and history fire is used to speed the passage of the soul to the next world, and fire, instead of being an agent in the purificatory, penitential process of Purgatory, becomes the means to transmute the body and soul into pure spirit, a process described by Hoccleve’s dying man as body and soul joined in the ‘vengeful flames’ with the soul, refined as spirit, ultimately left alone: Thus the friend who is the body becomes enemy To the soul,72 because at death a reversal takes place as the spirit undoes the body. The same process is described in the epitaph around the tomb of Hoccleve’s patron, the duke of Gloucester, where salt is the agent of transmutation. The potential that an acute awareness of time, change and mortality had to give rise to melancholy, and even to cause the sort of breakdown suffered by Hoccleve, also affected 280

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Lydgate (who may well have been present at one of the Salneritan feasts described by Russell). It was at the point when he was entering his last illness and abandoning his writing that Lydgate expressed in his Testament a sense of melancholy in tune with the season of his life: The unstable world, now ebbs, now floods all things conclude with mutability.73 It is a mood in tune with the premature senility of England’s Fisher King. Signs of this crisis occur in his translation of the Secret of Secrets. At the point when Lydgate, in the autumn or winter of 1449 at the age of seventy-nine,74 handed over the completion of the work to Benedict Burgh of University College, Oxford (who arranged the verse so he commenced at Lydgate’s last words: ‘death consumes all’),75 he meditated on the shape of a year and a human life, based on an understanding of the passing of the seasons: Thus four seasons gives us a mirror clear Of a man’s life, and a very plain image.76 The best piece of advice that Lydgate, acting as an Aristotle to Alexander, or Henry VI, could give to his sovereign or patron was to show him how to reconcile the four seasons, or the four ages of man, to confront the mystery of the human personality composed of the same changeable elements of nature, the humours and complexions, as the four seasons: in other words how to square this alchemical circle and obtain a sense of an integrated, whole personality when looking back in old age at the various seasons of one’s existence.77 The pessimism accompanying this task was compounded by the realization that, while Dante saw man as immortal, created directly by God, unlike the four elements which were not created directly by God, but by the angels and the primum mobile, and therefore mutable, Lydgate accepted that man was not separate from the four elements and therefore potentially neither special nor immortal. Summer is brief, Fortune informs Lydgate: ‘By course of nature vertu revolves in circles,’ and ‘vertu’ (the force of life described by Chaucer in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales) only briefly gives green to the fields and joy to the heart and soon sinks back into the earth again.78 Lydgate also vented his melancholy winter mood in his confessional Testament,79 where he expresses his awareness of the loss of the greenness of his youth; a darkness descends on him as he perceives the signs of the approach of death: The cloudy sight misted with darkness, Without redress, relief or amends To me of death has brought the kalends.80 A physical illness brings with it an attack of melancholia:

After came sickness: 281

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Melancholia, earthy, and pale of face To a bed of languor has me brought.81 With the illness and depression comes a frightening hallucinatory vision of a dark woman; clad in a black mantle, she was no Virgin Mary: Thereunto there did to me appear While I lay, complaining in a trance, Clad in a mantle, a woman sad of cheer, Black was her habit, sober of countenance, Strange in her bearing.82 She is called ‘remembrance of misspent time’, And to remember the lustiness of youth, did me great grievance. Lying alone in his room Lydgate reflects on the four seasons of his life, and especially the springtime of his childhood and youth: ‘My youth, my age, how I have misspent it,’83 and his ‘many great trespasses, by many a wrong path’.84 Despite these being his green years of rejoicing, he was not happy because he was aware of his sudden mood swings, and to convey these he uses the same imagery as Hoccleve: In all my works suddenly changeable, To all good advice contrary I was found, Now overly sad, now mourning, now jocund, Wilful, reckless, mad starting about like a hare.85 He identifies his quixotic unpredictability with the unreliable month of March: The variable season of this stormy age Moving always on newfangledness, Now of frowning cheer, now fresh of visage, Now glad, now light, now troubled and heavy, Wild as a hart, now mourning in sadness, Stormy as March, with changes full sudden, After clear shining, to turn and make it rain.86 Accompanying these fluctuating moods of youth, caused by the rising of hot, moist humours (today we would say hormones), there is an ever present awareness of the 282

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passage of time and the omnipresence of death. March can be stormy and cruel; the cold winds strip the red and white blossoms from the trees: ‘the stern sharp showers of death’s power’,87 which can also deflower the angelic features of a fifteen-year-old child.88 A troubled adolescent who resents authority (like St Augustine he admits to stealing fruit from orchards), he is quarrelsome and lacks a sense of direction and stability, like a weather vane or a clock with missing pieces. His crisis and search for a purpose and meaning in his life led him, in his fifteenth year (c. 1385), to his entry into the Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds: ‘Unto the plough I put forth my hand’,89 and although he was professed as a monk a year later, this does not seem to have given him the sense of stability and direction he craved, and he was not ordained as a priest until 1397. He disobeyed the Benedictine rule on many occasions, was always late for choir and disliked the holy texts, preferring ‘vain fables’ and good wine, and despite the wisdom and kind guidance of the older monks, he resented their directions. By his own admission he was a counterfeit monk, despite his black habit, a pygmalion. His identification with Chaucer’s monk (an albeit poorer version) who joins the pilgrims at Canterbury and narrates The Siege of Thebes (written as a prequel to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale), was perhaps inspired by his long years outside the cloister. This confession helps to explain the impression one gets from reading most of his books, with their restless pursuit of classical myths, ancient history and tales of the misfortunes of princes, that his interests were not always especially cloistral. His breakdown, the appearances of the dark lady, was connected with this sense of failure in his monastic vocation, his inability, within the cloistral life, to find a fixed point of stability and meaning when contemplating the passing seasons, the changes around him in the world of nature and within himself. Then he remembered (again as a fifteenyear-old), presumably shortly after entering Bury Abbey, seeing on a wall in the cloister an image that would give him this sense of having a centre: Just now remembering in my later age, The time of my childhood, as rehearse I shall, When I was less than fifteen, taking my passage, In the middle of a cloister, depicted on a wall, I saw a Crucifix, whose wounds were not small With this word “vide” written there beside.90 This is the still centre of his turbulent, revolving life; for Dante in his Vita Nuova this had been provided by devout praise of a woman; for Lydgate it is Christ: Man, wherever thou makes thy passage, Toward Jesus always should you behold, With eye fixed, look on his visage.91 Although the Bury monk may have been moving around the circumference of a circle, at the centre are the eyes of the image of the all-seeing god, which, though appearing to be fixed, follow him everywhere. It is a visual image of Christ (the sun), the stationary 283

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centre around which the Earth and the planets move. Just three years later, in 1454, the German theologian, Nicholas of Cusa, a papal envoy educated at Padua (who followed Oresme in suggesting that the notion that we are stationary and the planets move around us may be an illusion of perception), wrote in De Visione Dei (The Vision of God), about his placing an image on the walls of the Benedictine Abbey of Tegernsee in Bavaria, so that each monk would realize that he was the sole recipient of the icon’s gaze.92 The image in Lydgate’s cloister was a Crucifix, a cross with a central still point, like a wheel (in all but one of the surviving manuscripts it is depicted as a Greek cross), but it was also, with the Five Wounds, an image of martyrdom, and Lydgate, near the end of his life, was able to reconcile his accounts from antiquity of self-sacrifice in the interests of the common good, especially the death of Consul Marcus Regulus, which provided stability to the turning of Fortune’s wheel, with the Passion of Christ. Lydgate had also written about faith as a means of defying the reality of human inconstancy, notably in his portrait of Samson’s love for Delilah, and in this Crucifix and the Name of Jesus he had a divine ratification of blind faith: ‘Our blessed saviour strong Samson’.93 Lydgate seems to have acquired a similar sense of centrality that Dante achieved and which would be so envied by John Ruskin, and it was provided by the Cross and the Holy Name: Within my closet and my little couch, O blessed Jesus. And by my bed side.. The name of Jesus with me shall ever abide; My lodestar, and my sovereign guide, In this world here both on land and sea, … To blind eyes a light, lantern and spectacle, Thy death, thy passion, thy cross shall me direct;94 the monk’s will, like Piccarda’s, is no longer his own but God’s: Let thy grace lead me straight like the fisher’s line With humble heart, to live to thy plesaunce.95 Jesus was seen by Lydgate as the heroic Orpheus returned from the underworld,96 bringing, like Plato’s philosopher, a vision of a realm of light. This sense of purpose, of otherworldly destiny, did not come about, as it did with Dante, through the inspiration and love of a woman. Lydgate did not settle down into permanent monastic enclosure until the last fifteen years of his life in 1434, when Henry VI’s court was resident in Bury abbey from Christmas of the previous year until St George’s day. Before then he had spent time in Oxford, probably Gloucester Hall; between 1390 and 1400 he met Geoffrey Chaucer and he became a friend of his son, Thomas Chaucer, whom he probably met in the Chaucer household in Ewelme near Oxford,97 and from 1399 he spent much of his time in London, Paris, and at Humfrey’s court at Plesaunce, where women occupied an important position. Lydgate certainly dabbled in secular pursuits and even wrote love poetry, but with old age the word plesaunce, 284

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with its unequivocal joys so unlike the chantepleure, came to represent his monastic vocation, a refrain to evoke the sweet song of Jesus: ‘so full of plesaunce … that chases away the eclipses of foreign darkness’,98 and his Testament shows that, near death, he had come to realize that the emotional foundation of his life was provided by his fellow monks, and when he contemplated the heavens, that ‘place eternal, a place of all plesaunce’,99 and the love that moves the stars, he thinks of brother Jesus and of a home like Dante’s beyond the stars: Go each day onward on thy pilgrimage, Think how short a time you abide here; Your place is high above the stars clear No earthly palace is wrought in so stately a manner Come on my friend, my brother most sincere.100

Nostalgia and life’s pilgrimage Another cause of melancholy was grief and nostalgia for the past. There is no one more nostalgic than Dante who throughout his adult life longed for home. The tercet he invented mirrors the human consciousness, looking forwards and backwards. Before the pilgrim arrives in Paradise the present constantly slips into the past, into his memories, and Purgatorio, under the influence of Augustine’s Confessions, is the most nostalgic of the three canticles as the converted pilgrim undergoes a spiralling journey, so that in moving forwards he is continually looking back, struggling with his will (despite the exhortations of Cato, his forward impulse is resisted by the song of Casella ‘that still sounds within me’). It is this nostalgia that pulls the teleological preordained master plot moving irresistibly towards the pilgrim’s salvation in different directions adding a personal, affective dimension to the linear narrative. The sense of regret, of the lost potential of a close relationship cut short by premature death, is conveyed by Dante’s tutor Brunetto Latini: And if I had not died so early, seeing the heavens so kindly toward you I would have given you strength for the work.101 Dante’s response implies a secular rejection of the teleological journey he was pursuing: If my request were all fulfilled … you would not be banished from human nature.102 Even his tutor’s prophesy of a blessed destiny does not disguise the possibility of alternative futures or paths, couched as it was in the conditional tense:

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If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port, if I perceived well during sweet life.103 In other words he must follow the potential of his Gemini birth, but the possibility of straying in another direction is very much alive and Dante’s response certainly recognized the potential and allure of another life: For in my memory is fixed, and now it weighs on my heart, the dear kind paternal image of you when, in the world, from time to time you used to teach me how a man makes himself eternal.104 This melancholy nostalgia for alternative lives and relationships adds another layer to the main teleological plot’s distinction between saved and damned and it is also expressed when Charles Martel says to the pilgrim: You loved me well, and you surely had cause, for if I had stayed down there I would have shown you more than the foliage of your love.105 Dante’s pilgrimage is a struggle with his will to separate himself from earthly objects of desire and a yearning for things that are never still and forever moving beyond reach, whether it is the longing of the dead for their bodies, his desire for imagined friendships with poets in the time of Augustus, for departed friends like Forese, or for the imagined affection of ancestors such as Cacciaguida, in an idealized Florentine past far removed from the violent city that since the coup of the Black Guelphs in 1302 had suffered an exodus of Guelph wealth and culture, in an Italy where the old feudal families (with the exception of the Malaspinas) were in decline. This nostalgia would have struck a chord with his later readers, but there is a crucial difference: Dante’s faith gave him the optimism to live in expectation of a return of the Roman Empire, and his nostalgia was transcended by his faith in a reunion with Beatrice in an afterlife and his conviction that however much he may have missed his home in Florence and the love he experienced in infancy, this would be found in his heavenly home. However, there is also a ruthless element to a poem that is in part an autobiographical confession of a convert under the influence of Augustine’s Confessions who metamorphoses and sheds his skin, disowning his past, his friends, his earlier poetry and political affiliations and ideals for the sake of the prize ahead. Dante may have been at his most vulnerable when he met Francesca in the outskirts of Hell when he fainted at the thought of his complicity in her passion, but this compassion puts his providential journey to Rome. ‘where Christ is a Roman’106 in jeopardy; with Virgil’s encouragement therefore he learns to be like Aeneas, abandoning Dido, and as he proceeds in his 286

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pilgrimage, he moves ever relentlessly and purposefully forwards, gradually leaving behind his constitutional melancholy and nostalgia. He listens objectively to those he meets in Inferno and Purgatorio with little personal involvement, making no attempt to influence or interpret the stories he hears because he sees himself as a lucky winner at a game of hazard (the prize is eternal bliss) who attracts the envy of others (even Virgil),107 or as a visitor to a prison to whom the less-fortunate inmates gravitate pressing on him their concerns about relatives and friends in the world of the living. He is like a sailor catching the wind and purposefully steering his ship towards port; yet his reflections in Paradise on the possibility of others left behind in his Inferno, such as Guido Montefeltro (referred to by Filippo Villani as a new Ulysses), lowering their sails and entering harbour, suggests he was not able to completely jettison his sentimental attachments or his nostalgia. The poem even witnesses the final stages of the pilgrim’s conversion and the completion of his penance when Beatrice exhorts him to use his wings (the feather quills with which he writes) to ascend to God instead of being weighed down to earth as he was after her death, and by this she means the composition of the Divine poem, the testament to his nostalgic attachments and the fruit of his conversion.108 Writers in England faced with the exhortation to follow Dante across the ocean to Paradise, lacked his confidence in their safe arrival on land and they consequently were more inclined to look back unequivocally with nostalgia either at their own lives or those of their fictional characters. Chaucer shared Dante’s nostalgia for an old feudal social order undermined by the tide of modernization and economic expansion: in his case a feudal order represented by the knight, squire and yeoman, threatened by the expanding middle classes represented by the miller, the merchant and the cook. He also idealized a more moral past symbolized by the parson and the ploughman, representatives of a precommercial world before the rise of entrepreneurs like the reeve and the onset of clerical corruption. However, as a narrator of love stories, he is more nostalgic than Dante the religious convert, and he does not show the same detachment in his depiction of the states of mind of Troilus and Criseyde (despite his persona as an objective historian of Troy, faithfully recording the testimony of his made-up Latin source, Lollius, perhaps a code word for Boccaccio). Because he does not have the same confidence in the spiritual outcome of Troilus’s pilgrimage, he lingers nostalgically in the past, in the time when his hero is happily in love. He intervenes in the narrative at the point when the lovers are united and happy in an attempt to make time stand still, just before the downward trajectory of Fortune’s wheel: O blissful night by them so long sought How kind to both of them you were… Away thou foul disdain and thou fear, And let them in this heavenly bliss dwell.109 Without a firm belief in an afterlife and a heavenly reward for constancy and faith, writers in England after Chaucer were just left with a sense of pain and longing and this was given heartfelt expression in the ballads of Charles of Orleans, the duke of Gloucester’s 287

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bette noire. Charles was probably fluent in Italian: his mother Valentina Visconti was the daughter of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the first duke of Milan who entertained Dantean dreams of uniting Northern Italy. Her grandfather, Galeazzo II (d. 1378), was a patron of Petrarch and her great-uncle, Giovanni Visconti the archbishop of Milan (d. 1354), had been a student of The Divine Comedy. She was born and grew up in Milan until her marriage to Louis of Orleans at the age of eighteen. Exiled from the Paris court when Charles was seventeen months old she took her infant son to the country in Asnieres where he would spent the next eleven years of a happy childhood with her. Valentina was cultivated: her fellow Italian exile and disciple of Dante, Christine de Pisan dedicated to her Le Livre de la Prod’homie and included her in The City of Ladies.110 It is therefore quite likely that Charles read The Divine Comedy and he certainly drew on the same sources as Dante: he took back with him to France three copies each of The Consolations of Philosophy and Virgil’s Aeneid. Before his capture, he had been part of a circle of scholars and secretaries associated with his uncle King Charles VI and the duke of Berry who spent time at Avignon, where French and Italian humanists gathered, where the classics were read and Dante was a topic of discussion. The Divine Comedy does seem to have been at least in the background of Charles’s mind, and there are parallels between the poem and the ballads of duke of Orleans.111 Charles too wrote in exile, longing for home. In 1433, during the Anglo-French peace negotiations, he was brought to the coast of Dover which inspired him to write: ‘When looking towards the country of France I happened one day at Dover on the sea to remember the sweet pleasure that I used to find in that country. I began to sigh deeply.’ He too had lost his childhood sweetheart, Isabella of Valois, the widow of Richard II who died in the same Pontefract prison that for a time housed Charles of Orleans. Isabella, born on 9 November 1389, died in childbirth (possibly the same fate as Dante’s Beatrice) towards the end of her nineteenth year in 1409; the numerical significance of the number nine and its applicability to both Isabella and Beatrice in the Vita Nuova may not have escaped Charles. He was also betrothed to another, Bonne of Armagnac in 1410, in an arranged marriage. Bonne died while her husband was in captivity, and he continued to be obsessed with Isabella and wrote about his grief, his longing for death. Influenced by Chaucer’s depiction of a grieving widow in the Book of the Duchess he translated: ‘For I am sorrow and sorrow is me’ into ‘For every sorrow is I and I am he / For every joy in me is gone away.’112 He prayed for death in a forest of melancholy so that he could obliterate himself and be buried beside Isabella.113 Although there are parallels with Dante’s ostentatious displays of grief in Vita Nuova, it is in his perpetual melancholy state of mind that Charles deviates most from Dante’s ascent to Beatrice and the stars. For twenty-five years Orleans inhabited an underworld of prisons, often in solitary confinement with no hope or expectation of salvation. Since the death of his father, which spelled the onset of his exile from a happy childhood and which was accompanied the following year by the death of his mother at the age of thirty-seven he wore black and adopted the persona of a melancholic: he wrote ‘in black mourning is clothed my heart’, uttering such sentiments as ‘What is this life or death I lead. Nay certainly the likeness of death’,114 and he admitted that this was a splenetic illness. In 1458, long after his release he wrote in his one prose work of his desire for death and 288

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his wish that he had been killed at Agincourt. His was a family malady. Charles’s mother, Valentina Visconti, never recovered from her husband’s death and died the following year on the way to Tours fleeing Paris and calling on her son on her deathbed to avenge his father’s murder. She adopted the emblem of a chantepleure (tearsong) in the form of a watering pot between the initials ‘S’ for soucy and soupir (sorrow and grief) with the palindromic device: ‘Rien ne m’est plus, plus ne m’est rien’ (There is nothing more for me), which decorated her every room after the assassination of her husband and which also, in the form of a Latin motto Nil mihi praeterea, praeterea nihil mihi, covered the walls of the chapel where she was buried. Her son, Charles, adopted the motto and the chantepleure device.115 He seems to have been at the centre of a cult of melancholy. The brothers Sir Robert and Sir Richard Roos were associated with his release and Robert, and probably Richard, accompanied him to Burgundy in 1440. Richard, in his poetry, adopted some of the melancholic poses of Charles, promising ‘never to laugh no more but to weep in clothes black’, declaring that he had fallen into disease and sickness, and like Charles he employed prison imagery to express his conviction that the self is a prison, from which the only escape is love. For Orleans also prison was more than a stone castle: his memories and obsessions plunged him deep into a Daedalus-like labyrinth where to live is to suffer pain. He was an introvert who, unlike Dante, was never able to transcend his egotism: everything in the universe was a figment of his own persona.116 Spending much of his years of imprisonment in solitary confinement, he saw himself as an anchorite in love with the prison of the self: he expressed his longing for the evening when he can be lodged in the hostelry of his thoughts,117 but he had a very secular perspective on the eremitic values that dominated the religion of courtiers in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and he condemned himself as a ‘silly anchorite that the self enclosed art’, pursuing a secular version of the recluse’s life that involved melancholic introspection, and a retreat from an emotional life making connections with other people, not for the sake of a close relationship with God, as the fourteenth century English mystics espoused, but with the self, a solitary, individualistic life with no religious benefits. The melancholy April shroud and the dull ache of nostalgia and bereavement settled most persistently on the household of Sir John Fastolf in a way that mirrored the national mood after the death of Henry V. Fastolf ’s stepson, Stephen Scrope esq., was a brooding Hamlet in this household. He was attached to his mother, Millicent, and resented her remarriage to his stepfather Fastolf; he had his own room in Caister, and William Worcester, who also had a complicated relationship with Fastolf, expressed in his correspondence his frustration at Scrope’s unworldliness and disinterest in estate management, warning John Paston I to be wary of his melancholic, unpredictable personality: ‘You have need fare caution with him, for he is very disdainful and headstrong.’118 In the litigious, pragmatic world of the Pastons, who were preoccupied with lands and rents, Scrope was an anachronistic anomaly with his pride and nostalgic attachment to his lineage, the Azure bend Or, and the memory of his father, Sir Stephen Scrope, who died in 1408 leaving him the sword of Edward III. Stephen addressed a series of complaints to his stepfather, about his unhappy childhood and his being separated 289

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from his mother and sent to the household of Chief Justice Gascoigne in Yorkshire to complete his education, to which he attributed his disfiguring and chronic ill health and his bouts of depression. His Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers was intended for Fastolf ’s ‘contemplation and solace’, to help the reader apply his reading of philosophical maxims to achieve self-mastery and overcome the vagaries of Fortune. Scrope’s melancholy, like Hamlet’s, was perhaps influenced by growing religious doubts that separated him, in his enthusiasm for the philosophy of antiquity, from his immediate ancestors, the Scropes of Masham, who were patrons of hermits and anchorites and readers of the works of Richard Rolle the hermit of Hampole.119 Instead, in his melancholy, he turned to the myths of Greece for consolation and like Hamlet he used them to express his resentment at his mother, Millicent’s remarriage to his stepfather Fastolf, who took a life interest in all Millicent’s estate, contrary to the agreement made by Stephen’s father, Sir Stephen, in 1390 that all his estates should revert after his decease to his eldest son, Stephen. Scrope would offer a mirror image of his situation in his Epistle of Othea, in the jealous attempts of Queen Ino, second wife of King Athamas, to disinherit her stepchildren Phrixius and Helle and have them exiled, and the consequent punishment of the couple by the Goddess Hera who drove the king mad so that in a frenzy he attacked his wife who threw herself into the sea.120 Stephen, like Hamlet would do, ineffectually identified with Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, warning Fastolf the recipient of the letter containing complaints about his childhood upbringing 121 that if he has wronged a father, to beware of the son when like Pyrrhus he comes of age.122 Millicent’s remarriage to Stephen’s stepfather had been witnessed by James Botiller, 4th earl of Ormonde (d. 1452), who served Thomas of Lancaster in Ireland along with Sir Stephen Scrope (the posthumously wronged father), and he may have related stories about Stephen and Fastolf to his own son, the 6th earl of Ormonde, who died aged ninety-one in 1515, a plausible line of transmission to Shakespeare of these two possible inspirations for Hamlet and Sir John Falstaff. A growing melancholy also seeped into the household of Scrope’s charismatic stepfather as he approached old age and death, and this paralleled the pervading mood in court circles and indeed the nation at large, following the premature death of Henry V. In both cases it involved a sense of grief and nostalgia over an absent, authoritative father figure. Fastolf, like Henry V, had been associated with the conquest of Northern France, and the communal life of the households he owned in the Boar’s Head Inn in Southwark and at Caister in Norfolk was regaled with stories and reminiscences of his campaigns, such as those that enlivened Worcester’s Book of Nobility. From 1448 a wall hanging of a tapestry in Fastolf ’s winter hall at Caister depicted the siege of Falaise, with Fastolf seated on a red chair.123 Echoes of Fastolf ’s lectures to young charges at his tables in Rouen, Southward and Caister, can be heard in Worcester’s marginal reminiscences of his conversation; one note begins: ‘I have heard my author Fastolf say, when he had young knights and nobles at his pleasure,’ and records Fastolf ’s definition of courage, a distinction between the ‘hardy man’ who sacrifices his soldiers for the sake of a great adventure and the ‘manly man’ who always has a strategy before he advances and discreetly ensures he has the advantage over his adversary and saves himself and his soldiers.124 In another note he records his account of the defence of Harfleur: ‘And as 290

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for watch and sentinel on winter nights I heard the said Sir John Fastolf say that every man keeping the guard had a mastiff hound on a lease, to bark and warn if any of the opposing side were coming to the dykes or approaching the town to scale it.’125 However, as Fastolf approached a querulous old age, choler gave way to black bile or melancholy; as he put it: ‘My soul is vexed and pained in agreement with holy Job.’ His confessor, Friar Brackley, in a letter to John Paston in October/November 1459 wrote: ‘He draws fast homeward and is brought right low and somewhat weakened and enfeebled.’126 He was now dependent on his team of lawyers, especially John Paston, to satisfy the anxious worries of a childless old man, fretting over his properties and his provisions for servants, and tensions arose between the lawyers and his loyal accountant and medical adviser, Worcester, that increased after Fastolf ’s death as John Paston, one of the thirteen executors, though the sole administrator with Thomas Howes, ignored the terms of the will by neglecting to follow his client’s wishes: he failed to establish a chantry college at Caister of seven priests and seven paupers, and instead he claimed to be the recipient of a nuncupative will dictated to him alone on 3 November giving him sole ownership of Caister and the Norfolk estates; he subsequently failed to reward members of the household and servants, prompting Worcester to exclaim: ‘O monstrous and wretched infamy that the newcomer should force the old inhabitants to plough.’127 Worcester worked tirelessly after his master’s death trying to fulfil his wishes by rewarding servants and making provisions for Sir John’s soul in the face of the chicanery of the Pastons (who were not uncultivated: John Paston II owned many of the works that constituted the combative reactions to The Divine Comedy including copies of Troilus and Criseyde, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, The Parliament of Fowls, The Epistle of Othea and Cicero’s On Friendship).128 The real source of melancholy for Worcester who had translated Cicero’s treatise on friendship for his master was an awareness of the disintegration of relationships: in a letter of 1460 to another opponent of the nuncupative will, Worcester summoned Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero on friendship to comment: ‘A true friend in need experience will prove indeed thanking you for old and continuous friendship steadfastly grounded.’129 The parallels with the period after the death of Henry V death are clear, with arguments over a will and the surfacing of personal animosities in the power vacuum. Fastolf, like Hal prince of Wales, seemed to represent a happier time, described by Worcester in his Book of Nobility as a golden age when men of the calibre of Henry V and Henry, the first duke of Lancaster, were valued above gold, silver and all precious stones.130 It is appropriate that one of the most nostalgic episodes in English literature recalls this time. Shakespeare, working in Southwark, in that part of London once owned by Falstaff, seems to have heard stories about this legendary figure, possibly though the ninety-one-year-old earl of Ormond, whose son served Thomas of Lancaster and Henry V,131 stories about Fastolf ’s pragmatic attitude to war; his strategic retreat at Patay in 1425; his maintenance of a quasi-military household, where he entertained the young with military history, anecdotes and pithy wisdom, and out of this material Shakespeare created the comic character of Sir John Falstaff (a sixteenth century transcription of Sir John Fastolf), who considered ‘discretion to be the better part of valour’, who regaled an 291

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unruly household of younger followers at the Boar’s Head Inn (the site of Fastolf ’s Inn) which included Prince Hal and possibly John Lydgate, who during his long life may have occupied a Poins-like role for the dissolute prince. The even longer-lived bookseller and scribe, John Shirley, who died in 1456 aged ninety, testified to Lydgate’s connections to the Prince of Wales.132 Lydgate may have made the acquaintance of the Prince of Wales, while he was in residence at Queens in 1398, and Edmund Lacy, the master of University College who became the dean of the royal chapel, Windsor 1414–17, and commissioned from him liturgical works.133 Shakespeare depicts Falstaff dying while drinking sack, deserted by many of his friends, in the same way that Fastolf died more or less alone, drinking wine. Henry IV Parts One and Two evoke an idealized ‘merrie England’ a time of military success and camaraderie, when Hal and his surrogate father, Falstaff, caroused to the ‘chimes at midnight’, before the frosts of the evolving Lancastrian state set in, capturing the sort of melancholic nostalgia that Dante understood so well in his affection for his own surrogate father figure, his crusading ancestor Cacciaguida whom, despite being filled with holy love in Heaven, he imagined greeting him so warmly: O my branch, in whom I have been well pleased even while waiting, I was your root.134 The melancholy cloud in this circle seems to have settled most densely over William Worcester. Members of the Pastor affinity expressed their frustration over his stubborn, sentimental loyalty towards his dead master. William Paston wrote to his brother, John, in 1459: ‘I understand by him he will never have an other master but his old master – considering – the long years he has been with him, and many cursed journeys for his sake.’135 Friar Brackley, a servant of John Paston, responded to Worcester’s accusations of greed by describing him as ‘a swarthy, black, one eyed Irishman, an unpredictable, bad tempered and unstable wretch, full of spite’, and he warned John Paston to ‘beware of those marked by a natural disposition’;136 in other words Brackley saw Worcester as a melancholic malcontent, his dark skin a mark of special, melancholic wisdom in the manner of Dante’s face, believed to have been scorched by the fires of Hell. This was a self-image that Worcester adopted: he wrote to John Berney esq. in January 1460, referring to the heaviness of his spirit in attempting to carry out his master’s wishes and he vented his misery: ‘All my adversity, troubles in my soul and thoughts, and the heaviness I sustain’, closing the letter with his personal sign of Saturn, formed by the letter ‘H’, adapted to form the sickle, the astrological sign of Saturn, and ‘R’ to form Hibernia (his country of origin).137 Worcester would ascertain the position of Saturn before setting out on a journey, and his obsession with maps and measurements (he paced and measured distances between places and dimensions of churches) conforms to Durer’s depiction of the dark-faced melancholic surrounded by rulers and compasses. In his 1473 corrected copy of Stephen Scrope’s translation of the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers138 he annotated sayings relevant to his melancholy and persistent grief. The aphorism attributed to Plato: – ‘Heaviness is a passion touching things passed and sorrow is a fear of things to come’ – is followed by his signature Botoner,139 and reflecting on the tragedy of Fastolf, he wrote against the dict: ‘That one should not 292

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make great buildings which others will inherit’: ‘for John Fastolf ’,140 and alongside: ‘when old people exert force to keep their riches they be accursed because after their death they had rather it go to their enemies than to surrender control to their friends’, he added: ‘with passion spent J. Fastolf ’.141 Worcester, loyal like Forese’s Nella, had none of the consolations of Dante’s convictions concerning the perpetuation of the relationships between the living and the dead, focused on penitents’ progression up the terraces of Purgatory. Without these religious consolations, Worcester confronted the tragedy of a warrior who, though his dinners were not up to much, had always served the common weal, dying without heirs, his plans for a perpetual chantry college abandoned, betrayed by his friends and counsel in a harsh new world of the Pastons: managerial, legalistic and unsentimental. And yet Worcester remained sentimental, poetical and nostalgic as he touchingly took charge of Fastolf ’s pet white owl and listened to it ‘crying wonderfully’ in the Caister churchyard, and as he observed it flying around his horse’s hooves.142 During his subsequent peregrinations around England he stopped at Tavistock church in Devon to record a line of poetry he saw while probably thinking of Fastolf: ‘amat ergo timet / Est amor ergo timor’ (One loves therefore one fears. To love is therefore to fear).143 Such a bleak, syllogistic assessments of love take us into a sceptical world far removed from Dante’s.

The age of doubt The melancholy doubt and depression that potentially affected intellectuals contemplating a universe stripped of all the transcendental beauty that Dante saw may have, to some extent, been alleviated by the exercise of intellectual enquiry, the curious investigation into nature, into the physical and social world that was also at the root of their angst. Dante certainly implies that this sort of consolation was available to those without faith, in his description of the collegiate life of the inhabitants of Limbo. Worcester spent the years after Fastolf ’s death studying and reading for its therapeutic benefits, as he travelled the country, taking notes from his favourite classical texts, collecting medical recipes and obsessively measuring the dimensions of churches and noting heraldic details; he confessed that much of this activity was his way of coping with his constitutional Saturnian melancholia. In the absence of any strong convictions about love, justice or a life in the otherworld of Heaven, consolations could be found in the absorption in the affairs of this world. Chaucer’s guide into the house of tidings, the Dantean eagle, observed that his interest in tidings – the gossip and chatter of ordinary folk – would help him to avoid the depression that accompanied the contemplation of Fortune’s work: But since that Jove of his grace, As I have said would you solace, Finally with all these things, Unfamiliar sights and tidings, To free you of your heaviness – 293

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Such pity has he of your distress Which you suffer graciously – Knowing yourself utterly despairing of every bliss.144 Consolation could also be found in writing, in producing art that could at least hold up the mirror to this flawed world of nature, even if it could not justify the ways of God to men in the way that Dante’s poem could do. Charles of Orleans confessed that he wrote poetry in prison to stave off his constitutional melancholy. Hoccleve, in a dialogue with a friend, claims that he was undertaking the translation of Henry Suso’s Book of Dying to prevent a return of his depressive madness. He describes the act of translating from one language to another as an alchemical process, a way of freeing oneself, getting away from the old self, an act of self-renewal, or in alchemical terms, transmutation: And although my body’s guilty, foul and unclean To cleanse it somewhat by transmutation Shall be my occupation.145 Even the acts of reading and study could serve to stave off melancholy reflections on time and Fortune. Lydgate describes Duke Humfrey in the prologue to The Fall of Princes in this way: And he has a great joy with scholars to commune And no man is more expert in language, Stable in study he always does continue, Setting aside all changes of Fortune.146 Sir John Fastolf supervised the illumination in Rouen in the 1420s of one of his manuscripts to facilitate understanding of the text (as Gloucester would do with The Book of Husbandry), a copy of the French original of Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea (subsequently translated by Stephen Scrope). One illustration shows Temperance standing on a windmill mastering passions and moods,147 an illustration of the way close engagement with a text could help to overcome mental instability. The act of creating a work of art was in itself seen as an act of defiance against nature’s laws. Chaucer commented on the difference between the transience of life and the permanence of art, adapting the aphorism of Seneca Ars longa, vita brevis to ‘The life so short, the craft so long to learn’.148 Lydgate describes Boccaccio in his study confronting a monstrous goddess Fortune, which is like a meeting with the Devil: ‘her burning eyes sparkling as do stars on a winter’s night’; she is as coldly indifferent as nature. The scholar, in his study, stoutly asserts that his book was created in defiance of her destructive power over men and their empires: ‘Thy mutability hath destroyed many a man.’149 He writes, he says, for the benefit of his mental health, to overcome such

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vices as sloth and gluttony, and to search for stability and immutability in art, which he describes in the prologue to the fourth book of The Fall of Princes, as the fruit of a tree of life that is not affected by the seasons and which gladdens the heart: ‘to their plesaunce the chief comfort’.150 In art at least, he is able to imagine the sort of permanent beauty found in Dante’s Earthly Paradise at the top of Purgatory. The act of writing, rhetoric and poetry, is defended in The Fall of Princes as a way of confronting Fortune with the same human creativity that produced fair cities and works of art in music, all preserving the deeds of the great and the thoughts of the philosophers and defying the destructive forces of nature and time:151 After the sharpness of thy cruel rage Only by means of speech and fair language, Will folk, who by thy deceitfulness are from grace far exiled, be through fair speech be united and reconciled. People of Greece, Rome and of Carthage and in Italy within many a region, Were induced by the sweetness of language To come together in conversation To build castles and many a royal town. What caused this? -to tell in brief the outline, Nothing but eloquence which causes rude people to reform.152 Fortune and nature are defied by civilization, and the notion of fame, achieved through art, is another way of defining oneself outside the strictures of time and mortality. Humfrey duke of Gloucester, in his letter to Decembrini acknowledging his translation of the Republic, expressed his conviction that Plato has taught him that the only true form of immortality and glory is that attained through art: ‘You have chosen a noble and worthy practice which cannot be taken from you by any siege not lost by any forgetfulness, that is if what the wisest men say be true and glory is indeed immortal.’153 Hoccleve too expressed his fear that his life was like a ship cleaving through waters, leaving no trace behind, or a bird known only for the beauty of its wings, cutting through the air but, like an arrow, leaving no evidence of its flight.154 The preoccupation of the creative person with posterity is a typical Renaissance conceit, expressed by da Vinci’s dictum: ‘Nothing is more fleeting than the years of man – what is the point of passing through the earth unnoticed. Man who does not become famous is no more than woodsmoke in the wind or foam on the sea. But I intend to leave a memory of myself.’155 These words were originally spoken by Virgil to the pilgrim as he exhorts him to hurry out of the sixth bolgia of the hypocrites: For one does not gain fame sitting on down cushions, or while under coverlets; and whoever consumes his life without fame

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leaves a mark of himself on earth like smoke in the air or foam in water,156 and Dante was shown by his teacher Brunetto how to defeat death through writing, in this case his encyclopaedia Tesoro: Let my Treasure be commended to you, in which I live still.157 Writing for Dante was about the survival of the ego, the I. Cacciaguida, encouraged him to recall the forgotten names of Florence and to be prepared to pay the price for making enemies with his poem for the sake of posterity to compensate for the pain and injustice of his exile: The cry of blame will follow the party harmed, as usual, but the vengeance will testify to the truth that will dispense it.158 It is a price he is prepared to pay otherwise: I fear I will lose life among those who will call this time Ancient,159 and he confesses to his ancestor: ‘You lift me up so high that I am more than myself.’160 Not for Dante the oblivion sought by such readers of The Fall of Princes as Greenacre. On the terrace of pride Dante makes it clear, in response to Oderisi’s rhetorical question concerning the relevance of one’s fame in a thousand years’ time that his pride exists for a good reason, to ensure he will be known as a rival to Arachne who challenges the art of God. He aspired to the sort of fame enjoyed by Virgil, greeted by Beatrice as ‘one whose fame still lasts in the world and will last as far as the world will go’.161 Ironically the work of art that exposed the flaws and limitations of the natural world, and the faith of the writers that reflected this world, could serve as a source of aesthetic consolation, and all the writers in the period between 1350 and 1470 showed, either in a direct encounter or through hearsay, a reverence for the artistry of The Divine Comedy; one response to the awareness of the mutability of all things was to seek consolation in art. Dante had demonstrated his own reverence for art in the carved representation of the humility of the Virgin on the terrace of pride in Purgatory: And in her bearing was stamped this speech: ‘‘Ecce ancilla Dei’, exactly as a figure is sealed in wax.162 296

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Just as Beatrice’s inner virtue was stamped on the wax of her body (the form’s manifestation in the flesh, so different from Plato’s doctrine of the immateriality of the forms) so the Virgin’s humility was stamped in a work of art to remain in the pilgrim’s imagination. In the same way Dante hoped the beauty of his sacred poem would imprint on the wax of his readers’ souls. The writers of the period between 1370 and 1450 may not have shared Dante’s political, scientific, theological and romantic assumptions, but they did appreciate the aesthetics of his art. Dante gives a view of a universe that is intricately organized and harmonious with an intellectual beauty that is reflected in the composition of his poem, with its threefold Trinitarian structure of pearl-like tercets of thirty-three syllables and numerical intricacies of the number nine.163 Nowhere is this replication of the divine artistry and love behind the creation of the universe in a work of art more evident than when the pilgrim pauses, with foot on the stairway, at the point when Virgil is halfway through his exposition on love (seen as the downward falling light that has facilitated the pilgrim’s progress up the seventh corniche of Purgatory), at the moment when the last rays of the sun are falling, marking the division between day and night. This pause occurs in the centre of the canto and the poem, in the seventieth line of the seventeenth canto: number, light, motion and love, nature and art are all interrelated.164 Fifteenth century readers may not have readily perceived this harmony in the natural world, but they were able to appreciate it in a carefully crafted work of art. The art of the period 1370–1450, the product of those who challenged Dante’s religious convictions, inevitably reflected their more realistic, sceptical and nationalistic attitudes. Plato in the Republic expressed the conviction that art, in the form of the shadows on the cave, is unreal, bewitching, and therefore devoid of goodness, and fifteenth century writers certainly attempted to be true to the natural world around them. In a writer such as Lydgate, who lacks the craft and control of Dante who imposes on the universe the form and symmetry of his art, there is a sense that his art, if it can be called that, merely holds the mirror to changeable nature. There is no clockwork precision in his work because it is formless and chaotic like nature itself: he reflects this chaos as someone like Eliot’s fisher king who has ‘shored fragments against his ruin’.165 Dante cannot be considered a forerunner of the Renaissance; the gap between him and Boccaccio, Chaucer and Lydgate was considerable, and although he may have had little in common with the values of the modern scientific age his art, which with its complexity, harmony, symmetry and patterned beauty challenges nature, inspired the admiration of artists of the early English Renaissance, and in the modern age he is more highly regarded than any other writer of the late medieval and Renaissance period, including Shakespeare, because of the aesthetics of his art, his creation of a world that operates on its own principles, beyond that of the natural world. The Divine Comedy upholds a view of nature and time that is beguiling and it served as an antidote to doubt and melancholy because it contradicted science. Fifteenth century science and alchemy, and Greek philosophy and myths, articulated a concept of neverending nature, emerging along with consciousness, from a nigredo, a black void (like the black holes in the universe from which matter has evolved). Dante saw creation operating 297

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on the same principles as those employed by a creative artist like himself, whose work of art operates on different principles and imposes on a disordered chaotic universe an order: for Dante the universe and time unfold like a book. Amid the prophecies of the end of the world, with such signs as the departure of the popes from Rome, the unholy alliance of the whore of Babylon (Boniface VIII or Clement V) with the giant (Philip the Fair king of France) and the invasion of Italy in 1301 by Charles of Valois, he describes, on the top of the mountain of Purgatory, a vertical procession from Heaven down to Eden, with Beatrice in the chariot of the sun, rising from the East, a chariot of time representing the church pulled by the griffon (Christ) and accompanied by the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. This procession turns eastwards again, homewards to Heaven following the same route as the poem itself, a liturgical procession which, with its candelabra of light, may have been inspired by funeral processions bearing large wax candles, taking light into the apparent darkness of death and the tomb to accompany the dead into the realm of light.166 When Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti’s tomb lid shuts time ends, like a story with the closing of a book, and then there will be nothing but the opposite of this dark void, and the never-ending, endlessly changing nature, and that is pure light and endless joy. Dante’s metaphor for the universe as he looks into the light of the Empyrean, the eye of God the creative artist, is the scattered quires of God’s great book, a sacred volume like his own poem, revolving around the earth, like the turning of the spindle of a scroll, or the turning of leaves of a volume, bounded together by love: Oh overflowing grace whence I presumed to probe with my eyes the eternal Light, so deeply that I fulfilled all my seeing there! In its depths I saw internalized, bound with love in one volume, what through the universe becomes unsewn quires.167 The dispersal of its leaves throughout the universe is an image of dissolution, which is the fate of God’s book when its linearity is dispersed by analysis and exegesis to reveal the anagogical understanding of its hidden treasure, but this image of the scattered leaves also expresses the futile attempt of the pilgrim to remember and articulate his vision of what was fused together as a single light, a knot, as it descends into the realm of time to be communicated in Dante’s own book which takes his followers along a path of memory, desire and longing to the point at the end of time when God’s book, in which life has all the beauty, symmetry and purpose of great art, will close.

Without love there is no judgment At the heart of Saturnian melancholy there is a weakening of a belief in the afterlife, and it is over this issue that we can see the real collision between two worlds. Dante, for all his dwelling on the past and his griefs, inhabited a universe cocooned by a love woven into his faith, a love conceived in terms of different forms of parental affection, whether 298

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from Virgil, Beatrice, Matelda, or Cacciaguida, and which ultimately derived from God, and which enabled him to forge a navigable pathway for his life’s linear pilgrimage from exile and separation to a reunion with all his loved ones in his heavenly home. However, the melancholy of the chantepleure presented a more secular perspective, where the oxymoronic movement from sadness to joy was merely circular, a condition of life, nature and consciousness, in a world where there are no loving boundaries, no linear progression into the affectionate embrace of the divine light. The cult of melancholy, of the chantepleure in the fifteenth century, was a response to the growing awareness that there was no belonging to something above the passions, just the endless movement to and fro of opposing feelings, and instead of a binary resolution through faith there was a recourse to an acceptance of melancholic, joyful sorrow, made bearable through song, a stoic response to Fortune influenced by a reading of Boethius and the writings of antiquity. The attempt to inhabit a stoic middle ground between strong feelings was summed up by Charles of Orleans: ‘Neither good nor evil but in between’.168 This is how Purgatory was beginning to be conceived in the fifteenth century, the void between the extremes of sadness and joy, Hell and Heaven, a form of nothingness expressed in the motto of Charles and his mother, ‘There is nothing more for me.’ Now the word ‘Purgatory’ has exclusively come to mean this sense of a numbed nonexistence between the extremes of experience, all of which is far removed from Dante’s original conception of Purgatory as the unwinding of compulsions in a purposeful pilgrimage home. Purgatorial purgation and progression depends on the confident certainty of judgement, a propensity on Dante’s part that Boccaccio and Chaucer satirized. Chaucer, as we have seen, never judges his characters, thereby depriving them of any sort of penitential progress. The mountain of Purgatory is a beguiling but unattainable presence in the sung complaint of the betrayed and forsaken Anelida169 (where the roles of Troilus and Criseyde are reversed) and she begins her proud and bitter lament, addressed to God about her lover Arcite, in which, assuming knowledge of all Arcite’s feelings and intentions, she sees herself as pure, blameless and wronged, by alluding to a passage in Dante’s Purgatorio. Virgil had told the pilgrim to turn your eyes downward: it will be good for you,170 to contemplate at his feet the mortuary slabs with carved representations of pride and humility, and the pilgrim reflects: So that often we weep again because of the pricking of memory.171 However the song of Anelida, which echoes the remorseful reveries of Dante’s pilgrim, has no such humility: So pierces with the point of remembrance The sword of sorrow, whet with false plesaunce.172 299

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She accepts a fate of oscillating emotions in which there is no progress and after reflecting: I fare as doth the song of chantepleure.173 She closes her lament with the same paraphrase from Purgatorio: So sing I here of my destiny or chance, How that Arcite Anelida so sore Hath pierced with the point of remembrance.174 However, she is oblivious to the penitential message delivered by Dante’s: O ‘human race, born to fly upward, why do you fall at so little wind.175 Anelida has been felled by a little breeze, elevating her disappointment in love to a theological level, while Dante the pilgrim undergoes a healing process of letting go, an unwinding of his compulsions and pride as he makes his circular but purposeful ascent up the mountain. Anelida however is stuck within the circles of the chantepleure; her refusal to let go of her pride, the intensity of her emotions and lack of perspective mean she inhabits the Hell that suffers fair Anelida, the queen, for false Arcite,176 and that at the very least she will inhabit a purgatory that conforms to the late fourteenth century concept where there is nothing but emotional stasis. However the seeds of this conflict between two very different perceptions of reality were already there in Dante’s Florence, and the last word on this collision should rest with the rift in the friendship between Dante and Guido Cavalcanti. The most haunting encounter in the entire poem occurs between Dante the pilgrim and Guido’s father, Cavalcante, among the tombs of the Epicurean mortalists who deny the immortality of the soul. Here the liminal boundary between the living and dead seems most lucent and the very foundations of this complex poem are shaken, exposing its fragile beauty and highlighting a collision between two worlds in the intellectual rift between two close friends that anticipates what would happen after 1370. The father’s fretful enquiry about the whereabouts of his talented son invokes Guido’s spectral presence among the tombs. He and Dante are the only living presences in the entire worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven (although in April Guido’s life hangs by a thread as he will be exiled in the following month of May and he will be dead by August). He represented a threat to Dante: the materialism of lyrics such as Donna me prega undermine the otherworldly 300

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fiction of the poem and the vision of heavenly transcendence through Beatrice.177 And so such poetry is dismissed in Purgatorio xi as the pilgrim boasts that he is the one born to drive Guido from his nest, and Guido is indirectly judged and condemned to inhabit the sepulchres of the Epicurean mortalists with his father through the invocation of his name in the sixth circle. But the issue is not so simple. Dante’s nerve has failed him in this poignant canto. The poet, who has judged hundreds to eternal damnation, purgatorial suffering and salvation, cannot unequivocally judge Guido: the issue of his salvation or damnation haunts him, and he is unwilling to locate his friend in Hell or Purgatory and even to acknowledge his death (he was writing canto x between 1307 and 1308, and so Guido is nowhere and everywhere, a ghostly presence that haunts the entire poem.178 Boccaccio, writing the Decameron forty years later, appears to locate Guido in Florence at the time Dante was meeting his father, witnessing the eschatological Easter processions, victory celebrations for the city from which he remained detached and aloof.179 Guido anticipated the so-called Renaissance melancholic with his Aristotelian, empirical investigations into the nature of things. He was a charismatic Hamlet, described by Boccaccio as an accomplished lay philosopher, and withal a most engaging, eloquent and affable gentleman, easily first in whatever he undertook and in all that befitted his rank. But for Boccaccio (whose own doubts about Dante’s confident expectations of an afterlife were expressed in his biography of the poet when he warned: ‘Let life be dear to you and try to prolong it as long as you can’), Guido’s noble and most sovereign reason was out of tune and harsh with scrupulous doubt, so that he became lost in abstract speculation and became more distanced from mankind. Giovanni Villani, the Florentine chronicler, wrote of his fastidious, sensitive and choleric temperament: ‘choler which would have turned into melancholy bile if he had lived longer’.180 His conflicted personality was summed up by Boccaccio in his anecdote of his encounter with Florentine noblemen who, caring little that he was one of the best logicians in the world and an excellent natural philosopher, taunted him in the cemetery of San Giovanni Baptistry about his haughty isolation and his attempts to prove the non-existence of God. Guido had been making his way to the baptistry, believed to be built on the foundations of the Roman temple to Mars, from the Orsanmichele, a loggia on the site of a demolished Cistercian church containing an image of the blessed Madonna opposite the Cavalcanti family home in the centre of the city. He was riding between the two poles of his life, from his idealized woman, to whom he had written a sonnet, Una figure della Donna mia, in which he had reversed the Madonna to mia donna, his beloved, towards the choler of Mars, his dark star.181 As he heads towards the baptistry of San Giovanni through the Roman sarcophogi of the Piazza San Giovanni, Boccaccio evokes the sepulchres in the circle of the heretics. When Guido is taunted by the celebrating revellers for his atheistic views Boccaccio was having a playful dig at Dante’s judgemental views. Like Chaucer, Boccaccio lacked Dante’s faith and convictions and his tendency to judge instead of doubting. By summoning Guido’s name in the sixth circle Dante risked identifying himself with the vulgar crowd who condemned Guido as an atheist because of the epicurean reputation that he was supposed to share with his father. Guido’s dignified aloofness would suggest Dante misjudged him, for he replies to 301

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the revellers that they can say whatever they like in their own home, which implies that he was aware of the Easter custom of rich noblemen gathering in one another’s houses before riding in the streets. Betto’s interpretation of Guido’s words that the celebrating noblemen, by comparison with himself and other men of learning, are uncouth and unlearned, and as such worse off than the dead inhabitants of their house,182 is well off the mark: Guido may have disassociated himself from the hedonism of the Epicureans, but he is showing the sort of prideful intellect revealed in his father’s admiration for his son’s genius and by the pilgrim himself. It is an intellect that propels him from the revellers towards the sort of intellectual speculation that he shared with the atheists of the sixth circle and caused the rift with his closest friend by entertaining doubts and scepticism which determined he saw himself destined to inhabit the same tomb as his father, the common destination of all of us. Unlike Betto, Boccaccio is aware of this. Following closely the numerical patterns of the cantos of The Divine Comedy by dividing the one hundred stories of the Decameron among ten narrators, he placed his novella featuring Guido and Dante’s ghost on the sixth day to echo the sixth circle of the heretics and emphasized the similarity between this sepulchre and the tombs on Guido’s favourite walk among the sarcophagi of Piazza San Renato. But he also locates the story in the ninth chapter. A suggestive joke about sexual congress may have been intended by the two Arabic numbers, but more importantly, the poignant touch Boccaccio adds to this tale of the melancholy scholar evading his fellow Florentine’s with a witty rebuke as he vaulted the tombs at the conclusion to the ninth chapter evokes the number nine183 associated with Beatrice and the prime mover – the number that would separate the once close friends, as it would ultimately separate Dante and his world from the early English Renaissance.

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Figure 12  Albrecht Durer Melencolia 1 Engraving 1514 (public domain).

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CHAPTER 9

TERRAM (THE EARTH): CONCLUSION AND THE AFTERLIFE OF THE DIVINE COMEDY

We were walking to the centre toward which all weight collects. – Dante, Inferno1 O you who have sound intellects, gaze on the teaching that is hidden beneath the veil of the strange verses. –Dante, Inferno2 The arrival of The Divine Comedy in England stimulated enthusiasm for the production and consumption of vernacular literature, and there was some common ground between Dante and his early Renaissance English followers in terms of a shared admiration for ancient Roman culture and society and the assimilation of Greek mythology, via Latin literature, into intellectual and spiritual life. Dante’s adventurous intellectual curiosity, his fascination with processes of metamorphosis in nature, would resonate with readers of Ovid and fifteenth century practitioners of alchemy, and his nostalgic attitude towards the past would find a receptive audience. However, in most respects the gap between latefourteenth century and early-fifteenth century England and Dante’s world was profoundly wide. The Roman Emperor rather than Greek philosophy was Dante’s source of political authority, and the heavens were for him a physical reality rather than a metaphysical abstraction. Despite his scientific leanings and restless curiosity he, unlike his fifteenth century followers, chose to live within borders that were physical and intellectual, and nature, instead of being a powerful omnipotent force to be investigated on its own terms, was seen to be subservient to the will and designs of God. Fortune too, which loomed so large in the imagination of fifteenth century intellectuals, robbing individual lives and the concept of history of any sense of destiny, was merely a beneficent servant of God. Women, who Dante idealized as sources of intellectual and spiritual inspiration and as guides to the heavens, were subjected in the early English Renaissance to the same cynical and forensic examination as all other aspects of the natural world. The most fundamental gap in the way Dante and his subsequent admirers perceived reality lay in their different conceptions of the afterlife. Dante’s faith in the empirical reality of the heavens, which could be literally felt in the sunlight and seen in the shining light of the eyes of a loved one, painfully jarred with the increasing scepticism about the existence of a Heaven of light after 1370: instead there would be abstract philosophical

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speculations on the forms. For Dante the forms were an empirical reality, equated with the angelic intelligences moving the heavens and manifested in the diaphanous medium of the eye: the forms of physical objects of visual perception, he believed, passed through the transparent medium of air until stopped by the physical barrier of water that constituted the pupil of the eye and were then carried by the optic nerve across the pupil and presented a second time to the front of the brain, the seat of sensation, to form images in the mind. These forms were equated with angelic intelligences moving the heavens;3 interestingly this concept of images cast upon the frontal lobe or wall of the brain does anticipate Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the images reflected on a wall are however unfavourably compared to abstract philosophical speculation on the forms. Abstract philosophical speculation and scientific enquiry into nature was accompanied by an acceptance of the limitations of a life of intellectual enquiry which adhered to the laws of science and nature, and a settled acceptance of the omnipotence of Fortune, the consolations of art and a posthumous reputation. Melancholy, or doubt, potentially affected intellectuals of the fifteenth century faced with contemplating a universe stripped of all the meaning and beauty seen by Dante. The reason why his ‘divine poem’ is so heartbreakingly beautiful is that in all its fundamental premises: the divine, imperial destiny of Rome; the centrality of the earth in the universe; the working of sacred justice and individual destiny through history; and above all in his conviction that every inhabitant of the next life retained their essence, the memory that dominates and orders their existence, whether it be Francesca’s passion for Paolo or Cavalcante’s search for his son, Dante’s convictions were being contradicted and in many cases proved wrong. English writers, in the period between 1370 and 1450 suggested that relationships could never be really permanent because everything is in a state of flux (Troilus and Criseyde being the most poignant example); they instead attempted to show that there was no justice, no permanence or stability in human emotions, whether of love or hate; no evidence for the constancy of the love and beauty of a woman, and they even implied there was no evidence for a firm faith in the afterlife, and natural science was suggesting there was no fixed centre to the universe, no one permanent point of reference. The awareness of constant movement in nature expressed in the literature of this period suggests that a more widespread acceptance of a heliocentric universe was not far away.

The pull of the earth and the lure of the heavens There was one fundamental issue separating Dante from the early English Renaissance which would also have implications for his reception in the modern age, and this was the conflict between the centripetal, gravitational pull of the earth’s centre, which dominated fifteenth century thought and the centrifugal pull for Dante of the heavenly lights. Dante’s point of reference, taken from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, was the heavens which seemed so tangible and near in The Divine Comedy, but the writers that followed him took from Scipio’s dream, which was diffused in many manuscripts, their point of reference to be the centre of the earth. As John Gower put it the earth, like a fixed foot of 306

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a compass, stands at the centre of creation and all things of the world desire to draw to the centre following the law of nature.4 This was the locus of Hell for Dante. The common weal rhetoric, the secular ideal of devotion to the state, shared by such readers of Cicero and Seneca in the fifteenth century as members of the circles of Plesaunce and Sir John Fastolf ’s Caister, and espoused in William Worcester’s Book of Nobility, and in Lydgate’s portraits of Marcus Regulus and Cato the younger in The Fall of Princes, envisaged a world where Fortune rules and God is very distant. To the latefourteenth- and early fifteenth century English intellectual there was no providential unfolding of destiny; men and their societies were on their own, answerable only to one another; it was the sort of high-minded morality that the Victorians held, fuelled by a similar enthusiasm for moral axioms and practical didactic literature of advice on matters of morality, and the reading of the works of Lydgate and the ancient Romans, and which was accompanied by the same feelings of doubt held by the Victorians. Worcester, lamenting the loss of the castles and towns of Northern France in 1449–50, maintained: ‘Alas we dolorous people, suffering intolerable persecution and misery in lost honour and livelihood, shall we continue in this dolour and heaviness,’ but he conceded that ‘the wheel of Fortune would not have turned against us like it did’ if the English nobility had adequately stocked these possessions and had been more devoted to the common weal and had asserted their free will against Fortune, as the Romans had done when they defeated Carthage.5 This amounts to an endorsement of Cicero’s claim that if man inhabiting the sphere of earth is ever to take the road to the skies, the abode of the eternal fires from which his soul is created, he must pursue his sense of duty to love and do justice to family, friends and his community, because nothing here on earth pleases the supreme God who rules the universe more than the assemblies and gatherings of men gathered together in justice, which is called the state.6 This was an outlook reinforced by fifteenth century practitioners of the science of alchemy, who believed that the divine mercury was located within the earth. Inevitably such an emphasis on the gravitational pull towards the intelligence within the earth’s core (in both social and geological terms) implies remoteness from the stellar universe of The Divine Comedy, where only once is the earth’s magnetism mentioned, when St Peter reminds the pilgrim that the mortal weight of his sleeping body will soon pull him down again.7 Dante, looking down from the realm of the fixed stars on the little threshing floor that is earth, is made aware of the insignificance of all wars and conflicts, but Lydgate, in The Fall of Princes, lacks this cosmic perspective and seems burdened by the scale and weight of earthly concerns, human history and suffering. The goddess Fortune mocks Boccaccio and Lydgate for the fidelity of their travail searching the skies, casting East, West, North and the meridian under the Arctic Pole, to see if any princes are raised to the skies, and she implies that many are destined to go under the pool of the Artic By my favour raised up to the stars Or else under the pool of the Antarctic Which by contrast so far from us is.8 307

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There was, for these writers, just a Southern Ocean beyond the equator, no mountain of Purgatory leading to the heavens, an ascent so easy for Dante’s pilgrim with God’s grace, that a simple word, Maria, or even its abbreviation, ‘Ma’ (but) uttered by Buonconte da Montefeltro, as he bled to death among the reeds and mud at the Battle of Campaldino, is teardrop enough to secure a passage up the mountain to Heaven.9 It was light that pulled Dante’s pilgrim away from the earth’s centre towards the stars. Dante, as a Tuscan, believed he was a Roman, and therefore a Trojan, and the Greek horse of abstract forms had not entered his mind. For him all knowledge, as Aristotle and Aquinas taught, was based on sense perception, and even abstract thought was accompanied by images.10 The forms, for Dante, were a tangible manifestation of love in the imprint made by Beatrice’s essence on the wax of his soul and in the light that entered his eyes from hers. For Plato, in the Republic, light is merely a symbol of the ultra-reality of goodness, which is an abstraction of the mind. Vision, through the medium of light, is just another form of illusion; the fingers we see can be abstracted into notions of smallness or bigness, leading one to the abstract forms or types that are the only things that are real and unchanging, and although they may exist as a parallel beautiful world, it is a world found by intellectual dialectics within this world and it would be the basis for much Renaissance art.11 Plato, in contrast to Aristotle and Dante, who believed the planets are made of a transparent fifth essence, or aether, and impervious to change, maintained that the heavens are made of the same matter as sublunar things, material and inconstant, and should therefore not be studied as visible heavens; unlike the invisible forms, they are mere reflections of reality.12 Light, in Plato’s philosophy, is stripped of its mystery as it was to be in the fifteenth century in science and art, when rays from the sun were studied for their effects on colour and perspective and were no more important than shadow in the interplay of light and shade known by painters as chiaroscuro. Knowledge in Plato replaces faith and belief, for only knowledge, he argued is real and infallible. Aristotle, in De Anima, proclaimed that fantasies and images are always present in even the most abstract human thoughts,13 and this would have applied to even the most transcendent passages in Paradiso, but by the fifteenth century, abstraction in various forms was undermining the belief in the transcendent beauty of the here and now, whether it was taking the forms of a growing insistence on prayer to a remote, distant God, or growing worship of the state, where communities were based on Roman common weal rhetoric and Plato’s concept of the state as a beehive of disposable worker bees serving the king. For Dante however vision, and its medium light, represented by St Lucia, his patron saint and other guide to Paradise, was everything, the ultimate reality, because its origins were divine. The sinners in Hell, in the dark shadows of the earth, could only yearn in vain for this loving light of God that was dispersed from beyond the stars to bathe the pilgrim on the shores of Purgatory with morning sun and to shine in the eyes of his childhood sweetheart. As frowns signify the darkness of Hell, so the light of laughter, springing from the soul and shining in the eyes, reflects the joys of the natal home in Heaven: in Dante’s natal house of Mercury, the faces of the blessed are less 308

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discernible than those in the Moon because of the intensity of the light coming from their eyes: I see well how you nestle within your own light, and that you shoot it forth from your eyes, for it flashes when you laugh.14 The stars and the planets are home, the basis of Dante’s acceptance of the world as it is, marvellous and miraculous. The ratification of this inevitable homecoming was obtained whenever Dante looked into, or remembered, the eyes of Beatrice and saw the light of the Empyrean that shines from the eye of God and the reflected image of his own human form within one of the three circles of the Trinity, all of the same colour yet distinguishable because of the pilgrim’s improved senses, a visual paradox, the union of Christ the son of God and the self, in what is perhaps a homecoming that is a culmination of the pilgrim’s narcissistic egotism: O eternal light … … … love and smile: that circulation which seemed in you to be generated like reflected light, surveyed by my eyes somewhat, within itself, in its very own colour, seemed to me to be painted with our effigy, by which my sight was all absorbed.15 In this universe: There is no light unless it come from the Serene that is never clouded: otherwise it is shadow of the flesh or its poison.16 There is no ultimate darkness, in Dante’s universe only shadows cast by matter which was not regarded as part of God’s divine order in Dante’s universe. Galileo would postulate that light travelled from the sun at a certain speed through space, and Dante captured the speed with which light falls on transparent substances: ‘A ray shines so that between its coming to its full presence there is no interval,17 but while the concept of an expanding universe of blackness was still far off, fifteenth century readers of The Divine Comedy nevertheless turned away from the rose of the Empyrean to contemplate the dark horrors of nature. 309

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Intellectual adventure and unconditional love The Divine Comedy aroused universal admiration for its aesthetic qualities: its beauty, intricacy and symmetry as a work of art; it presented a very different view of the universe, one in which the earth and its natural forces, and the realities of human nature are rendered less significant than the divine will perceived to be operating throughout human history, and the divine love or grace manifested in the light of the heavens, dispersed through the planets to influence individual destinies and to sparkle in the eyes of people who are able to shine this light and love and partake of the joys of Heaven. It was a transcendentally beautiful view of life that would be exposed to the harsh scrutiny of Renaissance logic and science. In one respect however Dante’s resistance to the laws of nature, perpetual change and flux that dominated fifteenth century English culture met with a sympathetic response, and this was in the inspiration he provided for English intellectuals to write in the vernacular of their own culture. Long before the fifteenth century Dante discovered that the fundamental law of change in nature applied to languages which are unstable and change over time, and hating change as he did, he set about reforming and ennobling the vernacular of the bankers and merchants responsible for Florence’s obscene growth (its population doubled from the time of Dante’s birth) and the decline of noble virtues. This was a permanent achievement that in turn helped to lead to the formation of a stable and permanent vernacular in England that would, by the time of Shakespeare, attain almost the same heights of nobility. The world depicted in Dante’s work of art is not the work of hard and perfect product of a jurist, but the creation of an artist motivated by love or light (a fusion of intellect and desire), a ‘living Light -that so streams from his Shining’,18 and, as with all forms of love, this light is indiscriminate and at times inconsistent: What does not die and what can die are solely the shining forth of the Idea to which our Lord gives birth in love.19 Thomas Aquinas explains, in the sphere of the sun, that the Idea, or the light, works on the matter formed in the heavens through heavenly bodies, to produce something full of imperfection and unpredictability because these heavenly bodies are secondary agents of nature, and ‘the many lights in which one light is reflected’20 falls unevenly on the wax of matter, in the same way that an artist’s vision is compromised by the imperfections in his body, whether his energy, his eyes or his hands: But Nature always gives it lessened, working like the artist who has the habit of art but a hand that trembles.21 Aquinas further assures the pilgrim that Adam and Christ were perfect creations but there will never be another such, and the implication is that just as Dante’s poem draws to 310

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its close, so to the world is ageing: the starry heavens, moving imperceptibly one degree every hundred years from West to East, though only covering a sixth of its rotation of 136,000 years, will never return to its beginning because the world is entering its last age and approaching the end of its story.22 But this unpredictability of life has all the beauty of great art because it is the result of unconditional love. It is why Guido Montefeltro erroneously supposed he was safe when he secured absolution for his sinful advice to Pope Boniface and retreated from warfare into a Franciscan convent, and why his son Buonconte was saved by his last-minute uttering of the name of Mary, his midwinter rose: For I have seen all the previous winter long the thorn bush appear rigid and fierce, but later bear the rose upon its tip, and I have seen a ship run straight and swift across the sea for all its course, only to perish at last when entering the port.23 Love creates Inconsistencies, wrinkles, in the apparently seamless narrative of the teleological meta narrative. In Inferno Virgil suggests the questioning of divine justice is impious when he rebukes the pilgrim’s compassion for the soothsayers: Here pity lives when it is quite dead: who is more wicked than one who brings passion to God’s judgment?24 However he is directly contradicted in a long-range paradox when Piccarda in Paradise rejects the notion that God cannot be appeased by good deeds and affirms the importance of passion in swaying the divine will: Regnum celorum (the kingdom of Heaven) suffers the violence of burning love and lively hope that overcomes God’s will,25 and the eagle in the sphere of justice effectively paraphrases Virgil in describing a passion that overcomes the realm of Heaven and the divine will.26 These paradoxes effectively negate the teleological narrative of an unalterable before and after. The prospect of straying, and yet appeasing a loving God, was important for Dante because he had wandered from the main path, indulged in intellectual feats of arrogance and questioned God’s justice, and this is shown in his sympathy for the other controversial shining intellectual lights of the sun accompanying Aquinas. In this company were Solomon who had been condemned by theologians for his immorality, but for Dante the author of the Song of Songs, which celebrated the union between human and divine;27 Siger of Brabant, the Averroist theologian who was included in a general clause against Aristotelianism in Paris 1277; and Joachim of Fiore, the apocalyptic thinker, whose views 311

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were condemned in the Lateran council of 1215. The salvatory status of these thinkers had caused Dante some anxiety, and he also fretted over the fate of Guido da of Montefeltro ‘that most noble of Italians’ (under whose captaincy the corpses of Ugolino and his children were finally taken from the Torre de Gualandi in Pisa on 18 March 1289),28 a fraudulent counsellor, like Ulysses and himself, and who Dante had consigned to Hell when he was intent on maintaining a Guelph image. Once free to adopt a Ghibbeline position, Dante employed the same nautical imagery in his Convivio to suggest that Guido’s retirement in a Franciscan convent, and the reputed conversion of Lancelot, might ensure that they would not sail into harbour in full sail but that ‘these noble men did indeed lower the sails of their worldly preoccupations and late in life gave themselves to religious orders forsaking all worldly delights and affairs’. Lancelot was the adulterous hero of Francesca and Paolo and the embodiment of the ideals of the early lyric poetry of Dante and his equally controversial friend, Guido Cavalcanti, for whom he may also conceivably have hoped for a safe arrival into harbour with lowered sails, and the blooming of a midwinter rose.29 Dante’s reassessment of Guido Montefeltro, wrapped in flames, to whom he speaks in Inferno as a fellow Italian and counterpart to Ulysses, who had been addressed by Virgil, is closely bound up with Dante’s s identification with Ulysses and his anxieties about his own intellectual arrogance in crossing boundaries. Just as the Greek hero sailed between the Pillars of Hercules, Dante steered his ship through the liminal passageway between life and death, and as a Daedalus-like artist he crossed the barrier between nature and art in imitation of God moving over the waters, preordaining the fates of his characters while maintaining in his narrative an illusion of suspense. As he sails the ship that is his poem the same language is employed that is used to describe Ulysses mad flight: Turning our stern toward the morning, of our oars we made wings for the mad flight aways gaining on the left side.30 Dante was addressed by Virgil as a positive Ulysses voyaging to the right: Here it is good that each propel his bark with sail and oars, as much an he can’,31 and towards the end of his journey St Bernard, the last of his surrogate fathers, whose compassionate bearing was such 'as befits a tender father',32 encourages his forward momentum, employing the same Ulyssean language of oars and wings for the purposes of prayer: Truly, lest perhaps you fly backward moving your wings, believing you move forward, we gain grace by praying.33 Dante’s identification with Ulysses had been established at the very outset of the poem when he reflected: 312

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If I abandon myself to the journey, I fear lest my coming may be folly (folle).34 Folle is a word that continues to haunt the pilgrim: when he describes his prophetic breaking of the baptismal font in San Giovanni baptistry as he hears the confession of Boniface he uses the same word ‘folle’ (rash)35, and even in Paradise he looks back at the site of Ulysses mad (folle) crossing. Parallel lives, especially the lives of Ulysses and Dante, undermine the teleological main plot of the poem that determines the meaning of a life of divine destiny because Dante too has strayed from his path.36 Halfway through the poem Beatrice, speaking of innocence, straying, divine intervention and redemption, speculates what Dante could and should have been with his abundance of grace and the working of the great wheels of Heaven at his birth, a potentially marvellous alternative life, but instead he has to undergo this penance and write a poem about fall, repentance and salvation.37 If he had lived this life there would have been no Divine Comedy, which is paradoxically the fruit of his straying from the path and wandering away from God’s plans for him.38 We therefore have the poem instead, but Dante, as a controversial thinker and explorer, who towards the end of his pilgrimage questioned God’s arbitrary justice and dispensation of grace, may have hoped to share with his friend, Guido Cavalcanti, and these other controversial intellectuals, the obliquely falling, inconsistent and indiscriminate rays of this light of divine grace, in a universe created on the same principles as his poem and motivated by unconditional love. The question of sailing safely into harbour with sails lowered may have been the pilgrim’s expectation but there also remains the possibility that, as a follower of Ulysses, sympathetic towards his intellectual arrogance: Then I grieved and now I grieve again, when I consider what I saw, and I rein in my wit more than is my custom,39 he will share his fate and that just as the speck of individuality that was Ulysses was submerged by the ocean, so it is possible to read into the conclusion of the poem in the eternal present, in the vast emptiness, the swallowing of the ego of the pilgrim and the poet and the poem itself in the great ocean of being so that the pilgrim and poet (but not the poem) are no more. What gives this poem its trembling beautiful vulnerability are the paradoxes and inconsistencies that infiltrate the narrative of conversion and moral progress when the author, the man, breaks through the text, the liminal border between art and life. He weeps over the contorted figures of the soothsayers, for what he is doing throughout his poem is telling the fortunes of his characters. He reveals his conflicted feelings towards Francesca, which despite his conversion to a belief in a transcendent non-possessive love betrays a continuing fixation with the dark and destructive powers of eros; his nostalgia for alternative possible lives; his anxieties about his health and his future life outside the poem; his ability to finish his work; and even his sense of responsibility towards 313

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his readers: ‘Consider reader, what and if I did not go on how anxious you would be to know more if what begins here did not proceed.’40 His personal unhappiness seeps in when he describes his life of exile and perhaps his unrequited love hinted at in those haunting lines: ‘We are lost and only so far harmed that without hope we live on in desire.’41 However, above all this he maintains a stubborn belief in unconditional love, signified by the winking of the eye of the eagle of justice.42 The truths Dante espoused may not ultimately be found in this world, or the next, but they could be attained in art, in the hundred-eyed peacock’s tail of his mother’s dream.43 Bella di Durante degli Abati, from whom the poet took his Christian name and who died in his infancy, was evoked by Virgil in terms reminiscent of the Ave Maria: Disdainful soul, blessed be she who was pregnant with you!44 She had, according to Boccaccio (perhaps thinking of Plutarch’s suggestion that a woman’s imagination in conception impresses a shape upon an infant, determining his or her temperament),45 a dream, while she was pregnant, of her unborn child eating the berries of a laurel tree beside a fountain, and his being transformed into a beautiful peacock with a tail of a hundred eyes, a prophesy of the writing of his poem of one hundred cantos, and Boccaccio was right to emphasize the role of the mother in the poet’s destiny. Dante’s earliest preconscious memories, his glimpse of the home to which he would return, would have been determined by the falling rays of sunlight and his mother’s shining eyes and smile, which he would project onto Beatrice, just as he would come to see the sun’s rays as manifestations of the light and warmth of God’s love: ‘Nothing in the universe is more worthy to be made a symbol of God’s love than the sun, which illuminates with perceptible light first itself then all the celestial and elemental bodies.’46 For Dante the leap into the heavens may have been inspired by memories of the unconditional love of his mother, but for Chaucer such infantile memories at his mother’s knee inspired reflections on the way that the journey into adulthood and sophisticated application of language involving rhetoric, and in his case evasion and witty selfdeprecation, was an exercise in survival in the dangerous world of a court presided over by the Cheshire bowmen, the bodyguard of King Richard II who coerced Parliament, and the opponents of the crown, the lords appellant allied to Thomas Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester. It was an environment that claimed the life of Chaucer’s less cautious and more politically committed fellow poet, Thomas Usk, who had witnessed Anne of Bohemia’s intercession on behalf of the mayor John of Northampton in 1384 but who would be executed by the Lords Appellant in 1388 when the queen was no longer alive to intercede for him. Chaucer’s reflections occur at the end of the last poetic creation in the Canterbury Tales, The Manciple’s Tale, where the poet, with his accounting and commercial background, identifies himself with a minor official on the fringes of the court: ‘A manciple and myself there were, no more’.47 Chaucer had been affected by Dante’s expression of his anxieties and aspirations over whether he had offended Apollo (in other words his Christian God) through his poetry and his uncertainty whether 314

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the angry God would skin him like Marsyas; or whether the inspiration of God and of poesy would enter him. Chaucer’s anxieties were more specifically concerned with his relationship, as a song bird, with the political factions of his time. A white feathered bird caged by Apollo, the archer, witnesses his mistress’s infidelity and instead of applying rhetorical skills to the situation (knowing when to speak and when to keep silent) he blurts out ‘Cuckoo’, a harsh unfamiliar sound that betrays his humble origins. Apollo responds to this exposure of his cuckoldry by slaying his wife with an arrow (after 1384 there was no queen to appease the archer king’s wrath) and skinning the bird, depriving it of it white feathers and song, so that it becomes a black crow devoid of music.48 The appellation of ‘upstart crow’ would be applied two hundred years later to another writer of modest background, William Shakespeare. The English class system runs deep. This tale from the most elusive of authors concludes with a moving evocation of the writer’s infantile memories of his anxious mother warning her son about the dangers of embarking on a literary career in search of tidings: My son, keep close your tongue Children learn this when they are young … My son beware, do not become a new author of tidings, whether they are false or true, Wherever they come from high or low Keep close your eyes And think upon the Crow.49 Both Dante and Chaucer reflected near the end of their journeys on the development of language, itself a momentous journey or pilgrimage from the mother’s breast, the origin of all vernacular tongues. But the journey does not end in the stars for Chaucer; like Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus, he must return to the mother’s knee to hear the words ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ and to the mother earth from whence he came. It is significant that Chaucer and the manciple are preceded in the Prologue by another skilled rhetorician, the Pardoner who tells the tale of an old man thrusting his stick into the earth begging his ‘gentle mother’ for admission.

Beware of a beautiful face Another issue for Dante’s readers who were not prepared to follow him beyond the fixed stars is that of a beautiful face. In the Convivio, written in 1303/4, after the learning process of Vita Nuova,50 where Dante learned to see Beatrice as the face of wisdom and then the divine, he attributed to his readers, a love of matters amatory. Boccaccio, commenting on Dante’s account in the fifth canto of Inferno, just before the pilgrim meets Francesca, of Dido ‘who killed herself for love’, warned Dante’s readers about believing literally in the love stories of poets, by pointing out the chronological impossibility of Dido having an affair with Aeneas, and in his On the Genealogy of the Gods he cited 315

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Virgil’s eloquence as being so great he could persuade his readers of what they knew to be false.51 Dante urged his readers to overcome this inability to move beyond earthly love and instead to contemplate,52 like Rachel, the beauty and highest happiness in her own eyes. Of all the deceptions practised by this counsellor and artist, whose combined skills of Ulysses and Daedalus far outstripped those of the leopard and Geryon, this is the most devastating for readers who may have been beguiled by his epic love story, the myth of Beatrice, perpetuated in Vita Nuova, about a woman who in reality married a knight belonging to Florence’s financial aristocracy, a family far above the poet, perhaps before 1280, and who may have rejected Dante, and indeed who joined in with other women by laughing at the poet when he fainted against a wall after unexpectedly seeing her at a wedding. Dante responded by writing a sonnet which begins: 'With your companions you make fun of me,' 53 and while he may have written love lyrics as screens to hide his love for Beatrice, whose face he claimed to see in every woman's in reality, after 1283 and the second greeting, she was not the only woman on his horizon, one of whom, Gemma Donati, he married in 1283 when he was eighteen. Although Boccaccio maintained Dante never saw Gemma again after she was forced from Florence with her children in June 1302, he may have retained affection for her,54 for he was, despite his persona as a wanderer, a family man; and he was joined in his exile in Ravenna in 1318, where he had a house thanks to the income from two rectories awarded to his son Pietro in January 1321,55 by his devoted sons Pietro and Iacobo, and his daughter Antonia (who had no need to leave Florence, for as a girl she was not subject to the banishment that affected her brothers), and possibly by Gemma. All this contributed to Dante’s self-image as a Ulysses-like wanderer trying to reach his home, which on the face of it was Florence. However, despite Dante’s projected image as the faithful pilgrim, unrequited lover and family man, there were still other women in his life and erotic fixations. In 1406 he resumed work on the Inferno, while staying in the Lunigiana with the Marchese Moroello Malaspina, and it was while he was writing about the doomed love of Francesca and Paolo that he sent to the Marchese in 1307 a canzone, a ‘mountain song’, after arriving in the Casentino, in the Tuscan Romagna Appenines, describing how he fell in love in the current of the Arno with a woman who appeared like lightning from above (Boccaccio was told she was a mountain woman with a beautiful face and goitre), an apparition that caused terror and an epileptic fainting fit: ‘Then I saw the flame of the beauty, love terrible and imperious’; and the canzone ends with a longing for Florence and a realization that, even if he is pardoned, the mountain woman will prevent his homecoming. She is of course a femme fatale, a siren, the product of the poet’s ‘rash soul, working to its own harm … giving shape to its own torment’, like the siren encountered in the pilgrim’s dream in Purgatory, boasting of her power over Ulysses. In a letter accompanying the poem Dante admits to the marchese that this new, passionate love that has suddenly seized him has ‘cruelly banished, as though they were suspect, the constant meditations with which I was considering earthly and heavenly things’.56 This description of the siren in The Divine Comedy, the ‘sacred poem to which Heaven and earth have set their hand’, suggests that out of this distracting experience he created the dream in Purgatory of the siren on the mountain, and Virgil’s exhortation to look away from the woman, who is a projection of his own fantasies, to the heavenly wheels. 316

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Dante, like Ulysses, had a family, a home, and a Penelope in Florence (Petrarch in a letter to Boccaccio unfavourably linked Dante with Ulysses because he believed they both deserted their families), and it was while staying in the Lunigiana in 1306 with Moroello Malaspina, a Black condottiere, that Dante used Moroello’s connections with the Black Donati in Florence to appeal for a pardon from the Blacks ruling the city. He sent a letter to the priors admitting his offence in allying himself with the Ghibbelines, Florence’s traditional enemies, and betraying not only the Guelph faction but the whole city. A few months later, presumably after receiving a discouraging response, he addressed a canzone to Gemma’s Donati kin, including Corso, unrepentantly celebrating his honourable exile in an unjust world where values are inverted and white flowers turned to black, but expressing a willingness to move from hawking with the white-feathered birds to go hunting with the black hounds, in other words to join his wife’s Black faction. He confesses his exile has been unbearable because of a lady in Florence: ‘And were it not that the fair object of my eye is removed by distance from my sight and this has set me on fire.’57 On the face of it he was alluding to his wife, and for political reasons playing the family card, but it is possible that this was yet another screen, for his real objective was Beatrice, buried in Florence, her city, and the real objective of his wanderings was the heavenly home represented by her eyes. Beatrice may have appeared in Dante’s dreams to no avail when he was lost; but now he was ready to listen, and his rejection of the siren's blandishments was achieved with the help of the same partnership of Virgil and Beatrice that rescued him from Hell.58 The pilgrim’s dream is a reprocessing of Virgil's account of Beatrice's visit to Hell to ask for his help: ‘there appeared a lady, holy and quick, alongside me to confound her. “Oh Virgil, Virgil, who is this?” she was saying fiercely’;59 Beatrice, who would in the Earthly Paradise urge Dante to bear his shame for following false pleasures so that ‘hearing the sirens you may be stronger,’ encouraged Virgil to tear open the siren's garments to expose her corruption in the same way he had revealed the true nature of Hell to the pilgrim.60 The crucial role Dante gave Beatrice in his salvation may explain why his daughter, on embarking for the monastic life, and under the patronage of Novello, took the name of Suor Beatrice upon entering the monastery of Santo Stefano in Ravenna. Dante’s pilgrim has to continually learn to avoid being bound to the earth, literally turned to concrete,61 by the surface appearances of things and people. The Medusa appears alongside the furies of Hell, and Virgil closes his hands over the eyes of his pupil, aware of the dangers of erotic fixation and the literal surface of faces and texts, as opposed to the spiritual view that sees beyond the veil (represented for Boccaccio by the walls of Dis), and this is a message for the reading of the entire poem: O you who have sound intellects, gaze on the teaching that is hidden beneath the veil of the strange verses.62 317

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The act of reading (and the pilgrim’s journey through the dark wood was in part an encounter with scripture) is fraught with danger if texts are taken too literally. Dante’s tutor, Brunetto, wandered from the right path in a strange wood in his Tesoretto (Treasure) and was consigned to the blind regions of Hell because he remained stuck in a literal reading of texts, the blindness of literality (a form of idolatry) that afflicted the inhabitants of Sodom.63 It was also Francesca’s mistake and nearly Dante’s. In the fifth book of Inferno the pilgrim learns of his own culpability in encouraging Francesca into a misdirected desire for transcendence through the beautiful deceit of his love poems which turned her away from God: ‘Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.’64 Dante atoned for this sin by writing about his conversion, the result of which was a love poem that leads him to God, with the author again occupying the role of Galeotto or go-between. But this was an undertaking still fraught with peril for the author and his readers, something Chaucer realized. The counterfeit coins the pilgrim encounters in Inferno can easily be taken for real gold. Troilus after he wins Criseyde sings a song: Love, that knits the laws of companionship, And couples doth make in virtue for to dwell, Bind this accord, that I have told and tell.65 This may anticipate the pilgrim’s joy in Paradiso when he sees the knot of divine love, but it still retains echoes of Francesca’s conceit of love as something ‘swiftly kindled in the noble heart’, and the phrase ‘solo un punto’ (one moment alone) occurs both when the couple read Lancelot, and when Dante sees the universal knot that defeats his memory.66 The Divine Comedy itself can deceive and mislead, like the Galeotto read by Francesca, and this is Troilus’s fate. He believed his love for Criseyde was transcendent; his change of heart when he fell in love was a type of conversion and he employed the love language of Paradiso believing the love he shared with Criseyde was permanent and could lead him to Heaven, but it doesn’t because he is a pagan, and more importantly for its implications for Chaucer and his readers, because (although he may have resembled his fellow Trojan, Ripheus) he was not a convert and had no access to grace that would allow him to recognize misdirected love. Fifteenth century readers believing in the love story of Beatrice, without sharing the author’s faith, could find that instead of leading them to Heaven this poem would lead them nowhere and leave them feeling lost, sharing the sense of abandonment and despair felt by Troilus. Dante may have tried to convert his readers from scepticism, for there is a practical ethical dimension to The Divine Comedy, but he maintained he felt no responsibility towards the ‘unsound of mind’67 the ‘bleareyed’68 or the ‘shipwrecks’69 he left behind, and the imagery Dante employs of a perilous sea voyage is echoed by Troilus, one of his followers: All rudderless within a boat am I Amid the sea, between winds two,70

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and there is the disturbing possibility that Dante’s eloquence as a convert when he exhorted fellow pilgrims to follow his ship is like the flaming tongue of Ulysses beckoning those intent on salvation, but whose faith will not prove strong enough, ensuring that, like Ulysses crew, they will perish in the cruel seas. Dante’s love language aroused expectations and desires for transcendence in Troilus which could not be fulfilled in the sublunary, mutable world, and it is possible that Chaucer was trying to suggest that Dante, in his own desire for conversion and salvation, deluded himself into believing his wish to be a reality.71 Rather than endorsing the myth of Beatrice, Dante tried to teach his readers to look beyond and through his various deceptions. In a letter to Can Grande della Scala he suggested his poem be read anagogically (the fourth mystical level of signification applying to the four last things, Heaven, Hell, Death and Judgement previously applied to scripture),72 and above all to read his love for Beatrice anagogically, as the means for the passing of the sanctified soul from the bondage of corruption of the world to the liberty of everlasting glory,73 and to see in the repeated evocations of sunlight and the shining eyes and smiling mouth of his beloved, metaphors for the divine wisdom of Lady Philosophy, rather than the earthbound philosophical studies represented by the Donna Gentile, who triumphed over Beatrice immediately after her death, a lady whose eyes were her demonstrations and her smile her persuasions.74 This is perhaps the secret behind the smile of the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, who had read The Divine Comedy, and it is here that the sensibilities of these two artists and scientists from the early fourteenth century and the High Renaissance can be said to briefly meet.

The inaccessibility of Dante’s Paradise One thing separates Dante from all his predecessors, contemporaries and successors, and this is his detailed account of Paradise: something that had never been attempted before him and would never be attempted subsequently. Instead of falling back on the spatial conventions of the Elysian fields of classical antiquity or the enclosed Christian garden, he set himself the challenge of conveying in the temporal, linear medium of language, an existence beyond time and place, a nowhere. Following Boethius, he distinguished the eternal from the simultaneous by depicting Hell as spatially tangible and inhabiting an eternity that signified unending duration as opposed to the eternal present outside time – a perpetual endlessness to which he opposed an eternal timelessness that was a single point of time. To do this Dante distended time and space over thirty cantos to show the souls of Heaven descending in a hierarchy of the seven heavens to greet the pilgrim in a graded sequential fashion that he could understand, and throughout these thirty cantos he attempted to reconcile difference and unity through circular imagery of two rainbows and their verbal equivalents; St Francis and St Dominic, parallel yet different, and throughout the pilgrimage through the heaven of the seven planets, narrative cantos of division, logic and number, alternated with non-narrative dechronized cantos of affective, lyrical metaphors which had been anticipated in the lyrical anti-narrative of Vita Nuova, until the leap into the final three cantos describing the primum mobile 319

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and the Empyrean, a utopia, a non-place, containing all space and belonging nowhere.75 Here the paradox of the Trinity, three yet one, individual and undivided, the coexistence of the I and the many, is resolved as the desire of the ego for difference and individuation is reconciled with the primal instinct to return to the one and union with the cosmos: All natures incline in their different lots, closer to their origin or more distant from it; thus they move toward different ports over the great sea of being, each with an instinct given to it to carry it.76 Here, the Augustinian concept of the centre and the Aristotelian concept of the circumference are resolved in the circular images of the rose and the amphitheatre. The poet expresses his desire to convey everything he has said about Beatrice, all his past temporalities and multiplicities, the long list of words he has left behind that constitute multiplicity, into one supreme lyric which will be the equivalent of God’s binding the quires of the universe into a single volume.77 The Divine Comedy’s depiction of Paradise would never be emulated, but the author’s anticipations of his own future drew attention to the gravitational, terrestrial realities that would dictate future readings of the poem. Dante may, at the beginning of each canto, have anticipated the completion of a planned work, creating the illusion that the future lay within a text that he controlled, but he was also fascinated and afraid of the future outside his text, and this exerts a gravitational pull: the journey of the pilgrim may end at the Empyrean but, for the journey of the author of one hundred cantos, the future was more uncertain. This applied even to the completion and dissemination of his poem: Think, reader, how deprived you would feel, how anxious to know more, if what begins here did not proceed.78 One of the most anxious enquiries into the future was Cavalcante’s question about the fate of his son, Guido, where he fills the pilgrim’s silence with the pessimistic assumption that he is dead and pulls the very narrative texture of the poem out of shape, opening up a liminal space, a wormhole between the text and the poet and his readers. The pilgrim cannot know that Guido would die at the end of August but the poet and the reader knows. Guido is superficially absent from the poem deprived of any endpoint, judgement or prophecy: it is as if Cavalcante has asked Dante the pilgrim why he refers to Guido from the viewpoint of Dante the man. The pull of this future knowledge gives the pilgrim an insight into a historical perspective that lies outside the fiction, and the boundaries between the two Dantes and the reader become porous to reveal a third dimension.79 This uncertain extra-textual future also applies to the exiled author: 320

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What a hard path it is to descend and mount by another’s stairs.80 Instead of the purposeful rise and fall of the steps in Purgatory there is a fear of aimlessness, and of the physical and emotional consequences of exile, suffering a cruelty that ‘locks me out of the lovely sheepfold … Sacrosanct Virgins, If ever I have suffered hunger and vigils for you’81 writing a poem that ‘for many years has made me lean’.82 Beyond the text there is a third dimension that the poet shares with his readers, who he invokes to make sense of his experiences: ‘Lift therefore your gaze to the high wheels with me, reader.’83 In this dimension he is vulnerable, prone, despite the subjugation of his erotic fixations to the Lady Philosophy and Beatrice, to the occasional lustful impulses that occasioned the writing of the carnal Mountain Song with its imagery of dying, failing strength and revival, and the petrose (stony) poems, written at the same time, which express a desire for sexual revenge on a stony lady who holds him in thrall: 'I'd show no pity or courtesy. Oh no I'd be like a bear at play';84 to doubts concerning his remorseless passage towards salvation at the expense of the unbaptized pagan writers he revered; uncertain, as he wrote about the cascading waters of Inferno and contemplated nature's destructive powers, of his attempts to portray her as a benevolent minister of the divinity; and perhaps also exhausted at the end of writing his poem and aware of the passage of time to anxieties concerning his own frailty and mortality: I see clearly, my father, how time is spurring toward me to give me the kind of blow that falls heaviest on those who are most heedless,85 and that he may face an alternative ending that he will share with his readers: If I return to complete the brief path of the life that flies toward its end.86 In this dimension there will be a parallel journey of an ageing man and his body, worried about the future of his native Florence: ‘for it will weigh on me more, the older I grow’,87 for whom Beatrice’s words are becoming prophetic: ‘You should have risen up after me for I was no longer such.’88 This parallel journey will end with a middle-aged man’s feverish death near malarial marshes far from home, but the many lives and paths of the poem still remain. The story of the afterlife of The Divine Comedy after 1450 is certainly one about the force of the gravitational pull of the earth. Paradiso will be largely respected and neglected, and individual cantos of the poem, especially from Inferno, will be used as a source of inspiration for various cultural and political causes, but there were some exceptions to this trend, especially in the twentieth century, when writers of genius responded in English to the poem in comprehensive ways that were reminiscent of the 321

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responses of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Lydgate, using The Divine Comedy as a source of inspiration to create epics that could reflect their times, and as with the writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, they found that their attempts at emulating Dante were pulled back into the earth, a phenomenon that Boccaccio and Chaucer exploited to comic effect. Those parts of The Divine Comedy set in Paradiso, beyond the earth’s shadow and gravitational pull, which celebrated light as the vehicle of divine love emanating from the heavens and shared by God’s creations, men and women, gave to Paradiso a remote beauty that made it as remote and inaccessible to Dante’s earthbound modern readers, who were as incapable of following the pilgrim in his ascent to the stars, as the readers of the early English Renaissance.

Pilgrims following Dante If there is one thing that distinguishes the empirical realism that characterizes the high Renaissance from the etherial aspirations of The Divine Comedy it is the gravitational pull of the earth, captured by Miguel Cervantes in his depiction of the incident of Don Quixote tilting at windmills, those wind-driven sails that turn the mighty grinding millstones. Fired by his vision of the Lady Dulcinea and his desire to live in the realms of thirteenth century chivalry and courtly love, the Don thrusts his lance into one of the sails and is cast up into the air, only to be thrown to the ground.89 The turning of the wheels of the millstones, which for Dante signified the revolution of the spheres and the unfolding of the pilgrim’s heaven-bound destiny, merely demonstrates the hard realities of gravity and time. After the publishing of Don Quixote in 1605 and 1615, no writer would attempt to journey to the skies and this would even apply to the first attempt to follow Dante’s epic journey into the otherworld made by John Milton in Paradise Lost. Milton was a notable exception in the seventeenth century in his comprehensive study of The Divine Comedy. Fluent in Italian, Milton, between 1658 and 1663, attempted to depict his own version of Hell. In Dante’s epic, the creation of Inferno and Purgatorio following the rebellion of Satan are events in a long-distant past. The earth below Jerusalem collapsed to form the funicular pit of Hell, and the displaced earth formed the conical mountain of Purgatory in the Southern Ocean with the Garden of Eden at its peak, long deserted since the fall of man. This is the landscape through which Dante, the hero of his own epic, must pass. Milton takes his readers back to a period long before these primal events to show the rebellion of Satan and his descent into Hell, and the subsequent temptation of Adam and Eve in Eden. However the gulf between these two epics is more than chronological: there was no collision of two worlds involved because they were so far apart, and this was determined by the impact of the Renaissance on Milton’s mind. He may have claimed to attempt ‘things unattempted yet in prose and rhyme’, but in reality he was working in the tradition of the epic writers of Greece, a tradition unavailable for Dante. His models were Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and they influenced his humanist depiction of the classical grandeur of Hell, the intelligence of the councils of the demons, and the grief over lost happiness of its tragic leader, Satan. 322

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Lucifer, like the hero of a Greek tragedy, is inherently noble, suffering and aware that he has brought about his own downfall through pride; he nevertheless continues to assert his own will in defiance of God. This assertion of will lies behind the fall of Satan’s followers and Adam: it is the source in Paradise Lost of all the knowledge, science and ingenuity that accompanies consciousness, which is displayed in the engineering projects of the demons as they approach the Earthly Paradise.90 In this human drama the devils and their leader are humanized, not grotesque, debased and devoid of all humanity as they are in Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s depiction of Satan is anticlimactic because he regarded evil as absence and he reserved his more grandiloquent style for less evil sinners such as Farinata. Milton’s God is also anthropomorphized, passionate and throned, whereas there is no trace of anthropomorphism in Dante’s metaphysical depiction of Paradise, and God, beyond the spheres of time and space, is never seen or heard, and only perceived in terms of light. Milton makes little attempt to enter into the metaphysical realties of Paradise: beyond the fixed sphere of the stars, according to Milton, was the ‘backside of the world, the abode of the fatuous’. One hundred years after Copernicus, Milton is unable to escape the mechanical laws of the universe that the demons in Hell understood so well, to entertain Dante’s vision of a deity that is pure light, beyond time and space, a concentration, an essence, of every ‘where and when’.91 The primary force in Milton’s classical epic is therefore the human will, projected onto the Divine, whereas Dante creates an otherworld devoid of human projections, and in revealing the secrets of this universe, he shows the operations of a divine, incomprehensible will to which the human will must acquiesce. For Dante’s most imaginative and vulnerable reader, John Ruskin, the approach of Paradiso threatened his very sanity. Ruskin responded to the canticles of Inferno and Purgatorio as a painter, relating colours, landscape and climate to his emotions, in an often involuntary way. As a draughtsman, he admired the precision and detail of Dante’s creation of an otherworld, his adherence to lines, boundaries and maps as if they were separated by equidistant pointed compasses, and he identified closely with his capacity to observe and judge.92 Dante was seen as a model of stringent, judgemental observation of the world, which was the opposite of the Romantic apolitical, pathetic fallacy, that attempted to close the gap between signified and signifier. Inferno, in Ruskin’s view, was based on the capacity of the eye to see and judge, and this he argued contributed to Dante’s circular and labyrinthine divisions of Hell.93 To the discerning and judgemental eye, the fraudulent turn into snakes to illustrate the instability of the capitalist financial systems; the usurers sit on sand because they made money by doing nothing. In admiring the comparison of spirits falling from the bank of the Acheron to dead leaves fluttering from a bough, Ruskin is reassured that the poet is preserving a clear distinction to ensure that the leaves remain leaves, thereby signifying his own inability to confront the metamorphosis and blurring of identities that would lie ahead.94 Nevertheless, fortified by what he believed to be these judgemental certainties, Ruskin followed his hero along the spiralling paths winding down the left-hand side of Hell, drawn by Minos’s serpentine tail: ‘In my poor and faltering path I have myself been taken far enough down among the diminished circles to see the nether Hell.’95 323

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Here the punishments of the damned are designed to make them feel their sins,96 and Ruskin confronts his fears regarding his sanity. The saddest scene for him is the forest of despair, where he sees the trees haunted by lost souls;97 the ‘most awful passage’, as far as he is concerned, occurs when the furies at the top of a burning tower shriek for the Gorgon to turn the pilgrim and his guide, not into stone, but into enamel, a substance on which nothing will grow, dead forever,98 and it is in the pit of traitors that he witnesses the hard heartedness of those incapable of crying, who have their eyes fastened by frozen tears. However, despite these worrying portents of emotional death, he never becomes disorientated in Hell. The dark, leaden rivers, so different from the clear blue of the Italian waters, remind him of home, and the mists and rain that afflict the gluttons, and contrast so poignantly with the clear blue Italian skies, are a familiar sight in Cumbria and the Highlands; the mists and racks of clouds in Hell so detested by Dante are for Ruskin familiar Highland weather.99 The expectation was that after confronting his deepest fears, and fortified by the moral certainties of Hell’s contrapasso, Ruskin, after following the labyrinthine left-side path into Hell, would ascend another spiral on the right-hand side of the mountain of Purgatory: the quest of the pilgrim in this labyrinthine and circular world is to find the centre, to become the centre where all paths lead. This is the quality Ruskin most admired in Dante. Christ was crucified on a cross in the centre of the world at the centre of human history. The Tuscan poet started his spiralling journey down to the pit of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory to the centre of the empyreal rose, in the middle of his life, in 1300, in the middle of the Middle Ages, in the Valley of the Arno, the cradle of human life where North and South meet, and where the whole of the history of Christian architecture and painting began, in the baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence where Dante was baptized in 1267,100 a central figure between the classical and modern worlds: ‘the central man of all the world as representing the perfect balance of the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties all at their highest’,101 who imagined the empyreal rose as two symmetrical halves, containing equal numbers of pre- and post-Christian souls, validating Bonaventure’s vision of Christ as the mid-point of history.102 There is a sense that Ruskin envied Dante’s emotional, psychological centrality, his anchoring in the ‘sheepfold’ of the octagonal baptistry in Florence, and his steadfast attachment to his rose, his Beatrice. All Ruskin had to do was follow Dante up the mountain, through the serpentine labyrinths, by exercising his aesthetic judgement, his own judgemental seeing eye, on landscapes, paintings, architecture and society. The journey starts propitiously enough. His faith in the purifying process of climbing the mountain103 is strengthened as he feels revived seeing the sun on its peak,104 the pale morning sun trembling on the sea, turning vermillion to orange at sunrise,105 as the boat bearing the penitents to the shore, a felucca cleaving the sea, seems to be a bird of God.106 However, as he struggles up the mountain, he begins to find Dante’s aesthetic outlook on landscape, colour and light challenging and alien, and it affects his sanity the way the light of Arles would torment Vincent van Gogh. The crumbling cornices are composed of Apennine limestone that has a monotonous hue, so grey and lifeless: ‘that I know not any mountain district so utterly melancholic as those which 324

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are composed of this rock’.107 He misses the lovely colours of ‘our slates and granite’, which he contrasts to the disagreeable, ashen grey limestone of the mountain and the Malebolge in Inferno. Even the whitish grey of the penitential angels is not wood ash in colour but resembles the sunny sides of Italian hills, produced by the scarcity of the ground, a dusty, lifeless, whitish grey, pale and oppressive.108 The intense light of Italy, so loved by Dante, begins to unsettle him. He peevishly complains about Dante’s disregard for clouds and how the poet's only pleasure is in the skies white translucency, the durability of fine Italian days.109 It is when he reaches the top of the mountain that you sense Ruskin is in trouble. The forest of the Garden of Eden is a pathless wood, once a source of dread for Dante’s pilgrim in his days of sin and now a source of joy presents problems for Ruskin with its absence of fences and boundaries: ‘I could not see back to the place where I had entered.’110 The lack of structure in Paradiso would be even more intimidating for this lover of lines, structure and order. In a letter accepting Virgilio’s challenge to write in Latin, Dante promised to send him the remaining ten cantos of Paradiso: ‘which belong to no flock, no tradition, and its freedom limited by no fence or barrier’.111 Ruskin thought Paradiso required greater attention and a holier heart, which is why few readers ventured beyond the pit112 to follow this superior artist who did not merely imitate nature but who was a visionary, inspired as if he had been dictated to in a deep sleep sent by God.113 The creative venture beyond the imitation of nature in Paradiso is what really disturbed Ruskin, who was unable to follow Dante into the realm of pure light: ‘where the light of the sun so floods the heavens that never rain nor river made a lake so wide’.114 Here there are no lines to follow, no gradations of shade, no clouds acting as thrones for angels. There is nothing to aid the delineation of the self. Beatrice taught Dante to look towards the Empyrean like an eagle into the sun,115 and it is at this point that Ruskin begins to falter in his reading. He follows eagerly to the point until ‘so burned the peaceful oriflamme when the increasing light became so strong that it awakened me like a new morning and I closed the book’.116 The section where Beatrice leaves Dante with St Bernard to take her place in Heaven is seldom opened because it upsets Ruskin that Dante’s guide has left him all alone.117 He is not as strong as the pilgrim of The Divine Comedy and can follow no further. He is truly lost. Look into the sun and you may be blinded, but the light of Heaven can daze your mind. Dante had warned him: he issued these words of caution to all the readers who contemplated following him beyond Purgatory to the empyreal centre: O you who in little barks, desirous of listening, have followed after my ship that sails onward singing: turn back to your shores again, do not put out on the deep sea, for perhaps, losing me, you would be lost.118 Ruskin’s journey out of the maze ultimately led him to confront Dante’s cloudless and shadowless Heaven119 which left him remaining bewildered in blank madness. Dante, 325

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in describing the act of writing, referred to his preparing a blank page with ruled lines to guide his pen, establishing limits in imitation of God’s creation of limits to the universe.120 Ruskin lost these boundaries and confronted the blank page (anticipated in his nightmarish vision of Medusa's spotless enamel in Inferno), a blankness that Sandro Botticelli used to depict the Trinity in concluding his ninety-two pen and ink drawings of The Divine Comedy, which ironically Ruskin had helped to popularize, praising the artist for offering the common people a redemptive journey through the sacred labyrinth.121 Paradise was also far from the thoughts of writers of the late nineteenth century who were fixated on Inferno: There is in Hell a place called Malebolge, made of stone the colour of iron, like the circle that encloses it.122 Dante’s description of the sorrowing houses of Dis, in that inconsolable city where the walls seemed to be of iron,123 its rivers dark purple, with vapour rising from the Phlegathon124 into the black air and thick fog,125 settling in the lowest place farthest from the sky,126 inspired artists and poets into a shock of recognition, seeing these awesome horrors replicated in the horrors of the industrialization and urbanization of the world’s great metropolis, the centre of an empire, the new Rome. The French engraver, Gustave Dore, illustrated the Inferno in 1857 in a sombre, Gothic fashion, and in 1861–6 he published 180 wood-block illustrations of London, the result of four years exploring its squalid, labyrinthine slums. His illustrations of the Lambeth gasworks and Bluegrass Fields, Shadwell, reveal Dantean depravity and squalor, and the terraced houses and railway arches in London above Rail evoke the high ridges and pouches in the pit of malebolge divided into ten valleys. For a London clerk, James Thompson, who suffered from alcoholism, insomnia and depression, Dis and London were cities of the mind, in the way that Dis and Florence were for Dante, realms of perverted will and isolation. Thompson’s own Beatrice, Matilda Welle, had died aged eighteen, and in his long narrative poem, The City of Dreadful Night (1874), he, like Dante, emerges from a desert and approaches the city of countless lanes and dark retreats, a city which, like Dante’s Dis, is ‘la citta dolente’ (the grieving city), where the sun has never visited and where there is no path and not a single star. Despite its gloom he is compulsively drawn unable, like Dante’s damned, to resist, and on his return he sees the same message of hopeless despair that is inscribed on the gates of Inferno: I reached the portal common spirits fear, And read the words above it dark yet clear ‘Leave hope behind all ye who enter here’127 In his nocturnal, insomniac wanderings he observes other sufferers, indistinguishable from phantoms, wandering aimlessly ‘like tragic masks of stone, with weary tread, Each 326

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wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander’, along the sort of canal banks under a damp blanket of sky where Dante met Ser Brunetto.128 Thompson’s journey ends after walking by the river of the suicides: ‘the mighty river flowing dark and dreary’129 and ends with a vision in a black starless night; presided over not by Satan, but Durer’s seated goddess Melancholia, ‘that city’s sombre patroness’.130 It was not until the twentieth century that a quartet of writers attempted to engage with the totality of the whole epic with few preconceptions or agendas, whether religious, or political, and to enter into Dante’s world, emotionally and imaginatively, in the way Dante himself so movingly entered Virgil’s world, by embracing the classical poets he admired as friends and fellow countrymen, and emulating them while also writing an epic about his own times, his personal life and his home. A Missouri migrant T. S. Eliot and three Irish exiles, writing in English: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, all acknowledged the Italian poet as their master, and followed his lead; they engaged with The Divine Comedy on an intimate level, without political, moral or religious polemics, responding to his world and his view of the universe in ways that suggest a profound intermeshing of their worlds and his, but they too failed to follow him beyond the earth. Eliot arrived in London from America, which had its own relationship with Dante, although this was not defined in terms of the gravitational pull of the earth but by the obliterating force of the ocean. Since the Renaissance there had been a tradition that the New World had been discovered by Ulysses, and this nation's origins in an act of daemonic defiance influenced the composition of the national epic, Moby Dick. Herman Melville, who closely annotated Carey's translation of The Divine Comedy, conceived a Ulyssean voyage across the Southern Ocean in search of a great white whale that is both God and Satan; and this journey culminates in Ahab's vision of paradisical bliss and his being sucked into the vortex of an oceanic hell.131 Eliot was working in a London bank when he first encountered Inferno through reading his fellow London clerk, James Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night,132 and he was inspired, once he started reading The Divine Comedy, with the help of a prose translation, to locate Dante’s epic in London, which by the early twentieth century occupied the same role as a financial centre, due to its banks and trading companies, that Florence performed in the fourteenth century, when the pound, at least until 1919, had the same status as the florin, but he avoided the temptation to follow the neurotic Victorian poet into the cistern of Hell and despair, and instead, like Chaucer, he focused in The Wasteland (1922) on the fate Dante assigned to the unremarkable people, the bulk of mankind: ‘They have no hope of death, and their blind life is so base that they are envious of every other fate. The world permits no fame of them to exist; mercy and justice alike disdain them: let us not speak of them, but look and pass on.’ When I looked again, I saw a flag running in circles so rapidly that it seemed to scorn all pause; 327

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and after it there came so long a train of people, that I would not have believed death had undone so many.133 These souls, who were never really alive, are dismissed by Virgil as unworthy of Heaven or Hell, and Eliot turns this incident into an exploration of the spiritual ennui of the modern citizens of London, the clerks commuting to their offices, craving the waters of spiritual regeneration: ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.’134 Eliot, as a member of the Anglican church, was drawn to Dante’s vision of wholeness and integration, which contrasted with what he saw as the fragmentary disintegration of Western civilization, and in Burnt Norton he contemplates the alternative paths in Dante, only one of which can be taken, towards 'the door we never opened into the rose garden’ which culminates in the Little Gidding conclusion to The Four Quartets (written in terza rima) in a vision of redemption inspired by the Purgatorio, in which all paths, all times, are all ultimately the same. In 1942 Eliot (like Dante, the protagonist of his own epic) on fire-watch duty in Cromwell Street, London, during the Blitz, sees in the bombed ruins his version of Hell as dark doves descend, breaking the air with flames of incandescent terror, raining Pentecostal fires on the city. Dante has taught him that these purgatorial fires can bring redemption: fire redeems fire, the flames of love through memory expand beyond desire. The words of the dead, so eloquent in Dante’s Purgatory, are given vitality by being ‘tongued with fire’. One of the dead who visits the fire warden in the dust suspended in the air, is a shade loitering in the fog of an urban dawn near the River Thames, which rises like the mists of Phlegathon. The watchman recognizes the expression of a half forgotten, half remembered dead master who cries like Dante’s teacher Ser Brunetto Latini in Inferno’s circle of the literary sodomites: ‘What! Are you there’. But this is also a compound ghost, and it is Eliot’s Virgil like mentor, Dante, who appears before him the way he does before Chaucer in the House of Fame telling him he has left his body on a distant shore to find ‘two worlds become much like each other’ and words he never thought to speak, as he proceeds to guide him through the purgatorial city; but Eliot can only follow him so far on this journey. There will be a return to beginnings: reconciliation of the living and the dead; the past and the future; redemption through memory; an affirmation of the importance of place as the church at Little Gidding performs the same anchoring function as the San Giovanni sheepfold; and Dante’s civic pride and filial affection for Florence is echoed in Eliot’s displays of patriotic love for his suffering country. A symbolic union between this Anglican poet and the Roman Catholic from a distant shore is even suggested when Eliot quotes the fourteenth century English mystic, Julian of Norwich: ‘All shall be well’. However Eliot can only follow his guide so far: the tongues of flames from the dark dove may become enfolden into the knot of love so that fire and rose, divine wrath and mercy, become one; 328

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but there is no empyreal rose, merely the English rose of a penitential and suffering land, and Eliot's journey ends at the point of purgatorial purification, with Dante reassuring him that he needs to move through purgatorial fires to confront his painful realization of all that he has done and been, of his motivations and the wrongs done to others which he has mistaken for virtue.135 This is the same self realization that Beatrice ‘within a cloud of flowers’ imposes on Dante, which is necessary if he is to find her again in Paradise: ‘The high decree of God would be broken, If Lethe were passed and such nourishment were tasted without any fee of such repentance as pours forth tears’.136 The shade of Dante’s valediction promises the fire warden that penitential memories will not bring about guilt and despair but liberation. His end will be his beginning; he will arrive: ‘where we started’ knowing for the first time that ‘unknown unremembered gate’ through which he passes to the river’s source to hear the voice of the waterfall and the sounds of children in the apple tree’.137 This echoes Dante’s promise to Brunetto that, although he had lost his way, Virgil ‘is leading me back home by this road’.138 It is a journey that leads to the garden of blossom at the top of Mount Purgatory and reunion with his childhood love, Beatrice, and a state of innocence and acceptance brought about by the cleansing waters of the River Lethe, preparatory to a return home to Paradise, a homecoming far beyond the aspirations of The Four Quartets.139 The horrors of the twentieth century also affected Samuel Beckett’s perspective on Dante. He died in a Paris hospice in 1989, oxygen canisters by his bed, reading The Divine Comedy, to which he had devoted his entire life. Beckett explored passages in Purgatorio ignored by writers in the nineteenth century, and he wrote novels and short stories around his favourite character in the poem, a razor-sharp, slothful glutton called Belacqua, a Florentine lute maker and friend of Dante. The pilgrim finds Belacqua in the antechamber of Purgatory sitting in a foetal position, not bothering to climb the mountain, and waiting for the heavens to revolve around him until his sentence has been completed. The friends exchange witty barbs. Belacqua says to Dante: ‘You go on up you are so vigorous,’ to which his friend smiling replies: ‘why are you sitting just here? Are you waiting for a guide, or have your old habits claimed you again?’140 However, what Beckett takes from Belacqua’s waiting and his sentence, and those of all the inhabitants of Inferno and Purgatorio, which he saw as an extension of Hell, is the notion of a remorseless justice with no possibility of deliverance or even death. Beckett’s first short story in a collection entitled More Kicks than Pricks (which is a phrase taken from one of Dante’s letters): ‘It is hard to kick against the pricks’141 was called ‘Dante and the Lobster’; written in 1934, it features Belacqua Shua, a Dublin student of Dante, watching his mother boil a lobster and asking her why it must be boiled alive, echoing a question he will put to his Italian literature tutor: ‘why not pity and piety down below?’ The answer of course is lobsters have to be boiled alive, the quiet actions of Franz Kafka’s inexplicable and implacable higher justice. The predominant theme of Beckett’s short stories and plays is waiting with no real hope. He brings a twentieth century sensibility of concentration camps and search lights to Dante’s Inferno 329

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and Purgatorio. One play involves three people trapped in urns, like shades, compelled by a sinister, inquisitorial light (equivalent to Dante’s inquisitive pilgrim) to recount their sufferings, which ends with repetition and circularity. All of Beckett’s characters wait, for Godot, for death, with no real hope, or hint of Paradise, inhabiting the purgatorial world of stasis, of non-being or nothingness that had been expressed in the device of Valentina, the duchess of Orleans: ‘There is nothing more for me.’ The themes of guilt, penance, punishment and waiting dominate Eliot and Beckett’s adaptations of The Divine Comedy, but James Joyce, brought up as a Roman Catholic, and as a student of Thomas Aquinas, was more closely tuned to Dante’s religious outlook and responded to his love of life. He saw himself, living in Trieste, as a fellow exile, and he wanted to do for early-twentieth century Catholic Dublin, with its Marian piety, and clerical simony, what Dante did for thirteenth century Florence.142 Joyce, with his scholastic, Catholic background, saw more clearly than the nineteenth century Romantics, Dante’s moral and philosophical standpoint. In Dubliners he consigns his fellow citizens, trapped in a red brick labyrinth, to the same lifeless, paralysed lives shared by Dante’s shades outside Hell and Eliot’s London clerks. The purposeful journey of Dante's pilgrim is always towards the East, towards the high altar and the elevated Host; but Joyce's characters, despite their occasional epiphanies which transform the daily bread of their existence, and their dreams of self fulfilment and eastern adventures outside Ireland in Europe and beyond, are ultimately forced to confront their own mortality by looking westwards towards the Celtic hinterland and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Joyce’s epic, Ulysses, is, like The Divine Comedy, a journey conceived when the author was in his mid-thirties, Dante’s age when he began his descent into the wood, a point underlined by Joyce’s quotation of the opening lines of Inferno: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ (In the middle of our journey in life). Both journeys involve a search for a surrogate father. Joyce understood that the turning points in Dante’s pilgrim’s life are brought about by encounters with substitute father figures (his usurer father, Alighiero the moderate Guelph is never mentioned) and that his emotional spiritual and moral growth is fostered by his intellectual mentors Virgil and Ser Brunetto and his warrior ancestor Cacciaguida; But with clear words and precise language did that paternal love reply, hidden and shining with its own smile.143 Joyce’s Stephen Dedelus is also searching for a father and finds him in his opposite, the scientifically minded, down to earth, Leopold Bloom, who is looking to replace the son who died at the age of eleven. Not that any of this is explicit: their meeting near the end of the novel is low key and consists of small talk. Joyce’s intellect and ego was almost as massive as Dante’s, and this perhaps explains his ambition to absorb and digest The Divine Comedy so completely that it pervades his entire novel, while not being anywhere directly apparent (Dante did something similar with Saint Augustine and Chaucer with Boccaccio). Adopting Dante’s use of multiple linguistic registers, Joyce approached the 330

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story of Francesca and Paolo from the perspective of the cuckolded husband, Gianciotto (Lame John) Malatesta who murdered his younger brother, Paolo, and his sister-in-law, Francesca, in the character of the cuckolded Leopold Bloom, who triumphs over his rival, Blazes Bolan, by abstaining revenge and instead demonstrating the superiority of intellect over passion. The son and the father, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are conceived as twin aspects of the character of Ulysses, as depicted by Homer and Dante, and the conflicting poles of Dante’s Gemini personality. Dedalus, the restless exile, represents Dante’s pride and intellectual curiosity, evoked so strongly when he meets the shade of Ulysses, the restless wanderer who turned his back on family and home. Bloom, however, represents Homer’s Ulysses, who places wife, son and home above everything and returns to Ithaca. These are the values that the pilgrim, Dante, strives for in his battle with his pride as he moves towards his legitimate home beyond the ‘sacred mountain’ of Purgatory, drawn up its slopes by ‘my lady’s eyes’. The figure of Beatrice too is deeply embedded in the novel. Stephen, like the young Dante of Vita Nuova, aspires, through idealized love of a woman, to become a poet, and for Bloom, his wife, Molly, is a domesticated, earthy version of Beatrice, closely identified, like Beatrice, with a mountain (Gibraltar), gardens, flowers, the ocean and the empyreal rose of the Virgin Mary: I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of Heaven there is nothing like nature the wild mountains the sea and the waves rushing— and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair—he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes. 144 It is Molly, the rose of this domestic paradise, who awaits the twin aspects of Ulysses/ Dante as they emerge from the darkness of Dublin’s Nighttown, symbolically joined in Bloom’s garden in the early dawn of the Ithaca chapter. Dante emerged from the darkness of Inferno in the dawn to see the ocean, betokening his ultimate journey home to Beatrice: The dawn was overcoming the mourning hour, which fled before it, so that from afar I recognized the trembling of the waters,145 and he sees the early morning stars, his first glimpse of his journey to Heaven: My leader and I entered on that hidden path to return to the bright world; and, … up we climbed, he first I second, until I saw the beautiful things the heavens carry, through a round opening. And thence we came forth to look again at the stars.146 331

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Stephen and Leopold experience a similar epiphany when they see the early morning stars: What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden? The heaven tree of stars hung with humid night blue fruit.147 What Joyce takes from Dante in Ulysses is the depiction of a life in terms of a pilgrimage, in which the conflict between devotion to a woman and intellectual pride and curiosity leads to a realization of the power of love in all its forms. Joyce compresses the journeys of Ulysses and Dante into a single day (the remote possibility of the whole of Dante’s epic being a dream would later inspire his writing Finnegan’s Wake), and he gives Dante’s pilgrimage a comic, domestic turn. Nevertheless, he similarly shows the purgative effects of rivers (the River Liffey replaces the rivers Lethe and Eunoe) and the sea to express a momentous vision of love in all its forms: love of a woman, friends, family, knowledge, city and home; a love of life: ‘by the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.148 The twentieth century writer who could claim to have had the closest affinity to Dante in terms of background was Seamus Heaney. He was brought up in a Catholic family in County Donegal, Northern Ireland, and his childhood was dominated by the sort of sectarian violence that blighted Dante’s Tuscany: Belfast, where Heaney attended Queen’s University, was, after 1968, subjected to the same sectarian violence and burned out houses that blighted Dante’s childhood in the 1270s as he walked through the rubble-strewn debris of Florence, legacy of the vengeance meted out by Ghibbelines and Guelphs on their opponents’ properties;149 the colours of the proimperial Ghibbelines, a white cross on a red field (the war banner of the empire), and the reversed red cross on a white field of the pro-papal Guelphs, who in the later thirteenth century split into the feuding factions of the Black Guelphs and White Guelphs, were echoed in Northern Ireland by the green-ribboned Catholics and Republicans, and the Orange of the Ulster Protestants and Loyalists. Like Dante, Heaney saw himself as an exile, although a voluntary one, leaving the troubles of his homeland to work in the ivy league universities of America and to live in the Irish Republic. He first read Dante in Dorothy Sayer’s translation around 1976, and in his 1979 collection, Field Work, he translated cantos 32 and 33 of Inferno featuring Count Ugolino of Pisa, a perpetrator and victim of the sort of sectarian violence Heaney grew up with in Ulster, and placed by Dante in the circle of Hell reserved for those who betrayed their party. In the same Field Work collection Heaney wrote an elegy, The Strand at Lough Bey, for his second cousin, Column McCartney, who was shot dead by Protestants, which begins with a description taken from the opening lines of Purgatorio of the ocean strand breaking on the little island, from whose oozy sand tall rushes sprout. At the close of the elegy

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he proffers consolation and peace without anger by alluding to Virgil’s using the dew sprinkled rushes to wash away the grime of Hell from pilgrim’s face when he imagines daubing his cousin’s face clean with moss as fine as the drizzle from the low overhanging clouds.150 Dante’s Purgatorio would be the inspiration for a more disturbing revisiting of this second cousin and other friends, relatives and fellow poets, which would involve a reassessment of Heaney’s relationship to Northern Ireland and indeed his identification with Dante. The encounter between the pilgrim and recently deceased citizens of Florence in Inferno had been preceded by the author’s pilgrimage to Rome in March 1300, which would have entailed fifteen days of penitential visits to the basilicas of Peter and Paul, in return for a remission of punishments in Purgatory. Heaney’s similar imaginary encounter with fellow inhabitants and relatives of Belfast is recalled in a long narrative poem, Station Island,151 describing a penitential visit to Station Island on Lough Dergh, County Donegal, the site of St Patrick’s Purgatory, which for 1500 years had been the site of visits from pilgrims attempting to commune with the dead. In his approach to the shrine the poet, following the traditional three-day fast, all night vigils, barefooted procession, and the repetition of prayers, experiences a series of reveries and visions of the dead. Like Dante he speaks with victims of violence, some displaying their wounds, but there are salient differences. Dante was an unwilling exile from Florence, and he was very much part of this violent feuding world and deeply identified with its factional politics: when he encountered Filippo Argentini, a Florentine Black Guelph with whom he quarrelled before May Day 1300 when the Blacks and Whites came to blows, he expresses to Virgil his desire to push him under the broth of the Styx,152 and in the second zone of Antenora, reserved for traitors to kindred he kicked the skull of Bocca Abati (who had cut off the hand of one of Dante’s fellow Guelphs, the standard bearer at the Battle of Montaperti), grabbing his hair, tearing out tufts in an effort to force him to reveal his identity;153 he even turned betrayer, failing in his promise to release, if he revealed his identity, a fellow Guelph, Brother Alberigo Manfredi, from the ice he was embedded in for poisoning several relatives at a feast because of a land dispute.154 Dante was a condottiere, a prior of Florence who had faced the prospect of burning at the stake; he was not detached, but fuelled with passion, so much so that his poem was credited with enflaming a feud and inspiring a vendetta killing. In the ninth bolgia, among the sowers of discord, Dante is delayed by the bridge trying to identify a relative who he thought ought to be among the damned, one Geri del Bello, a second cousin of Dante on his father’s side, and the only member of the family to be exiled by the Ghibbelines after Montaperti. Geri had been killed in April 1287 by Brodario, a member of the ancient Guelph Sacchetti family, and he was scornfully calling out and threatening his kinsman, the pilgrim, who explained to Virgil: His violent death, as yet unavenged … by anyone who shares the shame of it,155

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and he seemed to hope that someone would at last decide to wipe away the shame weighing on the Dante family honour. Forese Donati accused Dante in one of his tenzone of cowardice in failing to avenge an offence against his own father, and in 1310, twenty-three years after Geri’s murder, a member of the Sacchetti family was killed by the Alighieri, Geri’s nephews.156 By then the Inferno’s fame was such that it must have been seen to have been implicated in this vendetta killing because, according to Pietro Alighieri, Dante’s family, his brother and sons, sought a formal reconciliation with the Sacchetti family in 1342. Dante reserved his most passionate contempt for those who did not commit, who were neither hot nor cold and who lived without passion: the unfortunates who were never alive. He was a volatile Italian, no stranger to violent argument, and in the Convivio he used the analogy of taking a knife to cut out impurities in a trencher of bread: ‘the knife of my judgment’, prepared in the fires of the vernacular, ‘to strip away the impermissible and unreasonable’157 chief of which was a denial of the afterlife.158 This is all far removed from the world of grants and lectureships inhabited by Heaney, the detached, academic poet who maintained he had ‘no mettle for the angry role’.159 Signs of unease at this contrast appear during the penitential progression. A friend, a shopkeeper, William Strathean, shot in his shop in the middle of the night by Protestants, appears before him with his brow blown away above the eye. Heaney to his own surprise asks for William’s forgiveness, for having lived such an indifferent life in which he has been timid and circumspect in his involvement, to which his friend sardonically replies that this is all above his head: ‘forgive my eye’.160 The Irish poet, William Carleton (1794– 1869), like Ugolino a turncoat who ‘mixed the byre of the politics of Ribbonmen and Orange bigots, notices that in the poet’s smile: ‘there’s something in it that strikes me as defensive’. Another friend, dead at the age of thirty-two, whom Heaney had left in hospital to return to Dublin feeling as if ‘as usual I had broken covenants and failed an obligation’, says to him, when reflecting on their different destinies: ‘Ah poet, lucky poet’.161 However, it was Heaney’s meeting with his second cousin, Column McCartney, a bleeding, redfaced boy, plastered in mud, the subject of his earlier plangent elegy, that brings about a startling reassessment of his identity that involves an element of self-loathing. Column directly accuses him of a lack of commitment to the harsh realities of their homeland when he quietly recounts how he was murdered while Heaney chose to remain with the poets upon hearing the news, while his own flesh and blood ‘was carted off to Bellaghy’.162 Column points out that his cousin’s poetry and aesthetic values have sheltered him from the realities of the violence, so that in writing his elegy he only saw the beauty of his literary world and confused ‘evasion and artistic tact’.163 He therefore accused him, almost as much as he accused the Protestant who shot him through the head, because he conscripted even such a savage and partisan work as The Divine Comedy to this task of evasion, of attempting to atone for the way he whitewashed the ugly reality and ‘drew the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio’ to sweeten Column’s death with ‘morning dew’.164 Heaney had previously suggested criticisms of his lack of political commitment were the products of hating, anvil brains,165 but here no defence is offered. After hearing the voice of the ghost of Francis Hughes of the IRA, who died in prison on a hunger strike, he 334

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slips into a dream repenting of his unweaned life, sleepwalking with connivance, and he wakes full of self-reproach directed towards the bathroom mirror, like a drunk repelled at his own reflection, and towards his hatred of the place where he was born (Belfast, unloved as Dante’s Florence was loved) and everything that has made him biddable and unforthcoming.166 Repenting of his ‘unweaned sleepwalking life of connivance’, he takes, as a convalescent, the hand of ‘that least pious and greatest of Irish Danteans, James Joyce’, who advises him like Virgil, but Joyce offers no faith or commitment and suggests that Heaney takes himself less seriously by striking out on his own (an echo of Dante being advised by his ancestor to form his own party) to steal the English language and flee his past and country to embrace modernism, writing purely for art’s sake.167 The ocean beckons, but Heaney’s commitment is much closer to the Irish writer William Carleton who expressed his true vocation, which was to be like an earthworm of the earth, digging with his pen, as he traces everything that has gone through him.168 The sparkling seashore of Purgatory seduced both Ruskin and Heaney, but for neither man was there any possibility of following Dante’s skiff over the ocean to Paradise. Heaney may have made a purgatorial pilgrimage like Dante, but whereas Dante’s journey in Rome, across the bridge to Castel Angelo, led him ultimately to a vision of the heavens, Heaney’s journey to Lough Dergh, like Chaucer’s to Canterbury, led him deeper into the earth. The Belfast poet found his commitment: it was to the land, his and his people’s past, as an uncertain narrator of earth, with material preoccupations and delvings.169 His place was the damp land, not the sea and sky, and he came to accept his role as a purgatorial man for whom there was no Hell or Heaven, caught between worlds with no cause or resolution to commit to, like the seventh century king of Ulster, Sweeney, with whom he ended the Station Island collection. If Ruskin envied Dante’s centrality, Heaney envied the passion, commitment, violent anger, hatreds and loves of that most sophisticated and anvil brained of writers. Eliot, Beckett, Joyce and Heaney certainly went beyond the usual passages of Inferno that preoccupied nineteenth century writers, but Paradiso they largely ignored. Even Eliot admitted that he found Paradiso at times exciting and incomprehensible, and he ends his Little Gidding where he began on the edge of the Garden of Eden in Purgatory. The theme of fatherhood which dominates the first two canticles of The Divine Comedy is what primarily interested Joyce, and he too closes Ulysses on the symbolic shores of Purgatory, at No. 7 Eccles Street. One of Beckett’s characters, a tramp in the ninth monologue of the 1954 Texts for Nothing, as he contemplates death, paraphrases the last four lines of Inferno acknowledging: ‘There’s a way out there and the way to get there and pass out and see the beauties of the skies again’, but despite the fact that each canticle of The Divine Comedy ends with a sight of the heavens, Beckett also repeated his conviction that ‘there are no stars’.170 Becket must have sensed that the answer to this conundrum lay in Beatrice’s lecture on the origins of dark spots of the moon in the opening canto of Paradiso, which he unsuccessfully wrestled with from the 1930s to 1958. Light from God, from the Empyrean, turns the sphere of the fixed stars, generating through the influence of the angelic movers of the spheres, differentiation in the astrological faces 335

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and in the intensities of light as it penetrates all bodies to form the variegated face of the moon. But this radiant divine light of joy also shines through the pupils of the eyes and this is the vision of the heavens, the stars, that the pilgrim follows in the eyes of Beatrice: And the heaven made beautiful by so many lights takes the image from the profound mind… Because of the happy nature from which it derives the mixed power shines through the body Like gladness through the pupil of a living eye.171 Dante’s vision of the stars was not won without a struggle with the earth’s gravity. When he is reunited with Beatrice in the Garden of Eden on the threshold of Paradise, she reminds him of his betrayal of her and of his destiny, when he was pulled down by earthly affairs. This refers to a period after 1295 when, instead of following the path of mystical poetry and the myth of Beatrice, indicated at the end of Vita Nuova when he promised to write about Beatrice in the way no other woman had been written about, he wrote sensual and erotic love poetry to several women. He also followed the path of his mentor, Brunetto Latini, who died in Florence in 1394, and combined his learning with practical involvement in government and civic affairs, joining the physicians and apothecaries guild in 1295; representing his sestiere in an inner council of capitano del popoli from 1295 to 1296, and allowing himself to be conscripted by the Cerchi party for the office of prior in 1300, thereby showing himself to be a party man, entangled in the feud between the Cerchi and Donati clans that dominated the sestiere of San Piero Maggiore throughout the 1390s. In his writing Dante followed Brunetto by contributing to Florentine civic life, addressing the civic disputes of the decade by writing in the Convivio on nobility and what was required in the behaviour of the Florentine aristocracy. Even the early cantos of Inferno, possibly first conceived in Florence before his exile, retain these civic preoccupations. The few dead souls he meets are all Florentine nobles whose extravagance, ostentation, pride, greed and lust show the way the new nobility had declined from the charm and courtesy of their forbears and the ideals of an intellectual nobility, which were dependent not on wealth and birth but the nobility of spirit outlined in the Convivio, and which were shared by Guido Cavalcanti.172 In other words Dante was being drawn to the centre of the earth to address the common weal in ways that Brunetto and Cicero would have approved, and this ultimately led to his exile and the feeling of being lost in a maze without a sight of the stars, which is captured in the opening lines of Inferno. He is led from this labyrinth by Virgil (it is likely that Dante was re-reading the Aeneid at the time he abandoned the writing of Convivio).173 His pilgrimage, from the moment he meets Beatrice on the edge of this world, is an educative process in which he is encouraged to look up at the stars, the heavens, and the result is a healing of the rift in his mind, enabling him to write a poem that integrated the contrasting inspirations of the earth and the heavens. In none of the works of Beckett, Eliot, Joyce or Heaney is there any hint of entering these heavens, or any sense of the transcendence achieved in Dante’s third canticle of 336

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Paradiso, which has largely been ignored since the fifteenth century. For this reason the most beguiling lines from The Divine Comedy are those that close each canticle and which was first noted by Bertoldi in 1416,174 The glimpse of the stars has teased and beguiled readers from the fourteenth century to the present day. They have consoled the bereaved with glimpses of eternity: Christine de Pisan after the death of her husband gasped with wonder at the signs of the zodiac, and a widowed Coluccio Salutati concluded his Labours of Hercules with his hope for a dwelling among the stars. For Dante the choice was simple: eyes fixed on the earth below or upwards and he urged readers of Il Convivio to mount their ‘eyes heavenwards above the mud of your stupidity’.175 In one of his Eclogues written in Ravenna, Dante, imagining his return to Florence in triumph, wrote that ‘the dwelling among the stars shall be revealed in my song as the infernal realm below’. However for twentieth century readers and followers there really was no such choice, just the pull of the earth. Inferno ends: ‘And thence we came to look again at the stars’;176 this is as far as Dante’s modernist readers could go; Purgatorio ends: ‘I returned from the most holy wave refreshed as new plants are renewed with new leaves pure and made ready to rise to the stars’,177 something his twentieth century readers were unable to do, and Paradiso ends: ‘my desire and the will were turned, … by the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ (l’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stele),178 a concept which was beyond the reach of Virgil who ends his three poems with shadows (umbrae)179 and beyond the reach of modern readers and this was at the heart of the collision of the worlds of Dante and the early Renaissance. This quartet of exiled writers, revered Dante, and considered him to be their infinitely greater master. However there is, in their writings, no actual collision with Dante’s world, no conflict of values, no dialogue about the nature of reality, or contrasting ideas about women, the cosmos or the past, which is what we get in the immediate aftermath of the circulation of The Divine Comedy and Dante’s popularity in the period between 1370 and 1450. It is only here, in English cultural life, that we can see a collision between worlds and a reaction, to all three canticles of The Divine Comedy, a real dialogue as two very different worlds, much closer in time, collided and these works of the early English Renaissance share with all the great modernist works of the twentieth century an acquiescence to the gravitational pull of the earth.

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Figure 12  Gustave Dore drawing of 1869: Over London by Rail from London a Pilgrimage (public domain).

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NOTES

Prelims 1

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice in Three Volumes (orig. published 1851–3, J. M. Dent and Sons: New York), vol. iii, sec. lxvii.

2 Dante, Il Convivio (Aonia edizioni Raleigh, 2020), bk. 1, 13. 3

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Vol 1 Inferno, transl. Robert Durling (Oxford: OUP, 1996), Canto 34, ll. 136–40.

Introduction 1

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Vol. 2, Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), canto i, ll. 118–20.

2

James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992), 7.

3

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Vol. 3 Paradiso, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Canto 2. ll 130–1, 142–4.

4 Dante, Il Convivio (The Banquet) transl. Richard H. Lansing (New York, 1990), bk 1. 5

Larry Scanlon and James Simpson, eds., John Lydgate Poetry Culture and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 7.

6

Jonathan Hughes, ‘Stephen Scrope and the Circle of Sir John Fastolf ’, in Medieval Knighthood IV, ed. C. Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), 109–46.

7

Nick Havely, Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts from the Fourteenth-Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 35–6; La Traducio del Dante de Lengua toscana en verso castellano (Burgos, 1515).

8

John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: J. Charlewood, 1576), 485b; John Bale, iIlustrium maioris Britanniae Scriptorium (1557–9) i, 377.

9

David Wallace, 'Dante in England' in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and Wayne Storey (Dante Society of America: Italian Academy, 2003) 422, 422–31.

10 For a more detailed historical survey of Dante’s British readers in this period, see Havely, Dante’s British Public. 11 Shelley, Defence of Poetry, written in 1821 and published in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Byshe Shelley ed. Eward Moxon (London: Dover Street, 1840). 12 Oscar Kuhns, ‘Shelley’s Influence on Dante. His Admiration of the Poet of Light and Love’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 13, no. 6 (1898), 161–5. 13 Rodney M. Baine, ‘Blake’s Dante in a Different Light’, Dante Studies, vol. 105 (1987), 113–36; Ralph V. Billingheimer. ‘Conflict and Conquest Creation: Emanation and the Female in Blake’s Mythology’, transl. Ralph Manheim Modern Language Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (2000), 93–120.

Notes 14 Antonella Braida, Dante and the Romantics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Joseph Luzzi, ‘Founders of Italian Literature: Dante Petrarch and National Identity in Ugo Foscolo’, in Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality Identity and Appropriation, ed. Aida Audeh and Nick Havely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13–29; Havely, Dante’s British Public, 129–38. 15 Havely, Dante’s British Public, 163–74. 16 W. E. Gladstone, ‘Did Dante Study in Oxford’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 31 (1892), 1032–42. 17 Tony Robbins, ‘Tennyson’s Ulysses. The Significance of the Homeric and Dantesque Backgrounds’, Victorian Poetry, vol. ii, no. 3, (1973) 177–93; Edward Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale, 1957). 18 Nicola Crisafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot and the Alternative Models of the Commedia’ (Oxford: D.Phil, 2018), 27 ff; Crisafi identifies two contradictory impulses in the Commedia conforming to Freud’s pleasure principle: the longing for the end (death) and the distractions of alternative narratives (life). 19 Havely, Dante’s British Public, 163. 20 Andrew Thompson, ‘George Eliot’s Borrowings from Dante: A List of Sources’, George EliotGeorge Henry Lewes Studies, vol. 44 (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania. State University Press, 2003), 26–74. 21 A. Thompson, ‘Dante and Moral Choice in Felix Holt’, Modern Language Review, vol. 86, no. 3 (1991), 553–66. 22 Henry Clark Barlow, Critical, Historical and Philosophical Contributions to the Study of the Divina Commedia (London: Edinburgh Williams and Norgate, 1864). 23 Tutto le opere di Dante Alighieri (Oxford: Stamperia dell’universita, 1894). 24 Edward Moore, Studies in Dante First Series Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896); Studies in Dante Second Series Miscellaneous Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889); Studies in Dante Third Series Miscellaneous Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). 25 See the concluding chapter. 26 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Vol. 1 Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), i, 1–3. 27 Augustine, Confessions vi, 21. 28 St Bonaventure, Breviloquium, Prologue 6.4. 29 Dante, Monarchia, ed. Enrico Rostagna Le opere di Dante (London: Weidenfield and Nutton, 1955), 3. 48. Note the appearance of the lion in Inferno 1, 46–8. 30 Purgatorio, 32, 100–1. 31 Inferno i, 4–9. 32 Lawrence Warner, ‘The Dark Wood and the Dark Word in Dante’s’, Commedia, Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (1995), 449–78. 33 In the case of The Divine Comedy such exegesis goes back to the earliest commentators immediately after Dante’s death.

Chapter 1 1 340

William Blake, Preface to Milton in The Poetical Works (1908). (Originally published 1810, Musaicum, 2017).

Notes 2

Inferno xxi, 112–14.

3

Christ’s Incarnation and death are traditionally ascribed to 25 March and this has been taken by some scholars to be the date of Dante’s descent into the underworld.

4

Inferno xviii, 28–30.

5

Ibid., iii, 56–7.

6

Ibid., 19, 52–3. Dante’s denunciation of simony contributed to his persona as prophet. In the circle of the simoniacs in Hell where popes Boniface VII and Clement V are destined to join Nicholas III, the pilgrim remembers breaking an anaphora of holy water to save a child from drowning and realizes he was repeating an action of Jeremiah who denounced simony. Santagata, Dante, 283. Boniface (Benedict Caetani) spent time in England in 1291 as a cardinal pledging papal support for Henry.

7

Inferno xxi, 112–14. Marco Santagata, Dante: The Story of His Life, trans. Richard Dixon (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard, 2018), 120, on the basis that March 25 is traditionally seen as the date of Christ’s death, but the evidence of the text supports Holy Thursday and Good Friday of 1300 which falls on 7 and 8 April.

8

Teodolinda Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 114.

9 Santagata, Dante, 221–2. 10 Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, ‘Dante, Purgatorio 2, and the Jubilee of Boniface VIII’, Dante Studies, vol. 122 (2004), 1–28. 11 Santagata, Dante, 117–25; Havely, Dante, 30; Boccaccio, Trattatello in Laude di Dante, trans. as Life of Dante by P. Wicksteed and ed. W. Chamberlain (London, 1904, repr. Oneworld Classics, 2009), ch. 14, 57–8. 130–45. 12 Inferno, viii, i. 13 Santagata, Dante, 174–5. 14 Inferno, xxiv, 145. 15 Purgatorio, viii, 124–5. 16 Santagata, Dante, 191. 17 Ibid., 117–25; Nick Havely, Dante (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 30; Boccaccio, Trattatello in Laude di Dante, ch. 14, 57–8. 18 Henry’s son, King John of Bohemia, was killed at the battle of Crecy. 19 Santagata, Dante, 235–75. 20 Ibid., 232; Inferno, xxxiii, 137–41. 21 Santagata, Dante, 259–60. 22 Epistole xii, 9. Testo critico della Societa Dantesca Italiana (Florence: Societa Dantesca Italiana, 1960), ed. Ermenegildo Pistelli, transl. Paget Toynbee. Princeton Dante Project. 23 Ibid., 299. 24 Havely, Dante, 227. 25 Anna Pegoretti, ‘Early Reception until 1481’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s Commedia, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Simon Gilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 250. 26 Paradiso, xxv, 1. 27 Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ch. 8. 28 Santagata, Dante, 315. 341

Notes 29 Havely, Dante’s British Public, 262. 30 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stamford: Stamford University Press, 1997), 24. 31 Robert Hollander, ‘Dante and His Commentators’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 226–36. 32 Benvenuto da Imola, Benvenuti de Rambaldis de Imola Comentum super Dantis Aldigherij Comoediam, vol. 4. ed. J. P. Lacaita Florentiae: G. Barbera, 1887, 318–18. At the end of the poem St Bernard says, ‘The time is fleeting that holds you asleep.’ Paradiso 32 139–42. 33 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 227. 34 Santagata, Dante, 7. 35 Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, transl. J.F. Wells in The Age of Bede, ed., D.H. Farmer (A. Harmondsworth, 1983). 36 Robert Easting The Date and Dedication of the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patrici, Speculum (1978) 778-83. 37 James Clark, ‘Nicholas Trevet’, The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 38 The Revelation of the Monk of Eynesham, ed. Robert Easting (Oxford: OUP, reprinted 2002 from London: EETS OS, 1869); A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957–9, i, 627. For text, see H. E. Salter, Cartulary of Eynsham, (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society Clarendon Press, 1907–8), vol. ll, 257–371; Mathew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, (London: Rolls Series, 1872–80) ii, 260, 274, 423. 39 Richard Rolle, Incendium amoris, ed. M. Deanesly (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915); The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life, ed. R. Harvey (London: EETS, 1986). 40 Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole and Materials for His Biography (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1927); Cotton MS Tiberius AXv ff.181–92r. Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), 208–46. 41 Inferno, i, 10–12. 42 Paradiso xxxii, 139–40. 43 Michele Barbi, Problemi di critica dantesca (Florence: Sansoni, 1934); Hollander, Dartmouth Project http://dantedartmouth.edu. 44 Inferno xxxiv, 25. 45 Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Dante: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 144; Dante, Inferno, i, 11–12. 46 Inferno, xvi, 124. 47 Robert Hollander, Dante A Life in Works (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 100–3. 48 Barolini, Undivine Dante, 144–61. 49 Inferno, i, 7–9. 50 Cristafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 185 ff. 51 Albert Russel Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 384. 52 Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame in The Riverside Chaucer ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 2155–8; Teresa A Kennedy, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Chaucer’s Journey from the House of Fame to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, in Chaucer and Italian Culture, 218–25. 342

Notes 53 Kennedy, ‘Imitation to Invention’, 234. 54 Ibid., 144–61. 55 Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall and K. B. Locock (London: EETS, 1899–1904), 77, 83, 93; Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen and Company, 1961) 124. 56 Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ll, 12, 208. 57 Ibid., 9604. 58 C. C. Willard, ‘The Manuscript Tradition of the Livre des Trois Vertus and Christine de Pizan’s audience’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1966). 59 Convivio 2. 14. 60 John Plummer, The Last Flowering: French Painting in Manuscripts 1420–1530 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, Oxford University Press, 1982); Bodl Lib MS Laud fo. 32. 61 A. G. Little, ed. Fratris Thomae vulgo dicti de Eccleston: tractatus De Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951) 58–61; Havely, Dante’s British Public, 13–14. 62 Havely, Dante’s Public, 12–13. 63 Ibid., 12. 64 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1945. 65 Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ch. 16. 66 Santagata, Dante, 259. 67 Familiares XXI, 15; Pegoretti, ‘Early Reception until 1481’ in The Cambridge Companion to Commedia, 251. 68 Havely, Dante’s Public, 22. 69 Ibid., ch. 28. 70 Richard Cavendish, ‘Cola Di Rienzo Prolaims Himself “Tribune of Rome”’, History Today, vol. 47 (Issue 5 May 1997). 71 Dante, Monarchia, ed. and trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). L. J. Macfarlane, ‘The Life and Writings of Adam Easton OSB’ (PhD diss., University of London, 1955). 72 Havely, Dante’s Public, 27–8. 73 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 53. 74 R. Weiss suggests Whethamstede on this 1423 visit knew Leontius Pilatus the translator of Homer into Latin, from which Whethamstede quoted; R. Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century (3rd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 33. 75 On Whethamstede’s possible knowledge of the Monarchia see Margaret Harvey, ‘John Whethamstede, the Pope and the General Council’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society. Essays in Honour of F.R.H. DuBoulay, ed. C. Barron and C. Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985). 76 Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362–1420 Portrait of an Expatriate Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 11. 77 Giuliano Tanturli, ‘Il disprezzo per Dante dal Petrarca al Bruni’ in Rinascimento, vol’ in Rinascimento, vol. ii, no. 25 (1985), 188–219; Eugenio Garin, ‘Dante nel Rinascimento’ in Rinascimento, vol. ii, no. 7 (1967), 3–28; Michele Zanobini, ‘Per un Dante Latino’. The Latin Translation of the Divine Comedy in the Nineteenth Century’ (DPhil, Baltimore, Maryland, 2016), 14. 343

Notes 78 Ronald Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, The Life, Works and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), 314–15. 79 Purgatorio xvi, 70–2, 58–83; Inferno vii, 73–96; Coluccio Salutati, De fato et fortuna, ed. Concetta Bianca (Florence: Olschiki,1985), 18–19; Zanobini, ‘Per un Dante Latino’, 21; Stefano Ugo Baldassari, ‘Coluccio dantista e traduttore’, in Umanesimo traduzione da Petrarca a Manetti (Cassino: Universita degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, 2003) 61–3; Francesi Bausi, ‘Coluccio traduttore’ in Medioevo e Rinascimento xxii’ (2008) 34–57. 80 Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, 336, 81 Ibid., 380, 385. 82 Jonathan Hughes ‘Thomas Arundel’, The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 83 Domenico Vittorini, ‘Salutati’s Letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury’, Modern Language Journal, vol. 36 (1952), 373–7. 84 Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Reevaluation (Norman Oklahoma: Pilgrim, 1984) 4. 85 Chaucer, General Prologue in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. G. Benson (3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson. All subsequent quotations from Chaucer are from the Riverside Chaucer. 86 Chaucer, Clerk’s Prologue ll. 26–38. 87 Chaucer, Friar’s Tale, 1515–30. 88 Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Tale, 1125–30. 89 Havely, Dante’s Public, 31; Harvey, The English in Rome, ch. 11. 90 David Wallace, Geoffrey Chaucer. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. 91 Chaucer Life Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 40. 92 Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, 519–20. 93 R. J. Mitchell, ‘English Student Life in Early Renaissance Italy’, Italian Studies, vol. VII, no. 1 (1952); R. Weiss, ‘Per la consoscenza di Dante in Inghilterra nel quattrocento’, Giornale storico della letteratura Italiana, vol. 108 (1936), 357–9; James Simpson, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven: Yale University of Press, 2006), 55–86; Nick Havely, ‘The Italian Background’ in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 314. 94 Havely, ‘The Italian Background’, 315–17; Simpson, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, 55–85;David Walker, ‘Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and J. Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36–57; Piero Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 115–39; Schless, Chaucer and Dante; Richard Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante Allegory and Epic Theatre in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 95 Santagata, Dante, 41. 96 William T. Rossiter, ‘Chaucerian Diplomacy’, in Chaucer and Italian Culture, ed. Helen Fulton (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), 17–44. 97 Chaucer Life Records, 30. 98 Helen Bradley, ‘Italian Merchants in London c. 1350–1450’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1992; Robert Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Marion Turner, Chaucer a European Life (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 146–65. 344

Notes 99

David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985), 5.

100 Ibid., 11–40. 101 Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); James Simpson, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, 55–85; Havely, ‘The Italian Background’, 313–31. 102 John Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russel A. Peck (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Kalamazoo Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), liber vii, 2329–37; Elisabetta Tarantino, ‘The Dante Anecdote in Gower’s Confessio Amantis Book VII’, The Chaucer Review, vol. 39, no. 4 (2005), 421. 103 Tarantino, ‘The Dante Anecdote’, 426; Il Novellino: The Hundred Old Tales, trans. Edward Storer (London: Routledge, 1926), 116. 104 Commento alla Divina Commedia D’anonimo Fiorentino del Secolo xiv, 3 vols (Bologna, 1868) 2: 262; Tarantino, ‘The Dante Anecdote’, 425. 105 Tarantino, ‘The Dante Anecdote’, 432. 106 R. A. Shoaf, ‘Noon Englissh Digne: Dante in Late Medieval England’, in Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, ed. Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 189–203. 107 Anon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkein and E. V. Gordon, revised Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925, 2nd ed. 1967), fit 27. 108 Havely, Dante’s British Public, Prologue 1–4; Berlin Staatsbibliothek MS Hamilton 2407. 109 Norman Davis ed., The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century Parts 1 and 2, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) August 1458 174–5. 110 William Worcester Itinerarium, (Itineraries), ed. and trans. J. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 69. 111 Magdalen College MS 198, a note signifying Worcester’s ownership is on the flyleaf fo, iiv. 112 Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 113 Emden, BRUC, 121. 114 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1735. 115 R. J. Mitchell, John Tiptoft, 1427–1470 (London: Longmans, 1938). 116 Paston Letter, Margaret Paston to John Paston ii, vol. 2, 294. 117 BRUO, iii, 1513. 118 Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 143. 119 Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario iii (Charleston South Carolina: Nabu Press, 2011), 371–3; Zanobi, ‘Per un Dante Latino’, 15. 120 Cara Siobhan O’Rorke, ‘Latin as a Threatened Language in the Linguistic World of the Early Renaissance’ (MA. thesis, University of Canterbury, 2008), 52–5; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 168–70; Angolo Mazzocco, ‘Rome and the Humanists: The Case of Biondo Flavio’, in Rome and the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghampton, NY: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 186–95. 121 Emden, BRUO i, 372. 122 Ibid., iii, 1495.

345

Notes 123 T. Lombardi, ‘Giovanni Bertoldi da Seravalle tra i grandi cultori di Dante’, in Lectura Dantis Metteliana: Dante e il francescanesimo, ed. A. Mellione (Cava dei Tirreni: Avagliano, 1987) 97–124; on the influence of Benvenuto’s commentary on Serravalle, see M. Barbi, ‘La lettura di Benvenuto da Imola e i suoi rapporti con altri commenti’, Studi danteschi, vol. 18 (1934), 79–98. 124 Inferno, xxxiv, 121–4. 125 G. L. Hamilton, ‘Notes on the Latin Translation of, and Commentary on, the Divina Commedia, by Giovanni da Serravalle’, Annual Report of the Dante Society, No 20 (Boston Mass. 1901), 15–37. 126 Purgatorio, 1, 25–8. 127 Inferno, xx, 28. 128 Paradiso, xxvi, 117. There is a long tradition that Satan’s collision with the Earth excavated the dungeon of Hell although this contradicts the inscription of the gate that suggests Hell is eternal and created by God. It is safer to assume that God has foreseen Satan’s fall and the impact with the earth merely confirms the existence of the Hell that is lying in wait for the enemy of man. See Discussion by Thomas Rendall, ‘Did Satan’s Fall from Hell? A Persistent Misreading in Inferno xxxiv’, Forum Italicum, vol. 53, no. 91 (2019), 3–13. 129 L. Jenaro Maclennan, ‘The Fall of Lucifer and the Creation of Adam in the Early Dante Commentators’, Romanische Forschungen, 99 (1987), 139–51. 130 Havely, Dante’s British Public, 17. 131 G. L. Hamilton, ‘Notes on the Latin Translation of and Commentary on the Divine Commedia’ 15–37; Wallace, Premodern Places, 148. 132 James Yonge, The Governance of Princes (Secreta secretorum), ed. Robert S. Steele, in three prose versions of the Secreta secretorum (London, 1898, EETS Ex Ser. 72). 133 Darcy O’Brien, ‘Piety and Modernism: Seamus Heaney’s Station Island’, James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (1988), 51. 134 James Hamilton Wylie, The Reign of Henry the Fifth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerisity Press, 1914), vol. 1, 76. 135 Emden, BRUO, Bubwith 1, 294; Hallum 2 854. 136 Wylie, Henry the Fifth I, 76–81. 137 Santagata, Dante, 214. 138 Purgatorio, xvi, 38–42. 139 Durling note to Purgatorio 16, 42; Benvenuto da Imola, Commentum super Dante Alighieri, ed. C. P. Lacaita (Florence: Typis G. Barbera, 1887), 5 vols. 140 Wallace, Premodern Places, 172; Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1199-c.1300: The Commentary Tradition, A.J. Minnis, A.B Scott and D. Wallace eds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 450–8; 476–91. 141 See Dante’s Lyric Poetry, vols I and II, ed. and trans. K. Foster and P. Boyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) 1, no. 66; ‘Dante’s Cavalcantian Relapse: The “Pargoletto” Sequence and the Commedia’, in New Voices in Dante Criticism, ed. J. Luzzi, Special Issue of Dante Studies, 131 (2013), 73–97; Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the Vita Nuova 1283–1292, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and trans. Richard Lansing and Andrew Frisardi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); Dante, Vita Nuova, bilingual edition, ed. Dino S. Cervigni (Notre Dame Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) 142 Havely, Dante’s Public, 17. 143 A. Hudson, ‘The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401’, EHR, XC (1975), 1–18.

346

Notes 144 For Bertoldi’s commentary, see BL Egerton 2629 (a paper English manuscript of the fifteenth century which mentions Bubwith and Hallum). An edition of the translation and commentary was published by two Franciscans in 1891 and dedicated to Pope Leo XIII. Wallace, Premodern Places, 146. 145 Wallace, Premodern Places, 139–80. 146 John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, vol. 1 ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University of Press, 1964). 147 James Carley, ‘John Leland at Somerset Libraries’, Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, vol. 129 (1985), 143. 148 Wallace, Premodern Places, 153; Antonia Gransden, ‘The History of Wells Cathedral c 1090–1547’, in Wells Cathedral: A History, ed. L. S. Colchester (West Compton House: Open Books Publishing, 1982), 24–35. 149 Havely, Dante’s British Public, 18. 150 Manchester, Chetham’s Library MS Mun. A3.131; Rundle, ‘Republics and Tyrants’, 71; Coluccio Salutati, De laboribus Heraclis (The Labours of Hercules), ed. Bertold L. Ullman, 2 vols (Zurich: Artemis-Verlang, 1951). 151 L. Bruni, Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. P. Vitti (Turin: UTET, 1996). For English translation by Alan F. Nagel, see The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selecterd Texts, ed. G. Griffiths-J. Hankin-Thompson (Binghampton: State University of New York, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 85–90. 152 Gloucester’s copy of Petrarch’s De remediis fortunae MS Lat 10209. 153 Leonardo Bruni, Life of Dante in the Earliest Lives of Dante, trans. P. H. Wicksteed, ed. W. Chamberlain (London: P Oneworld Classics, 1904), 97. 154 John Pope-Hennessy, The Illuminations to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Giovanni di Paolo: Paradiso, vol. 3. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 155 Alessandra Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth Century England: The Case of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 156 Oxford Bodl Lat misc. d. 145, containing the Latin translation of the Corbaccio and Bruni’s translation of the tale of Tancredi from the fourth geonata of the Decameron, depicting the love of Tancred’s daughter of Giuscardi and the father’s punishment, may be a copy of Humfrey’s manuscript (Paris BnF Ms fr. 12421). D. Rundle, ‘Manuscripts Once Owned (or Otherwise) by Humfrey Duke of Gloucester’, online publication. September 2010. 157 Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio A History in Books (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 76. 158 Lydgate’s, Fall of Princes in 4 vols ed. Henry Bergen EETS, Extra Series, 121 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), iv, 136–40; Herbert G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (University of London: Athelone Press, 1957), 7. 159 Santagata, Dante, 181–5. 160 Fall of Princes i, Prologue 303. 161 Convivio iv. 162 Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, 1125–7. 163 Alastair Minnis, ‘“Dante in Inglissh”: What Il Convivio Really Did for Chaucer’, Essays in Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2 (2005), 97–116. 164 Anne Hudson, ‘Lollardy the English Heresy’, Studies in Church History, vol. 18 (1982), 261–83.

347

Notes 165 Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England and Vernacular Theology. The Oxford Translation Debate and the Arundel Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, vol. 70, no. 4 (1995), 822–64. 166 Ibid., 845. Ullerston cites 1 Corinthians 12.3: ‘No man speaking by the spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed’ which is what those who would ban Bible translation are saying. 167 The impact of the 1409 Constitutions can be overstated. Links have been made between the legislation and way Chaucer’s legacy was followed by Lydgate’s encyclopaedic and historical Fall of Princes, but Boccaccio after the Decameron also followed this with his De casibus illustrium virorum and De genealogia deorum. 168 Chaucer, Treatise on the Astrolabe, ll. 56–9; Wallace, Introduction to Chaucer, 27. 169 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 84. 170 Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate, A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961), 60. 171 Bodley MS 294; Jeanne E. Krochalis, ‘The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle’, The Chaucer Review, vol. 23, no. 1 (1988), 55. 172 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1609. 173 The Middle-English Translation of Palladius De Re Rustica, ed. Mark Liddel (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1896), Bk 2, ll., 480–4. (The Early English Text Society edition does not include the envoys at the end of each book. For Latin text of Palladius, see D. W. Singer, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland: Dating from before the XVI Century (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1928), vol. ii, 649. 174 Petrina, Cultural Politics; Bodl Lib Duke Humphrey D. H. d.2. The composition of the manuscript suggests it is a presentation copy. 175 George Ashby’s Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, EETS, Extra Series, 76 (London: Kegan Paul, 1899) ll., 61–3. 176 V. H. H. Green, Reginald Pecock: A Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), 16–17. 177 Emden, BRUC, 121. 178 Capgrave, A Chronicle of England, ed. F.C. Hingeston (London: Rolls Series, 1858). 179 Oxford Oriel College, MS 32; Peter Lucas, ‘John Capgrave OSA (1393–1464) Scribe and “Publisher”’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 5, no. 1 (1969), 1–35; J. C. Fredeman, ‘The Life of John Capgrave OESA’ (1393–1464), Augustiniana: Variorum, vol. 29 (1979), 194–237; MC. Seymour, John Capgrave Authors of the Middle Ages (Brookfield Hants: Variorum, 1996), 39–41; John Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Chronicles, ed. Peter Lucca, EETS, OS, 285 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 180 John Amundesham Annales monasterii sancti Albani a Iohanne Amundesham conscripta, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols, Rolls Series 28/5 (1870–1) ii, xxix; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, repr., 2019), ch. 2. 181 David R. Carlson, ‘Whethamstede on Lollardy: Latin Styles in the Vernacular Culture of Early Fifteenth-Century England’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 102, no. 1 (January 2003), 21–41. 182 Havely, Dante’s Public, 26, n. 76; Vitarum quorundam poetarum compendium in BL Cotton Titus DXX f 160. 183 Havely, Dante’s Public, 20; BL MS 26764. 184 BL 26764 for.47r, 50v, 51v, 68r. 185 Havely, Dante’s Public, 25; BL MS 2764, fo. 88r; R. Weiss, ‘Per la conoscenza di Dante in Inghilterra nel quattrocento’, Giornale storico della letteratura Italiana, vol. 108 (1936), 357–9. 348

Notes 186 Haveley, Dante’s Public, 20; BL MS Add 26764 fo. 79. 187 BL MS 2764, fos 79; 110v Weiss, ‘Dante in Inghilterra’, 357–9. 188 BL MS 27664, fo. 110v. Havely, Dante’s Public, 20–2. 189 Life of St Alban, ll 1122–8. 190 Paradiso, xii, 34–5 121–3. 191 Convivio 3. 14. 192 James Hannan, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (London: Icon, 2010) 167–80; John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, ‘The Science of Motion in the Middle Ages’, in Science in the Middle Ages ed. David C Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979), 212. 193 John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (London: Hambledon, 2007), 277. 194 Paradiso, xvii, 40–3; see also Boethius de Consolatione de philosopiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), ed. Douglas C. Langston (New York: W.W. Norton Critical Edition, 2009) 5.5 and Plato Timaeus, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 28. 195 Joel Kaye, A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 398–462. 196 Quoted in Maclennan, ‘The Fall of Lucifer’, 126; Kaye, A History of Balance. 197 Convivio 3. 4. 198 Kaye, A History of Balance, 398–462. 199 According to the Almageste of Ptolomey the length of the Earth’s shadow was 871,000 miles consistent with the supposed distance of Venus from the Earth. 200 William Woods, Chaucerian Spaces: Spatial Poetics in Chaucer’s Opening Tales (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 3. 201 Ibid., 61–2. 202 Ibid., 61–9; Emden, BRUO, i, 466; J. A. Weisheipl, ‘Early 14th Century Physics and the Merton School’ (Oxford, DPhil, 1957). 203 Dean P. Lockwood, ‘Two Thousand Years of Latin Translation from the Greek’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 49 (1918), 126. 204 Mirko Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare: storia di una questione umanistica (Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1984), 216–21. 205 O’Rorke, ‘Latin as a Threatened Language’, 52–5, 73; Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 168–70; Angolo Mazzocco, ‘Rome and the Humanists, ‘Roman and German Humanism 1450–1550’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 50 no. 3, (1997) 186–95 Prue Shaw in Reading Dante from Here to Eternity (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014), 215–16. 206 Pecock, The Repressor of over Much Blaming of the Clergy (Rolls Series no. 19, 1860), ii, 351–2, 357–8; Joseph M. Levine, ‘Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine’, Studies in the Renaissance, JSTOR, vol. 20 (1973), 118–48. For text of the Donation Coleman, Constantine Appendix, ii, 228–37; for the Vita Sylvestri Coleman, Appendix i, 217–27; B. Tierney, The Crisis in Church and State, 1050–1350; (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) 22, 142–4; Havely, Dante (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 42. 207 Nayar, Dante’s Sacred Poem, 120-36; Commento di Francesco Da Buti sopra La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri, vol. 2 (Nabu Press, 2010). 208 Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, 245.

349

Notes

Chapter 2 1 Bruni, Memoirs bk xii, 301. 2

Convivio, 4.5.

3

Inferno, xxvii.

4

Purgatorio, iii, 110–12.

5 Ibid., xxvii, 52–3. 6

Paradiso, xvi, 16–18.

7

Bruno Nardi, ‘La Tragedia d’Ulisse’, in Dante e la cultura medievale: Nuovi saggi di filosofia danmtesca, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1949), 153–65.

8

Paradiso, xxvii, 145-6.

9 Havely, Dante, 49. 10 Paradiso, xviii, 94. 11 Inferno, iv, 43. 12 Ibid., iv, 103. 13 John Freccero, ‘Dante’s Pilgrim in a Gyre’, PMLA, vol. 76, no. 3 (1961), 168–81. 14 Paradiso, ii, 127–32. 15 Dante, Monarchia, 1.12.6; 3.16.9–12. 16 Paradiso, vi, 53–4. 17 Inferno, xv, 73–8. Florence was believed to have been built by Caesar as a garrison town after the suppression of the rebellion. 18 Havely, Dante, 28. 19 Purgatorio, xxi, 111. 20 Ibid., xxi, 112–13. 21 Ibid., xxi, 134–6. 22 Ibid., vi, 88–9. 23 Convivio, 4.4. 24 Ibid., 4.5. 25 Virgil, Eclogues, trans. H. R Fairclough, Loeb Library vols 63 and 64 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916). 26 Epistole v 22 testo critico della Societa’ Dantesca Italiana, ed. Ermenegildo Pistella (Florence: Societa Dantesca Italiana, 1960). Princeton Dante Project. 27 Paradiso, vi, 55–7. 28 Ibid., xviii, 94. 29 Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). 30 Reynolds, Dante, 320–3. 31 Giuseppe Mazotta, ‘Life of Dante’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–4. 32 Purgatorio, xxxii, 100–3. 33 Michelangelo Picone, 'Ovid and the Exul Immeritus', in Dante for the New Millennium, 389–407. 350

Notes 34 Simon Sebay Montefiore, Jerusalem the Biography (London: Weiden and Nicholson, 2011), 325–31. 35 Paradiso, xxv, 64. 36 Ibid., xxxi, 34–6. 37 Ibid., xxxi, 7–11. 38 Richard Kay, ‘Dante’s Empyrean and the Eye of God’, Speculum, vol. 78, no. 1 (January 2003), 37–65. 39 Paradiso, xxxii, 16–17. 40 Ibid., xxxii, 119. 41 Martinez and Durling, notes 92–3 to Paradiso vi. 42 Paradiso, xix, 121–4. 43 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1792. 44 Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 201. 45 House of Fame, i, 143–4. 46 Purgatorio, ix, 22–30. 47 Victoria Flood, ‘The Prophetic Eagle in Italy England and Wales: Dante, Chaucer and Insular Political Prophecy’, in Chaucer and Italian Culture, 179. 48 The Parliament of Fowls, 383–95. 49 Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1. 50 Christopher Lindsey, 'Nation, England and the French in Thomas Walsingham's Chronica Maiora 1376-1420', (PhD, University York, 2015) 136ff. 51 Thomas Walsinghanm, Chronica Monasterii S. Albani Ypodigma Neustriae A. Thoma Walsingham Quondam Monaco Monasterii S. Albani Conscriptum, ed. H. T. Riley (London: Rolls Series, 1876). 52 Annales Monastereii S. Albani, vol. 1, 168–9. 53 BL Add MS 39848, Fastolf Paper 59; Calendar Closer Rolls HVI 1422–61 ed. C.T. Flower (London His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1947), iii, 476; R. Smith, ‘Aspects of the Career of Sir John Fastolf 1380–1459’ (Oxford DPhil, 1986). 54 Jonathan Hughes, ‘Stephen Scrope and the Circle of Sir John Fastolf: Moral and Intellectual Outlooks’, in Medieval Knighthood 1V, ed. C. Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (5th Strawberry Hill Conference, Woodbrige: Boydell, 1990), 130. 55 Calendar of Ancient Deeds, vol. VI, ed. H.C. Maxwell Lyte (London: Public Record Office, 1915), 2845, 287, 307. 56 Ibid., 284, 287, 307. Fastolf Paper 696. 57 London College of Arms MS Arundel 48 fo 126v. 58 The Fall of Princes, viii, 1483–4. 59 Paradiso, viii, 49–51. 60 MS Bodley Ashmole, 59; Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Serpent of Division (London, Henry Froude: Oxford University Press, 1910), Intr. note 4. 61 Witt, The Labours of Hercules, 380. 62 Paul Thoen and Gilbert Tournoy, ‘“Lucretia Lovaniensis”, the Louvain Humanists and the Motif of Lucretia’s Suicide’, Humanistica Louvaniensia, vol. 56 (2007), 87–119. 351

Notes 63 Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum, ed. Robert Steele (London: EETS, extra Ser. 74, 1898). 64 Johnson, J., F.C. and J. Rivington CPR 1399–1401 507; CPR 1399–1401, 178, 597; CPR 1409– 13, 208; Raphael Holingshead, Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (6 vols) (London, 1807). 65 Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 18 ff. Poggio presumably did not visit the library at Bury. 66 Thomas Hoccleve, Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’ and ‘Dialogue’, ed. J. A. Burrow (London: EETS o.s. 313, 1999), 2, ll., 561–2. 67 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 182. 68 Purgatorio, vi, 58–63. 69 Emden, BRUO, ii, 1232. 70 Weiss, Humanism in England, 27. 71 Kenneth Hotham Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester: A Biography (London: A. Constable and Company Ltd, 1907). 72 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 182. 73 MS Add 26764; Pearsall, John Lydgate, ch. 2. 74 The closest parallel would be with Thomas Gascoigne’s Loci e libro veritatum, but Gascoigne lacked Whethamstede’s classicism. 75 Weiss, Humanism, 73, 181. 76 Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 351; Bodl Ms Lat 8537, fo. 300; David Rundle, ‘Manuscripts Owned by Humfrey Duke of Gloucester’. 77 Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 340–87. 78 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 98–107; A. C. De La Mare, ‘Duke Humfrey’s English Palladius Ms Duke Humfrey d.2’, Bodleian Library Record, vol. 12 (1985), 39–51. 79 Petrina, ‘The Middle English Translation of Palladius’s De agriculturae’, in the Medieval Translator, Traduire au Noyen Age 8 ed., Rosalyn Voaden Rene Tixier Sanchez Roura and Rebecca Rytting (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 317–28; Bodley MS Duke Humfrey d2. 80 E. P. Hammond, ‘Poets and Patron in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Lydgate and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester’, Anglia, vol. xxvii (1914), 121–36. 81 Huntingdon Library MS HM 268 fo. 79vr; Montreal McGill Univ. Lib MS 143 fo. 4v; Sarah Louise Pittaway, ‘The Political Appropriation of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: A Manuscript Study of British Library MS Harley 1766’ (University of Birmingham PhD, 2011), 51; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1933), 16; Scanlon and Simpson, John Lydgate Poetry Culture and Lancastrian England, 8. 82 London College of Arms MS Arundel 48 fo. 126v. 83 Pearl Kibre, ‘The Intellectual Interests Reflected in the Libraries of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Journal of History of Ideas, vol. 7 (1946), 257–97. 84 Pearsall, John Lydgate, ch. 2 argues that Lydgate’s interest in antiquity was superficial, conventional and dominated by Christian allegory and morality and his pillaging classical mythology cannot be termed ‘humanism’ – a view challenged in my subsequent chapters. 85 Lydgate, Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. E. Sieper (London: EETS, ES, 84, 89, 1901–3, repr. 1965).

352

Notes 86

Caxton, in printing this work, claimed it was translated by the earl of Worcester, Tiptoft. This is probably a scribal error on the manuscript Caxton used. Tiptoft was a proficient Latinist and would hardly have deigned to translate from a French version.

87

BL MS Sloane 4.

88

BL MS Cotton Julius F VII fos 174–85v.

89

Epistle of Othea Translated from the French Text of Christine de Pisan by Stephen Scrope, ed. Curt F. Buhler (London: Oxford University Press, EETS 1970); Sandra L. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epitre Othea’: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI (|Toronto: Pontifical Inst. of Medieval Studies, 77, 1986).

90

Patrick Strong and Felicity Strong, ‘The Last Will and Codicils of Henry V’, English Historical Review, vol. xcvi (1981), 79–102.

91

Adolf F. Pauli, ‘Letters of Caesar and Cicero to Each Other’, The Classical World, vol. 51, no. 5 (1958), 128–32.

92

John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010); Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71–119.

93

Warwick would complain about Gloucester’s influence eleven months later, noting that in his absence the king was stirred from his learning.

94

Susanne Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) and the Italian Humanists (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 39 ff.

95

Nolan, ‘The Performance of the Literary: Lydgate’s Mummings’, in Scanlon and Simpson, John Lydgate, 169–202.

96 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 236; L. C. Y. Everest-Phillips, ‘The Patronage of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. A Reevaluation’ (York University DPhil thesis, 1963). 97

There is a reference in the prologue to Humfrey’s suppression of the Lollards in 1431.

98

Most of what I have to say about Lydgate’s interest in antiquity, his realistic Renaissance outlook and departure from Christian moralizing traditions, goes against the views of many Middle English scholars, especially Pearsall, John Lydgate.

99

Titi Livii Foro-Juliensis Vita Henrici Quinti, Regis Angliae, ed. T Hearne (Oxford, 1716); London Coll Arms MS Arundel 12 showing Humfrey’s arms in the illuminated capital; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 1307 – Early Sixteenth-Century (Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 211–12.

100 Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 74–7. There is only one surviving manuscript which also contains Frulovisi’s De republica dedicated to Gloucester, described by R. Weiss, ‘Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and Tito Livio Frulovisi’, in Fritz Saxl 1890–1948. A Volume of Memorial Essays from His Friends in England, ed. D. J. Gordon (London, 1957. The 1444 Oxford donation of Titus Livius’s de Republica probably contained the Humfroidos. 101 Lydgate, Epithalamium for Gloucester, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry N. MacCracken, Part 2 (London: EETS, Oxford University Press, 1911, 1934, 1961–2), ll., 78. 102 Emden, BRUO, ii, 484. 103 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, iv ll., 1424–5. 104 Epistolae Academicae Oxonsiensi, ed. H. Anstey, 2 vols (Oxford, 1898) i, 139. The letter probably refers to additional donations; Petrina, Cultural Politics, 236. 105 The extant manuscripts owned by Gloucester are Corpus Christi MS ccxliii (1423) written in Oxford in Latin and including Plato’s Phaedo and Meno followed by Gloucester’s autograph; Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Oriel College 32; Capgrave’s Commentary on 353

Notes Genesis; Magdalen Coll (1423) containing Ptolomey’s Cosmographia given to Oxford in 443, and BL Harley 1705 containing Candida’s translation of Plato’s Republic. See Rundle ‘Manuscripts Once Owned by Humfrey Duke of Gloucester’; A. Sammut, Umfredo duca di Gloucester e gli Umanisti Italiani Medioevo e Umanesimo 41 (Padova, 1980), 98–126; Peter J. Lucas, ‘John Capgrave O. S. A. (1393–1464), Scribe and Publisher’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 5, no. 1 (1969), 1–35. 106 Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester; Petrina, Cultural Politics; Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester; Faye Getz, ‘The Faculty of Medicine before 1505’, in The History of Oxford vol 2 Late Medieval Oxford, ed. Jeremy Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 403. 107 David Rundle, ‘Good Duke Humfrey: Bounder, Cad and Bibliophile’, online publication December 2013. 108 Paradiso, xix, 79–80. 109 Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philosophres, ed. Robert Steele EETS extra ser 66 (1894), 1174 ff. 110 John Whethamstede Registra quorundum abbatum monasterii S. Albani qui saeculo XV mo flouere, vol. 1 registrum abbatiae Johannis Whethamstede …., ed. Henry Thomas Riley, Chronica Monasterii S. Albani (Rolls Series, 1872), 313–14. My thanks to James Clark for this reference. 111 Inferno, iv, 67–9. 112 Beryl C. Platt, A History of Greenwich (Exeter: David and Charles, 1973); H. M. Colvin and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works Vol ii (London Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963), 949; P. W. Dixon, Excavations at Greenwich Palace 1970–71 (London: Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarian Soc., 1972); Cal Pat Rolls 1429–36, 240, 506. 113 Johanne Amundesham Annales Monasterii S. Albani, ed. H. T. Riley Rolls Series (London: Rolls Series, 1870), vol ii, 259. 114 Gesta Henrici Quinti (The Deeds of Henry V), ed. and trans. F. Taylor and J. S. Roskell (Oxford, Oxford Medieval Texts: Clarendon Press, 1975). 115 Most information on Lysurgus is from Plutarch. Individual lives were translated into Latin in the fifteenth century; Marianne Pade. The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in FifteenthCentury Italy (Renaissance Studies; 14 Copenhagen, 2007), 2 vols. 116 Gesta Henrici Quinti, 1–2. 117 R. Weiss, ‘Piero del Monte, John Whethamstede and the Library of St Albans Abbey’, EHR, vol. 60, no. 238 (1945), 399–406. 118 Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 92 ff. 119 Ibid.; CUL MS Gg i 34; for description, see David Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Writing and Their Reception in Europe c. 1400–1500’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1997), 324–7. 120 Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 93–7; CUL Ms Gg i 34; Rundle, ‘Republics and Tyrants’, 441–4. 121 Gloucester’s Declaracione … ayeinst thenenlargissement and deliveraunce of Charles, duc of Orliaunce, in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry VI, ed. J. Stevenson (2 vols in 3, Rolls ser., London 1861–4), ii, 440–51. 122 Worcester, Boke of Noblesse, 76–7. A clue to Worcester’s authorship provided in his son’s preface to Lambeth MS 506, a collection of documents illustrative of Bedford’s regency in France. 123 BL Royal MS 13 C. 354

Notes 124 Declaracione, ed. Stevenson, ii, 440–51. 125 Jonathan Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 245ff. 126 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 144; Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. 127 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Jonathan Barnes and Anthony Kelly (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014) bk viii. 128 John Russell’s Book of Nurture in the Babees Book. Aristotle’s ABC, ed. E. J. Furnival, (London: EETS, 1968), 105, 239; found in five manuscripts, one of 1540 contains Lydgate and Burgh’s version of the Secreta secretorum. 129 J. Huizinga, ‘An Early Reference to Dante’s Canzone “Le dolce rime d’amor”’, in England’, Modern Language Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (January 1922), 74–8. 130 Maurice Keen, ‘The Debate over Nobility in Dante, Nicholas Upton and Bartolus’, in A Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Commemoration of Dennis L.T. Bethell, ed. M. A. Meyer (London: Hambledon, 1993), 257–69. 131 George Keiser, ‘Practical Books for the Gentleman’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1400–1557, ed. L. Hellings and J. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 470–94. 132 Mario Borsa, ‘The Correspondence of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and Pier Candido Decembrio’, EHR, vol. xix (1904), 509–26. 133 Giovanni del Virgilio, Opera, Ecologue 1, 455; Erich Auerbach, Dante Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961, first publ. 1929), 98. 134 Santagata, Dante, 326–7. 135 Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, 1, 6224–51. 136 Palladius on Husbandrie, ed. Barton Lodge, EETS, OS, 52 and 72 (London, 1873) ll., 1080–4; 328–34; this is an edition of Bodley MS Add A.369 which has no prologue or the envoys requested by Gloucester. There are three surviving manuscripts. 137 Virgil, Georgics, trans. H. R. Fairclough (HR Loeb Classical Library volumes 63 and 64, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), bk ii, 278–82. 138 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 156. 139 Ibid., 18. 140 Ed. from MS Fairfax 16, E. P. Hammond, Modern Philology, vol. xxi (1924), 379–95; Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos c.1410–82 Lancastrian Poet (London: Hart-Davis, 1961), 132. 141 The Fall of Princes, iii, 4411–17. 142 Letters and Papers, Henry VI ii., 440–51. 143 Upton, De officio militari, ed. Edward Bysshe (London, 1654). 144 Purgatorio, xxvii, 53. 145 Ibid., xxii, 61. 146 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1495. 147 Saygin, Gloucester, 84; Epistolae Academicae Oxonsiensi, i. 64–5. 148 Chronica Monasterii S. Albani Chronicon Gestarum in Monasterio S. Albani Ad 1422–31 in Johanne Amundesham Annales Monasterii S. Albani, ed. H. T. Riley (London: Rolls Series, 1870), vol i 12, 16, 27, 33, 40, 65. The author an unknown monk was a court chronicler as well as a monastic chronicler; C. E. Hodge, ‘The Abbey of St Albans under John Whethamstede’ (Manchester University, PhD thesis, 1933), 143. 355

Notes 149 Clark, ‘Cult of St Alban’; for fraternal admissions, see BL Hard 3775 for 100–101r. 150 Johannis de Amundesham, Annales i, 12–13. 151 Fall of Princes, viii 2635–6. 152 Ibid., viii, 2635. 153 Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen (London: EETS Extra Series 97, 103, 106, and 126, 1906–35). 154 Havely, Dante’s Public, 21; BL Add MS 26764 fo. 110v; Dante, Paradiso, xx, 67–72. 155 John Lydgate, Saint Albon and Saint Amphibalus, ed. George F. Reinecke (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), Intro pp; xxx–xxxiii. 156 Described as Protomartyr of ‘Brutis Albion’, in St Alban and St Amphibalus, ed. George F. Reinecke, Early English Texts ii (New York, 1985), bk i, ll., 7 and ll., 167. See also The Life of St Alban and St Amphibell, ed. J. F. Van der Westhuizen (Brill: Leiden, 1974). 157 James G. Clark, ‘The St Albans Monks and the Cult of St Alban: The Late Medieval Texts’, in Martin Henig and Philip Lindley, eds British Archeological Association Transactions, vol. 24 (2001), 218–30. 158 The St Alban’s Chronicle 1406–1420, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937); J. G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and His Circle c. 1350–1440 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); J. G. Clark, ‘Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered: Books and Learning at Late-Medieval St Albans’, Speculum, vol. 77, no. 3 (2002), 848; Lydgate, Saint Albon and Saint Amphibalus. 159 Claudius E IV fos 334va–336 ob (the source of the printed edition). Another MS Bodl. 585 fos. 1–9. 160 Clark, ‘Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered’, 848. 161 Margaret Bent, John Dunstable, London: Oxford University Press (1981). 162 Testamenta Eboracensia ed. James Raine (Surtees Society 1834), vol. 2, 322. 163 Emden, BRUC, 126. 164 Life of St Albon, i, 163–72. 165 Ibid., i, 555–70. 166 Ibid., i, 605. 167 Emden, BRUO, iii 1967; North, Richard of Wallingford 277 ff. 168 Life of Saint Albon, Prologue, 63–75. 169 Ibid., ii 219–32. 170 Ibid., ii 575–81. 171 Ibid., ii, 572–81. 172 Ibid., i, 919–20. 173 Ibid., i, 940–5. 174 Ibid., ii, 1085–6. 175 Ibid., ii, 1196; 1206–17. 176 Ibid., ii, 1749–50 1762–9. 177 Ibid., ii 1762–9. 178 Jonathan Hughes, The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth Century England: Plantagenet Kings and the Search for the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Continuum, 2012), 117; Henry Duke

356

Notes of Lancaster, Le Livre de Seynt Medicines the unpublished devotional treatise of Henry of Lancaster, ed. E. J. Arnould (Oxford: Anglo Norman Text Society, 1940). 179 Deborah a Codling, ‘The Kingly Style of Henry IV: Personality, Politics and Culture’ (University London, PhD thesis, 2005); Humfrey’s copy is extant Stonyhurst College MS 24; A. J. Arnould, Le Livre de Seynt medicines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster (Anglo-Norman Text Society: Anglo Norman Texts, Oxford, 1940). 180 Life of St Alban i, 466–80. 181 Ibid., ii, 732. 182 Ibid., ii, 1586–92. 183 The Fall of Princes, ii 4484–7. Sarah Salih, Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019), 129. 184 Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrims: A Description of Rome c. 1450, ed. C. A. Mills, EETS, ss 3 (London: British Archeological Society of Rome, 1911), 27. 185 The pavis shield was an oblong shield, large enough to protect the entire body, which was used from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Life of St Alban, iii, 1499–540. 186 Ibid., iii, 1541–8. 187 Lindsey, 'Walsingham's Chronica Maiora', 122. 188 Dunstan Lowe, ‘The Symbolic Value of Grafting in Ancient Rome’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol. 140, no. 2 (autumn 2010), 461–88. 189 Book of Husbandrie, bk v, ll., 32–5. 190 Ibid., bk xi 86. 191 MS. Bodl Duke Humphrey D.d.2 ll., 1183. 192 Pat. Cal. Rolls 1446–51. 193 John Watts, ‘De Consalatu Stiliconis: Texts and Politics in the Reign of Henry VI’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 16 (1990), 251–60; BL MS Sloane 4 fo. 56 194 Paston Letter. no, 25. 195 C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘Politics and the Battle of St Albans, 1445’, Bulletin of Institute of Historical Research, vol. 33 (1960), 1–72.

Chapter 3 1 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics ed. Jonathan Barnes and Anthony Kelly (New Jersey: Princeton, 2014), bk ii. 2 Virgil, Aeneid, transl. H.R. Fairclough (Harvard Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1916), bk ii, 49. 3

Paradiso, i, 13, 19–20.

4

Convivio, 3.14.

5

Paradiso, viii, 1–6.

6

Purgatorio, ix, 37–9.

7

Ibid., xvii, 2–3.

8

Convivio, ch. 8, 16.

9

MS M775. The Pierpont Morgan Library, which came into the possession of Sir John Astely of the Paston circle; C. F. Buhler, Introduction to The Epistle of Othea, xix. 357

Notes 10 St John’s College Cambridge MS H.5; see Jane Chane, ‘Christine de Pizan as Literary Mother: Women’s Authority and Subjectivity in “The Floure and the Leafe” and “The Assembly of Ladies”, The City of Scholars in New Approaches to Christine de Pizan’, ed. M. Zimmerman and Dina de Rentiis (Berlin, and New York De Gruyter, 1994), 244–59; C. C. Willard, ‘The Manuscript Tradition of the Livre des Trois vertus and Christine de Pizan’s Audience’, Journal of History of Ideas, 27 (1966), 433–44. 11 Durling, Introduction to Purgatorio, 9–10. 12 See also Convivio, 4. 21. 13 Plato, Timaeus, 41–2 Boethius, de Consolatio Philosophiae, 3, metro 9. 14 Paradiso, iv. 15 James G. Clark, ‘Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered’, 832 ff; Bodley MS Douce 299; Bodl MS Rawlinson B 214 fols 1r-106r; Sylvia Federico, ‘Two Troy Books: The Political Classicism of Walsingham’s Ditis ditatus and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 35, no. 1 (2013), 137–77. 16 Thomas Walsingham, De Archana Deorum, ed. Robert A. Van Khuyve (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968). 17 Emden, BRUO, ii, 951. 18 Lambeth Palace MS 265; Sears Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (International Archives of the History of Ideas, 141, Brown University, 1995), 25 The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers: The Translations Made by Stephen Scrope, William Worcester and an Anonymous Translator, ed. Curt F. Buhler (London: EETS, Orig. Ser, No. 211, 1941). See also Buhler, Intro, xxxix–xlvi. 19 Colophon of CUL MS Dd ix 18. Another manuscript corrected by Worcester is Emmanuel Coll. Cambridge, MS. 1.2.10. Description by Buhler introduction to Dicts and Sayings, xxi–xxv; see M. R. James, Western Manuscripts in Emmanuel College Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904) 29–30. 20 Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, 18; London BL MS Cotton Julius VII, for 67v–68. 21 Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, 174. 22 BL MS Sloane 4. 23 Worcester, Itinerarium, 250. 24 Emden, BRUO, ii, 781; Magdalen College MS Latin 49. 25 Deno John Geanakoplos, Constantine and the West (Madison Wisconsin: University Wisconsin Press, 1989), 40. 26 BL Add MS 10334; BRUC, 191. 27 Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, 17. 28 Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, 119. 29 Weiss, Humanism, 98; M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts Other than Oriental in the Library of King’s College Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895); Epistolae Academicae Oxonsiensi, i, 246. 30 Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, 17; BL MS Royal 14 cvii; Oxford University Corpus Christi, 243. 31 C. T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 32 Candida’s translation of the Republic BL MS 1705; David Rundle, ‘Manuscripts Once Owned Humfrey Duke of Gloucester’.

358

Notes 33 Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester; Borsa, ‘Correspondence of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester’, 501–26. 34 Emden, BRUC, 277. 35 See Leeds International Congress July 2019, paper delivered by Alexandra Claridge University of Liverpool: ‘Family Matters: Material Evidence for Drama in the Social Circle of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and the Beaufort Family’. 36 Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester; Borsa ‘Correspondence of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester,’ 501–26. 37 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 254. Weiss, Humanism, 51; two copies were recorded in Gloucester’s library BL Harl 1705 Rundle ‘MS Once owned by Humfrey duke of Gloucester’ online publication 2010; MS Lat 10669. The ex lib’s commences with Cest Livre c’est A Moy Homfrey duo de Gloucestrie, M. B. Parkes, Pages from the Past: Medieval Writing Skills and Manuscript Books (Surrey and Burlington. V.T.: Ashgate, 2012) n.313. 38 Durham Cath MS C iv 3; BRUC, 430. 39 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1693. 40 Emden, BRUC, 646, 118, 525. 41 Paradiso, xx, 5–6. 42 Monarchia, 2.10.1. 43 Purgatorio, iii, 37–45. 44 Ibid., xxvii, 127–31. 45 Paradiso, xiii, 97–8. 46 Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 412c–517a. 47 Ibid., 415a3. 48 Ibid., V 445d, VIII.543D–544A. 49 Ibid., IX 571c. 50 Ibid., IX 574a. 51 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 42. 52 Fall of Princes, vi, 778. 53 Carlson, ‘Whethamstede and Lollardy’, 21–41. 54 Plato, Republic, IX, 574a. 55 John Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russel A. Peck (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1980) liber vii, 374; Brunetto Latini, Il tresoretto (In Contini, 1960). 56 Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackman (Loeb Classical Library 264, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), bk VII. 57 Book of Husbandry, 1034. 58 Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy1066–1530 (London: Methuen, 1984), 90. 59 Aristotle, Politics, 3, 1284a9–11. 60 Plato, Republic, 5.473d. 61 Fall of Princes, iv, 1174–7. 62 Lydgate, Secrees of Philosophers ii 491–602 ll., 1184 ff. 63 Fall of Princes, iv, 1137.

359

Notes 64 Ibid., iv, 1435–8. 65 Ibid., iv, 953. 66 Rundle, ‘ Republics and Tyrants’, 102; Plato, Republic, 473c. 67 Aristotle, Politics, bk iii ch. 7 (1289a38). 68 Plato, Republic, bk VI 488a–489d. 69 Worcester, Boke of Noblesse, 49–50. 70 Borsa, ‘Correspondence of Duke of Gloucester’, 501–26. 71 Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester; Borsa, ‘Correspondence of Duke of Gloucester,’ 501–26. 72 Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 159; Humfrey’s copy of a translation of Plutarch’s Lives survives: BL MS Harley 3426; Christopher S. Celenza, ‘Parallel Lives: Plutarch’s Lives, Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger (1405–38) and the Art of Italian Renaissance Translation’, Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 22 (1997), 121–55. 73 Saygin, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 63–4.; Elizabeth May McCahill, ‘Finding a Job as a Humanist: The Epistolary Collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 4 (2004), 1308–45. 74 Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, 140. 75 Annales of St Albans i, 143; Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, 25. 76 D. R. Howlett, ‘Studies in the Works of John Whethamstede’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1975), 9, 11–12. 77 BL Cotton Tib Dv; Rundle, ‘Republics and Tyrants’, 102. 78 Alfred C. Hiatt, ‘The Reference Work in the Fifteenth Century: John Whethamstede’s Granarium’, in Makers and Books, ed. C. E. Meale and D. D. S. Pearsall (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2014) 13–33; E. F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1943) 79 Transcribed and translated by Jayne in Plato in Renaissance England, 23. 80 Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, ed. Thomas Arnold, Rerum Britannicum Medii Aevi Scriptores (Rolls Ser, 91, 1967), 220; K. A. Lowe ‘The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, vol. 50 (2006), 151–65. 81 Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philosophers, Prologue, 4. 82 Ibid., ii 491–602 ll., 1184 ff. 83 The Fall of Princes, IV, 1160–76. 84 Secrees of Philosophres, 138–42. 85 G. J. Hardingham, ‘The Regimen in Late Medieval England’ (University of Cambridge, PhD, thesis, 2005). 86 Fall of Princes, iii, 3561. 87 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 216; Der Briefwechsel des Eneas Silvius lib’s Piccolomini, ed. R Wolkan (Wien: Alfred Holder, 1909), 325, letter 143, no. 143. 88 MS. Bodl. Lib MS Auct F3 25, fo. 1; McFarlane, ‘Worcester’, 223; John Free died while travelling in Italy, probably in Rome. 89 Emden, BRUO, ii, 724. 90 Rosamond Mitchell, John Free, from Bristol to Rome in the Fifteenth-century (London: Longmans Green, 1950). 91 John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. Axel Erdmann (EETS Extra Series no. 108, 1911) ll., 4369.

360

Notes 92

Antigone married Henry Grey Lord Powys in 1436 and had a child, which suggests she was born at the latest at the time of Gloucester’s Burgundy escapade.

93 Sophocles, Antigone. transl. F. Storr (London: William Henemann, 1924) ll. 900–10. See also ed. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 94

Republic, 514a–518a.

95 Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, 25; London BL MS Cotton Tiberius DV fol 159r–160r. 96

For immediate reasons for Humfrey’s arrest, see John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 228–32; An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, ed. J. S. Davies (London: Camden Society, 1856), 65.

97

Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. M. Le Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: Heussner, 1864), vii 87; Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. Appendix F.

98 Hughes, The Rise of Alchemy, 67ff. 99

Frank D. Millard, ‘An Analysis of the Epitaphium Eiusdem Ducis Gloucestrie’, in Authority and Subversion ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003) 117 ff.

100 The Fall of Princes, iii, 879 ff. 101 Life of St Albon, ii, 1493–6. 102 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 12 vols, ed. J. R., Bury (New York: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906); James Thompson, ‘Edward Gibbon 1737–1794,’ Pacific Historical Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (1938), 97. 103 Life of St Alban, ii, 1458–71. 104 Both are included in a sixteenth-century list of British alchemists The `lookeing Glasse for Illiterate Alchymists BL MS. Sloane 2218. 105 Robert Grove, Gleanings or a collection of some memorable passages both antient and modern many in relation to the late warre (London: William Rayboud, 1651), 95–6. My thanks to James Clark for drawing my attention to this story. 106 Inferno, xxvi, 59. 107 Clark, ‘Thomas Walsingham Reconsidered’; Bodl MS Douce 299.

Chapter 4 1

Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, ed. S. Fischer (Frankfourtam Main: Verlog, 1980), 23.

2

Benvenuto da Imola in his commentary interpreted the chord as a symbol of fraud.

3

Inferno, i, 41–2.

4

Inferno, xvi, 124–30.

5

Earl Jefferey Richards, ‘Christine de Pisan and Dante a Reexamination’, Archiv fur das Stadium der neueron Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 222, no. 1 (1985), 100–11.

6

Inferno, xxvi, 31–2.

7

Ibid., xv, 55–6.

8

Ibid., xxvi, 19–24.

9

Inferno, xvii, 85; Rafaella Bianucci, ‘Malarial Fevers in the Fourteenth Century Divine Comedy’, letter to editor July 2008, Internal and Emergency Medicine, 12, 1135–6.

10 Ibid., xxvi, 67–8. 361

Notes 11 Ibid., xxvi, 112–19. 12 Ibid., xxvi, 125–6. 13 Although Dante did not know Homer he must have been aware of Ulysses’s safe return voyage to Ithaca, which is described by Benoit de Sainte-Maire in Roman de Troie and Guido delle Colonne in Historia destructionis Troiae. According to Benevenuto even children and the illiterate knew about it. Dante therefore deliberately altered Ulysses’ fate for his own purposes continuing Ovid’s account of Aeneas in Gaeta encountering a member of Ulysses crew, Macarus of Neritos, who tells Aeneas how Ulysses left Circe’s island with the prophecy of a vast and perilous sea voyage ahead. See Durling Additional note 11 Inferno pp. 571–2. 14 Paradiso, iv, 130–3. 15 Ibid., xxiv, 116. 16 Inferno, i, 18. 17 Paradiso, xix, 40–1. 18 Ibid., xii, 30. 19 The number of perfection according to Grossteste in De Luce (Grossteste on Light), trans. Claire Riedl (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942), 14. 20 Paradiso, xxviii, 34–78. 21 The relative paucity of vowels in the English language makes this a difficult verse to imitate. Shelly succeeded in his Triumph of Life, and Derek Walcott wrote a Caribbean Homeric epic in terza rima but the scheme is not consistent, Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Faber, 1990). 22 Inferno, xxiii, 94. 23 Purgatorio viii, 1–6; the inspiration for lines in Grey’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 24 Paradiso, i, 133. 25 Inferno xvi, 82–5. 26 Ibid., x, 68–9. 27 Purgatorio, vii, 55. 28 Ibid., viii, 13–18. 29 Ibid., xiv, 148–50. 30 Convivio, 2. 14. 31 The House of Fame, ii, 936–9. 32 Lynne Mooney, ‘Chaucer and Interest in Astronomy at the Court of Richard II’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. G. Lester (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 139–60; Turner, Chaucer A European Life, 219, 230. 33 Troy Book, ii, 852. 34 Fall of Princes, ix, 2522. 35 House of Fame, ii, 1011–17. 36 Paradiso, ii, 1–8. 37 M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 96l; Steve Ellis, Geoffrey Chaucer (Tavistock: Northcote House, 1996), 45.

362

Notes 38 Paradiso, i, 4–7. 39 Ibid., i, 25–6. 40 Purgatorio, xxx, 88. 41 Corinthians, 1:2: 2–4. 42 Paradiso, xxxiii, 55–66. 43 Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, 133–44; James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 246. 44 The sixth book of De re publica circulated separately with a commentary of Macrobius. Scipio Aemilianus’s dream occurs two years before he sacks Carthage when he is visited in sleep by his dead grandfather by adoption, Scipio Africanus, the elder, hero of the second Punic war. Cicero, On the Republic. On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library), 213. 45 Purgatorio, xxviii, 24 ff. During, notes to Purgatorio xxviii, 34–149. 46 Ibid., xxviii, 36. 47 Inferno, iii, 4–6. 48 Note Chaucer ironically echoes here Psalm 23: ‘The Lord is my shepherd’. 49 The Parlement of Fowls, 127–40. 50 Ibid., 153–5. 51 Ibid., 305–10. 52 Kaye, A History of Balance, 20–75. 53 Paradiso, xv, 97–8. 54 Ibid., xv, 97–124. 55 Inferno, xxiv, 13–15. 56 Ibid., xxv, 100–3. 57 Ibid., xxv, 145–8; John Took, Dante (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020), 333. 58 Inferno, xxx, 136–9. 59 Ibid., xxx, 131–5. 60 Ibid., xxv, 88–93. 61 Ibid., xv 113-15; Cestareo, ‘Queering Nature’, 90–7. 62 Ibid., xix, 1–6. 63 D. L. Darby Chaplin, ‘IO and the Negative Apotheosis of Vanni Fucci’, Dante Studies, vol. 89 (1971), 19–31. 64 Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, 283–6. 65 Inferno, xx, 25–6. 66 Ibid., xxiv, 112–14. 67 Santagata, Dante, 315. 68 Inferno, xxix, 73–83. 69 Ibid., xxx, 32. The subject of Puccini’s aria il mio babino caro from the opera Gianni Schicchi. 70 Purgatorio, xxvii, 16–18.

363

Notes 71

Paradiso, viii, 52–5.

72

Ibid., xxiv.

73

Purgatorio, x, 124–7.

74 Shaw, Reading Dante, 205–19. 75

Troilus and Criseyde, ii, 22–5, Convivio i.

76

Troilus and Criseyde, ii, 205–19.

77

Inferno, xxxii, 8–9.

78

Convivio, I, 13.

79

Ibid., V, 40.

80

Paradiso, xvii, 7–9.

81

Ibid., xxxiii, 108.

82 Havely, Dante, 208–9. 83

One of Callas’s most important operatic roles was Medea and she starred in Pasolini’s film version of the legend.

84

Inferno, xviii, 85–7.

85

BL MS Royal 12 Exv fo. 19.

86

Santagata Dante, 170.

87

Inferno, xxx, 118–20.

88

Richard Maidstone, Concordia, ed. R. Darlson and A.G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute, 2003), 1.348, 1. 18

89 Wallace Chaucerian Polity, 178. 90

Rundle, ‘Republics and Tyrants’, 115.

91 Kymer, Dietarium, ed. T. Hearne in Liber Niger Scaccari (Oxford, Oxonii; Sheldonian Theatre, 1728), 550–9; MS Sloane 4 fos 63–98v; An argument for Norton’s authorship is presented in Howlett, ‘Studies in the Work of John Whethamstede’; Jeremy Catto, ‘Masters, Patrons and the Careers of Graduates in Fifteenth Century England’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004); Emden, BRUO, ii, 1069. 92

Peter Jones, ‘Medicine on the Move: England and Mainland Europe’, delivered to the University of Exeter 15th Century Conference, September 2019.

93

MS Sloane 4 fo. 37 and fo. 38.

94

Ibid., fol. 81.

95

Peter Jones, ‘Complexio and Experimentum: Tensions in late Medieval English Practice’, in The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice, ed. Peregrine Horden and Elizabeth Hsu (New York and London: Berghahn, 2013), 107.

96 Catto, History of the University of Oxford, 11, 403. 97 Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy, 44; BL MA Sloane 4 fo. 49v Bodley MS Ashmole 1432, for 155–7; Magdalen College, Oxford MS 65. 98

Joel Fredell, ‘Alchemical Lydgate’, Studies in Philology, vol. 107, no. 4 (2010), 429–64.; BL MS Harley 2407; fos 71, 77.

99 Lydgate, The Churl and the Bird in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, vol. ii, 468–86. 100 Lydgate, Secrees of Philosophres, 1002 ff.

364

Notes 101 The Churl and the Bird, l., ll., 29–30. 102 Fredell, ‘Alchemical Lydgate,’ 429–64; BL MS Harley 207 for 71–7. 103 Lydgate and Burgh, Secrees of Old Philosophres, 42, verse 186. 104 Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 312 and 325. 105 Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, 1, l577–81. 106 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Latin edition (Pantionos Classics, 2017), viii 188–9. 107 Medea’s prayer to Hecate: ‘Ye winds and airs ye mountains lakes and streams / At my behest broad rivers to their source flow back / And mighty oaks from out the soil I tear; / I move the forests; bid the mountains quake,’ influenced the invocation of another alchemist, Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest. 108 Metamorphoses, ix ll., 356–8. 109 Fall of Princes, 1, 710–13. 110 Ibid., 1 465. 111 Ibid., 1, 173–5. 112 D. R. Howlett, ‘The Date and Authorship off the Middle English Verse Translation of Palladius’ De Re Rustica’, Medium Aevum xlvi (1977). 113 Hiatt, ‘Whethamstede’s Granarium’, 13–33. 114 The family home was near St Peter’s Hospital in Bristol, destroyed in the Blitz. 115 Everett, ‘Humphrey duke of Gloucester’. The vertical lines indicating the acrostic occur on the Bodley MS Add A. 369. This acrostic is much clearer and less ambiguous than the many claimed for Richard Roos by Ethel Seaton. Fitzwilliam MS (MS. Duke Humfrey d.2) with Gloucester’s crosses is the duke’s own copy. 116 Book of Husbandry, ix, 78; x, 24–36. 117 Ibid., vii, 33, 43. 118 Ibid., iv 46–8. 119 Ibid., ix 128–31; 117 and 119. 120 Book of Husbandry, iv, 128–32, ff. 121 Ibid., iv, 470–6. 122 Ibid., xi, 450–80. 123 Ibid., viii, ll., 113–53. 124 Ibid., iv, ll., 7. 125 Aristotle, Physics, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 8.3.4 126 Emden, BRUO II, 1050; BRUO i, 604; Emden, BRUC, 491, 645, 630. 13, 16.

Chapter 5 1 Boccaccio, In Trattatello in Laude di Dante, le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 3, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci (Milan, 1974), ch. 14. 19. 2

Paradiso, iii, 85.

365

Notes 3

Inferno, vii, 96.

4

Paradiso, iii 106–8.

5

Ibid., iii, 70–85.

6

Ibid., xxvii, 109–14.

7

Ibid., xxviii, 46–8.

8

Ibid., x, 7–12; Patrick Boyde, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145 ff.

9

Christian Moevs, ‘Miraculous Syllogisms: Clocks, Faith and Reason in Paradiso 10 and 24’, in Dante Studies No. 117 (John Hopkins: University Press, 1999), 59–84.

10 Paradiso, x, 139–43. 11 Paradiso x, 143–4. 12 Ibid., x, 22–30. 13 Convivio, 3.5. 14 Ibid., 10, 22; Paradiso, xii, 2. 15 Paradiso, xxvii, 121–7. 16 Ibid., xvii, 70–5. Bartholomeo bore the imperial eagle in his coat of arms by virtue of his marriage to the great-granddaughter of the emperor Frederick II. 17 Santagata, Dante, 307–8. 18 Epistole, xiii, 21. 19 John Leyerle, ‘The Rose-Wheel Design and Dante’s Paradiso’, University of Toronto Quarterly, University of Toronto Press, vol. 46, no. 3 (spring 1977), 280–308. The marriage of Romeo and Juliet in Zefferelli’s film occurs in this church. 20 Inferno, vii, 91–7. 21 Paradiso, v, 19. 22 Purgatorio, xvi, 73–8. 23 Ibid., xv, 92–5. 24 Paradiso, xxvii, 145–6. 25 Ibid., ii, 142–3 26 Santagata, Dante, 56. 27 Paradiso, viii, 100–8. 28 Convivio, 4. 18. 29 Boyde, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher, 145 ff. 30 Paradiso, viii, 94–136. 31 Ibid., xviii, 22–4. 32 Purgatorio, xv, 70–7; Convivio, 3.7. 33 Paradiso, v, 105. In Mercury he meets another alter ego, Romeo a misunderstood official and diplomat forced into exile. 34 Purgatorio, xxiv, 82–7. 35 Paradiso, xxii, 103–4. 36 Ibid., xvii, 55–60. These lines were probably written during Dante’s stay in Verona. 37 Tarantino, ‘The Dante Anecdote’, 421.

366

Notes 38 Paradiso, xxii, 112–20. 39 Inferno, xvi, 82–4. 40 Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante’s Sympathy for the Other or the Non Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia’, Critica del Tesco, vol. 14, no. 1 (2011), 177–204. 41 Cristafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 129. Piero was in England between 1234 and 5 negotiating a marriage between the emperor and Isabella, sister of Henry III. 42 Erich Aurbach, Dante Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago University Chicago Press, 1961), 132. 43 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Dominican Fathers’ translation (New York: Benziger, 1947), 1, 4.5, 246; Auerbach, Dante, 85–7. 133. 44 The House of Fame, ii, 582. 45 Ibid., ii, 573. 46 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1807; John North, ‘Ralph Strode’, New DNB. It has been speculated (without evidence) on the basis of this reference that Strode was the author of The Pearl. 47 Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 617–20. 48 Ibid., v 1–3. 49 Ibid., iv, 2–11 50 Ibid., iv, 259–70. 51 Purgatorio, xxvii, 136–42. 52 Santagata, Dante, 51. 53 Ibid., 257. 54 Inferno, xxxiii, 46–54. 55 Ugolino himself, according to Benvenuto da Imola, had ordered the killing of Frederigo Novello, son of Ser Guido Novello of Casentino who kissed the hand of his son’s killer at the funeral, showing the sort of forgiveness that Ugolino was unable to muster. 56 Robert Durling Additional note 15, Inferno 578–80. Bertoldi in his 1416 commentary pointed out that Ugolino was responsible for ordering the killing of the son of Marzurco in 1287. 57 See also Aristotle, Ethics 5.5 1132b. 58 Paradiso, xxvi, 61. 59 Chaucer, The Monk’s Tale, ll, 3602–4. 60 Ibid., 3620–5. 61 Ibid., 3633–7. 62 Inferno, iii, 73–4. 63 Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, 215–27. 64 Ibid., 227. 65 Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 10–35. 66 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Centre of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 177–88. 67 Paradiso, xvii, 77. 68 Ibid., xvii, 133–4.

367

Notes 69

Ibid., xvii, 136–8.

70

Fall of Princes, vi, 129–312. Ovid in exile referred to Fortune’s unsteady wheel.

71

Ibid., iv, 2873–6.

72

Ibid., vi, 156–61.

73

Ibid., vi, 162–86.

74

Ibid., vi, 189–93.

75

Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (New York. Cambridge University Press, 1986), 318.

76

Purgatorio, xii, 100–3.

77

Fall of Princes, vi, 1636–6

78

Ibid., vi, 1388 ff.

79

Ibid., v, 565–7.

80

Ibid., v, 632–57.

81

Convivio, 4.5.

82

Ibid., v, 687–98.

83

Cambridge Gonville and Caius Coll. MS 183/216; Rundle ‘Extant Manuscripts of the Duke of Gloucester’, no. 2.

84

Fall of Princes, i, 2406. Maura Nola, ‘“Now wo, now gladnesse”: Ovidianism’, in The Fall of Princes, ELH, John Hopkins University Press (2004) 531–58.

85

N. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon. Press, 2003).

86 Machiavelli, The Prince (1513) ed. Quentin Skinner and Russel Price (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1988), ch. viii. 87

Fall of Princes, iv, 2857–9.

88

Ibid., iv, 2647–53.

89

Ibid., iv, 2904–5.

90

Ibid., i, 3431–2.

91

Ibid., iii, 2167–9.

92 Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (London: William Heineman, 1913), Part 3 ch. 6. 93

Vita Henrici Quinti, ed. T. Hearne, 20.

94

See also Gower’s Confession amantis, Prologue ll, 714 ff.

95

Fall of Princes, iv 2332 ff.

96

Ibid., ii, 4460–592

97

Ibid., ii, 4466.

98

Troy Book, iv, 7036–85.

99 Emden, BRUC, 552, 630. 100 Ibid., 670. 101 Ibid., 339, 437, 421, 458. 102 Ibid., 366, 658.

368

Notes 103 Ibid., 170, 646; Emden, BRUO, i, 323, 531. 104 Named as such by the scribe John Shirley 105 John Lydgate, The Minor Poems ed. MaCrackan, Part 2, 272, A Mumming at London ll, 276. 106 Ibid., 682, 2–8. See also John Lydgate, Disguising at London, ed. Claire Sponsler, Middle English Texts Series, University of Rochester (2010), 2–8. 107 Lydgate, Minor Poems, ii, 683, 11–67. 108 Ibid., ii, 338–43. Note the recurring of the phrase 'unaware' or unforeseen which is applied to Alexander and Julius Caesar and which echoes the 'unforeseen' (or unaware) stroke in the Fall of Princes. 109 Rymer, Foedera (London: Apud Joannem Neulme 1739–45), vol. x, 387–8; Forbes, Lydgate’s Disguising at Hertford Castle ed. Derek Forbes (Pulborough: Blot Publishing, 1998), 49–51. 110 John Lydgate, Disguising at Hertford, The Minor Poems of Lydgate, ed. MaCracken, ii, 675–82, ll. 24. Macpherson, ‘The Hertford Mummings’ (London, MA thesis). 111 Minor Poems, ii, 283. 112 BL MS Royal 18 Div. 113 The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, ed. Margaret Schofield (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia dissertation, 1936). 114 Paston Letters nos. 111, 162; Excerpta Historica or Illustrations of English History, ed. Samuel Bentley (London, 1831), 245. 115 L. E. James, ‘The Career and Political Influence of William de la Pole Its Duke of Suffolk 1437–50’ (Oxford B. Litt. 1979); H. N. MaCracken, ‘An English Friend of Charles of Orleans’, PMLA, vol. xxvi (1911), 142–80; The English Poems of Charles of Orleans, ed. R. Steele (London: EETS., OS, 215 (1941); John Fox, The Lyric Poetry of Charles of Orleans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); N. L. Goodrich, Charles of Orleans: A Study of Themes in His French and English Poetry (Geneva: Drox, 1967); Enid McLeod, Charles of Orleans: Prince and Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969). 116 Roger Virgoe, ‘The Death of William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk’, BJRL, vol. 47 (1965), 489–502; Georges Chastellain, Le temple de Boccace, ed. Susanne Bliggenstorter (Berne: Francke, 1988). 117 Letters and Papers Henry VI, ii, i 223–33. 118 Foedera, x, 556–61. 119 Ballade, cxiv. 120 Ballade, 59. 121 See the English poems in MS BL Harl 682; Goodrich, Charles of Orleans. 122 Fall of Princes, ii. 54–5. 123 Ibid., i, 4550–78. 124 Ibid., viii, 2397. 125 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, viii. 126 Fall of Princes, 1, 3529–42. 127 Ibid., iii, 204–707. 128 Inferno, xxxiv, 4–6.

369

Notes

Chapter 6 1

Vita Nuova, Italian edition (Contino editori, 2014), ch. XLII

2

Paradiso, iv, 139–40 and 5 1–2.

3

Paris BnF MS fr. 12421; Rundle, ‘Extant Manuscripts of Duke Humfrey’. no. 39.

4

Fall of Princes, vi, 498–503.

5

Purgatorio, i, 78–81.

6

Ibid., iii, 115–16.

7

Ibid., viii, 71.

8

Ibid., xix, 145.

9

Ibid., viii, 77–8.

10 Ibid., xxiii, 115–19. 11 Santagata, Dante, 21. 12 These sonnets can be found in Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. Foster and Boyde vol. i, 148–55; see also La falsa tenzone di Dante con Forese Donati, ed. Mauro Cursietti (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1995); Fabian Alfie, Dante’s Tenzone with Forese Donati: The Reprehension of Vice (Toronto Italian Studies, University of Toronto Press, 2012). 13 Dante’s Lyric Poetry, vol. 1, 148–55. 14 Purgatorio, xxiii, 85–9. 15 Ibid., xxiii, 91–3. 16 Ibid., xxiv, 13–16. 17 Ibid., xxiii, 106–11; Alfie, Dante’s Tenzone with Forese Donati, 90 ff. 18 Latin Works of Dante Alighieri, trans A. G. Howell and P.H. Wicksteed (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 56. 19 Convivio 3. 9. 20 Dante's Lyric Poetry 83. This canzone was quoted in De vulgari and was therefore written before 1304. 21 Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 33, 58; Santagata, Dante, 69. 22 Purgatorio, xxiv, 50–1; Ian Thompson, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey without End (London: Head of Zeus, 2018), 83. 23 L’Ottimo Commento della Divina Commedia Dartmouth Project http://dantedartmouth.edu; Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 328. 24 Boccaccio, Esposizione, 315; Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 320. 25 Ibid., 306–8. 26 Aristotle, Ethics 3.1; Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 74. 27 Inferno, v, 112–17. 28 Ibid., 93. 29 Ibid., 103–5. 30 Ibid., 134–5. Lines that moved the Romantic poet Byron who in a letter to his sister, with whom he had an incestuous relationship, maintained that at least Francesca and Paolo would be together.

370

Notes 31 See Beatrice’s explanation of Piccarda’s will in Paradiso, iv. 32 Inferno v, 82–4. 33 Purgatorio, xx, 20–1; Paradiso, xv, 133. Dante imagines his great-great-great-grandmother Mary calling on the Virgin when giving birth to his ancestor. 34 Paradiso, xviii, 64–6. 35 Ibid., ix, 115. 36 Ibid., ix, 33. 37 Ibid., ix, 94 ff. 38 Inferno v, 103–5. 39 Purgatorio, xxxi, 47–51. 40 Ibid., xxxi, 118–9. 41 Ibid., xxxi, 133. 42 Ibid., xxxi, 136–7. 43 Ibid., xxxi, 22–3. 44 Inferno, v, 133–42. 45 Purgatorio xxiii, 129. 46 Vita Nuova sonnet xxiv 47 Ibid., ch. xi. 48 Ibid., ch. xv. 49 Ibid., 13, 2. ‘e amice a me immediatamente dopo lo primo’. 50 Ibid., 21.2. aluna cosa per una donna che ser’a morta; Santagata, Dante, 69. 51 Vita Nuova, viii. 52 Vita Nuova, 19, 8; Santagata, Dante, 75. 53 Paradiso, xvi, 13–15. 54 Vita Nuova ch. xi. 55 Ibid., ch. iii. 56 Ibid., ch. xii 57 Ibid., ch. xviii 58 Ibid., viii. 59 Purgatorio, xxiv, 52–3. 60 Ibid., 55–6. 61 Vita Nuova ch. xviii. 62 Ibid., xxxviii. 63 Ibid., xxxix. 64 Paradiso, vii, 19. 65 Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 334 ff. 66 Purgatorio, xxx, 22–7. 67 Vita Nuova ch. xxii. 68 Purgatorio, xxx, 49–57. 69 Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ch. iii.

371

Notes 70

Inferno, xxiii, 37–41.

71

Purgatorio, xxx, 43–5.

72

Ibid., xxx, 126.

73

Ibid., xxxi. 59–60.

74

Ibid., xxx, 70–1.

75 Ibid., i, 47ff. 76

Ibid., xxii, 2–6.

77

Ibid., xxii, 154.

78

Inferno v, 83.

79

Paradiso, xxiii, 1–10.

80

Stephen Boterill, Dante and the Mystical Tradition, Bernard of Clairvaulx in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 22 Cambridge University Press, 1994).

81

Paradiso, xxiii, 88–9.

82

Ibid., xxiii, 121–2.

83

Purgatorio, xxx, 31–4.

84

Paradiso, xxii, 4.

85

Purgatorio, xxxii, 1–6.

86

Vita Nuova, 42.3.

87

Paradiso, xxxi, 92.

88

Vita Nuova, 3.1.

89

Paradiso, xxiii, 67–9.

90

Christine De Pizan, Le Livre Du Chemin de Long Estude (The Book of the Path of Long Study), ed. Andrea Tarnowski (Paris: French General Library collection, 2000).

91

Kevin Brownlee, ‘Literary Genealogy and the Problem of the Father: Christine de Pizan and Dante’ in Dante Now. Current Trends in Dante Studies, ed. Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1995), 206 ff; C. C. Willard, Christine de Pizan, Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984).

92

Brownlee, ‘Literary Genealogy and the Father’, 206; Earl Jeffrey Richards, ‘Christine de Pizan and Dante: A Reexamination’, Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 222, no. 1 (1985), 100–11.

93

Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology, ed. Christine McWebb (New York: Routledge, 2013); Le Debat Sur Le Roman De La Rose by Christine de Pizan, translated into modern French by Virginie Greene (Paris: Champion, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Age 76, 2006).

94

Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glascoe. second edition Exeter Medieval texts and Studies Liverpool University Press, 1999).

95

Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1084–5.

96

Ibid., ii. 390–92.

97

Inferno, v, 103.

98

Troilus and Criseyde, ii, 456–62.

99

Ibid., v, 1093.

100 Political Religious and Love Poems from Lambeth MS No. 306, and Other Sources, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London: EETS. OS no. 15, 1866); Works of Jo Metham, ed. H. Craig (EETS, 372

Notes 1916); S. Moore, ‘Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk c. 1450’, PMLA, vol. 27, no 2 (1912) 188–207. 101 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1238–41. 102 Ibid., iii, 1249–51. 103 Paradiso, xxxiii, 19–27. 104 Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1282–8. 105 Ibid., i, 981–3. 106 House of Fame, i, 321–2. 107 Ibid., i, 345–50. 108 Boccaccio, Espozicione, 315. 109 Ellis, Geoffrey Chaucer, 22–3, 25–8. 110 Decameron; Introd. Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 281ff. 111 Tale of Melibee, 217–39; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 247. 112 Purgatorio, ix, 19–49. 113 Santagata, Dante, 40. 114 Barbara Reynolds, Dante, The Poet, the Thinker, the Man (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) 64–74. 115 The House of Fame, ii, 556–66. 116 General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 542–4. 117 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 45; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 82–3. 118 General Prologue, 44. 119 Seaton, Sir Richard Roos. 120 See Vladimir Nabokov’s, Pale Fire (London: Penguin, 1962). 121 Chartier (1385–1430) was an ambassador to Scotland in 1430. La Belle Dame Sans Merci is printed in W.W. Skeat, ed. Chaucerian and Other Pieces Edited from Numerous Manuscripts Being a Supplement to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), no. 45. 122 Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, 80–102, 244–7; BL MS 732. 123 Chaucer and Other Pieces, 45. 124 BL MS Hard 372 La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Chaucer and Other Pieces ll., 309–12. 125 La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, 314–5. 126 Ibid., 797–800 127 Ibid., 812. 128 Ibid., 171. 129 Referred to in his will in 1481. 130 Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, Seaton, Richard Roos, 83–4. 131 Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. J. A. Burrow (London: EETS, Original Series, 313, 1892, repr. 2005), 705–6.; Petrina, Cultural Politics, 318. 132 The Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife in Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue. 133 The manuscript with Humfrey’s autograph is extant Paris BnF, MS fr 12.421, Rundle, ‘Manuscripts Once Owned by Duke of Gloucester’, n. 39. Wright, Boccaccio in England, 113. 373

Notes 134 It possibly survives in Bodl MS Lat. Misc d.34; Sammut, Umfredo duca di Gloucester, 126. 135 BL MS Harl. 2255. 136 Purgatorio, xix, 11–15. 137 Ibid., xix, 31–4, 61–4. 138 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 202; MS Oxford Bodl Lib Lat, Misc, d. 34 ff 5v-6r. 139 Giovanni Boccaccio, Corbaccio or The Labyrinth of Love, trans. and ed. Anthony K. Cassell revised edition (Urbana: University of Illinos Press, 1994); Corbaccio, ed. Giorgio Padoan in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 12 vols ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964) v ii (1994) 413–614, 3. 140 Ibid., 6. 141 Ibid., 7. 142 Ibid., 8. 143 Ibid., 14. 144 Ibid., 56. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 11–12. 147 Ibid., 62. 148 Ibid., 18. 149 Ibid., 21. 150 Gordon Grifitths, James Hawkins and David Thompson, The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, Selected Texts Vol 4 (New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 232. 151 Boccaccio, Corbaccio, 31. 152 Female quick thinking is demonstrated in the Merchant’s Tale; Criseyde boasts of the rapidity of her thinking, and in the Wife of Bath’s Tale a knight spends a year trying to find out what they want. 153 Ibid., 20. 154 Ibid., 75. 155 Ibid., 55. 156 Vita Nuova ch. xliii. 157 Boccaccio, Corbaccio, 73. 158 Ibid., 13. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid., 32. 162 Fall of Princes, i, 6436–8; 6444–7. 163 Ibid., i, 6441–3. 164 John Lydgate, Life of Our Lady, ed. Joseph A. Lauritis (Pittsburg: Duquesne University, 1961), vols I and ii. Extant in 42 manuscripts. 165 Lydgate, Troy Book, iii, 4213–29. 166 Ibid., iii, 4287–91.

374

Notes 167 Rundle, ‘Good Duke Humfrey: Bounder, Cad and Bibliophile’; MS Sloane 248; fo. 230v. This and the copy of Kymer’s Dietarium are the only medical treatises from the duke’s library to survive. 168 Kymer’s, Dietarium in Liber Niger App. vol. ii, 551–9. 169 This regimen of health survives in a single manuscript BL Sloane MS 4, pp. 63–103. It consists of twenty-six chapters dealing with the duke’s mode of living. Two chapters dealing with the ill effects of the duke’s sexual appetite were printed by T. Hearne in Liber niger, 556–8; Sloane MS 4 fo. 85r. 170 Boccaccio, Corbaccio, 29. 171 For Eleanor’s penance, see Six Town Chronicles, ed. R. Flenley (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1911), 111; The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. D. Brie (London: EETS., O.S. no. 131 and 136, 1906–8), vol. ii, 481; An English Chronicle, 59; A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483, ed. E Tyrell and N. Nichols Harris (London: Longman, 1827) 129; A Chronicle of Greyfriars, ed. J.G. Nicholls (London: Camden Soc, 1852), 18. 172 R. Griffiths, ‘The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester’, Bulletin John Rylands Library, vol. 51, no. 2 (1969), 381–99. 173 Anne Curry ed., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1505, Henry VI, (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), iv, 1186; G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1929), 79; Vickers, Duke of Gloucester, 278. Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e libro veritatum, ed. J. E. T. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881). 174 BL MS Egerton 889; John North, Horoscopes and History (London: Warburg Institute, 1986); John North, ‘Astronomy and Mathematics’, in The History of the University of Oxford Vol II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 103ff. 175 Carole Rawcliffe, ‘The Insanity of Henry VI’, The Historian, vol. 50 (1996), 8–12. 176 North, ‘Horoscopes and History’. 177 Chronicles of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 127; An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, 59; Gregory’s Chronicle in The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. James Gairdner (London: Camden Society, 1876) 184; Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France (reprinted from Pynson’s 1515 end, London: Rivington, 1811), 614; John Stow, The London Chronicles, ed. C. L. Kingsford (London: Camden Miscellany, 1910), 50. 178 The only edition is E. P. Hammond in Modern Philology., xxi, University of Chicago Press (1924), 379–95; Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, 132. 179 Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, 132–6; Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16. 180 How a Lover Prayseth His Lady, 68–70. 181 Ibid., 112–16. 182 In bibliomancy revered books were used for divination. In this period it was the Bible, the Quoran and Virgil’s Aeneid. 183 How a Lover Prayseth His Lady, 131–9; Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, 134. 184 Lydgate, Minor Poems, 2, p. 601, 73–5. 185 Ibid., 608, 51–6. 186 The Fall of Princes, i, 4242. 187 This inscription was provided by John Shirley. Pearsall (John Lydgate ch. 5) furthermore rejects Lydgate’s authorship on stylistic grounds. 375

Notes 188 Lydgate, Minor Poems 2, 608 1–126. It is attributed to Lydgate in Shirley’s annotations Bodl. MS Ashmole 59 fo. 57r. 189 Lydgate, Minor Poems 2, 608, ll. 45–54. 190 C. Marie Harker, ‘The Two Duchesses of Gloucester and the Rhetoric of the Feminine’, Historical Reflections, vol. 30, no. 1 (2004), 109–25. 191 For Margery Jourdaine, see An English Chronicle 1377–1461, ed. W. Marx (Davies Chronicle) a new edn., (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003) 63; English Chronicle, 58; Jessica Freeman, ‘Sorcery at the Court Margery Jourdemayne the Witch of Eyre’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 30 (2004), 343–57. The legend that Humfrey was ensnared by the witch of Eyre was transmitted by Drayton, Shakespeare and Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. 192 An English Chronicle, ed. W. Marx. 193 One of Eleanor’s books survives BL MS Sloane 248. 194 CPR 1429–36, 616; CPR 1435–41, 27. 195 Lydgate, Minor Poems 2, 665–7 ll., 9–11, n44–8. 196 BL MS Royal 14 cvii. 197 BL MS Ashmole 66. 198 Andrew Wathey, Music in the Royal and Noble Households in Late Medieval England. Studies of Sources and Patronage (New York, London: Garland, 1989); Wathey, ‘New Light on the Biography of John Dunstable’, Music and Letters, vol. 62 (1981), 60–3. 199 Bodley Lib MS Laud Misc 674 fo. 74. See also Dunstable on astrology Emmanuel College Cambridge MS 70; Margaret Blent, ‘A New Canonic Gloria and the Changing Profile of Dunstable’ online publication, September 2008. 200 CUL e.e 3, 61 fo. 108v; North, ‘Mathematics and Astrology’, History of Oxford, vol. 2 (1992), 404–5. 201 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 337. 202 The Trotula, A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and transl. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 203 The Sekenesse of Wymmen: A Middle English Treatise on Deseases of Women, ed. M. R. Hallaert, Scripta Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (Brussels Uffsal, 1982), 35. 204 Boccaccio, Corbaccio, 24; For further details on women and the body politic see Jonathan Hughes, ‘Alchemy and the Exploration of Late Medieval Sexuality’ in Medieval Virginities, ed Anke Bernau, Sarah Salih and Ruth Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 140–66. 205 Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e libro veritatum, ed. J. E. Thorold Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1881), 43; Emden, BRUO, ii, 1069. 206 Hearne, Libri Niger Saccarii 2 ch. 3 550–7. 207 Emmanuel Coll Camb MS 1.2.10; The Paston Letters (ed Davis) vol. ii, 424. 208 Purgatorio, xxx, 49–50. 209 Ibid., xxviii–xxx. 210 Covivio 4. 24. 211 Fall of Princes, ii, 1275–93; Mortimer, ‘Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’. 212 A Mumming at Hertford in Lydgate Minor Poems 2, 681 ll., 244. 213 Hughes, ‘Alchemy and the Exploration of Late Medieval Sexuality’, 157. 214 BL MS Cotton Claudius EIV.

376

Notes 215 H. E. Talbot and E. A. Hammond, Medical Practitioners of England (London: The Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965).This anticipated by 100 years the Royal College of Physicians. 216 English Chronicle, 62. 217 Ibid., 55. 218 Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations of Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers, ed. Henry T. Riley (London: Bohun 1854), 192–3. 219 Fall of Princes, iv, 2477. 220 English Chronicle, 62–3; see also John Benet’s Chronicle for 1400–62, Camden Miscellany, 24 ed. G. L Harriss and M. A. Harriss, London: Camden Society 4th ser., 9 (London, 1972), 192–3. 221 Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 13, and 371ff. Petrarch’s complex and contradictory reaction to Dante’s treatment of women and love will merit further study. Sara Sturm Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

Chapter 7 1

William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). See also Wordsworth Poems, ed. Helen Darbyshire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

2

Purgatorio, xxx, 783. Beatrice announces her identity in line 73 (=10 the perfect number.

3 Chaucer, Boece, bk iv, Prosa I, 65–70, 4

Convivio, 2. 8.

5

Purgatorio, xxix–xxx.

6

Convivio, 4. 12. 14–16.

7

Purgatorio, viii, 1–6.

8

Casella tells the pilgrim that the Jubilee facilitated the passage of souls already dead to Purgatory Purgatorio, 2, ll, 97–9.

9

Psalm, 113.

10 Durling, Purgatorio, Introduction, 12–13. 11 Ariela Algaze, 'The Artistic Programme of the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Dante's Imagination' (Forum Italicum, 2021). 12 Moran Cruz, ‘Dante, Purgatorio 2 and the Jubilee of Boniface VIII’, 1–22. 13 Inferno, i, 46–7. 14 Paradiso, i, 112. 15 Purgatorio, xxiv, 75–8. 16 Santagata, Dante, 213. 17 Vita Nuova, ch. iii. 18 Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizione sopra la commedia di Dante in Tutte de Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. vi, ed. Giorgio Padoan (Milan: Milan Mondadori, 1965), 526. 19 Inferno, x, 55–60. For a detailed response and analysis of this encounter, see Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 377

Notes 20 Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou tresor (the Book of the Treasure), trans. Paul Barrete and Spurgeon Baldwin, vol. 90, Series B Garland Library of Medieval Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993). 21 Gary Cestaro, ‘Society and Ethics Sodomite, Homosexual, Queer: Teaching Dante LGBTQ’, in Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Kristina Olson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2020). 22 Inferno, xv, 24. 23 Gary Cestaro, 'Queering Nature, Queering Gender', in Dante for the New Millennium. 24 Purgatorio, xxiii, 42. 25 Ibid., xxiii, 115–17. 26 Hollander, Dartmouth Dante Project. 27 Inferno, xvi, 46–7. 28 Shaw, Reading Dante, 23. 29 Purgatorio, xi, 97–100. 30 Santagata, Dante, 132. 31 Ibid., 198. 32 Boccaccio Decameron, Italian edition ed. Maurizio Fiorilla e Grancarlo Alfone (New York: Biblioteca Univerzale Rizzoli, 2013) Day 6, 9th story. 33 Ibid., Day 6, 9th story. 34 Ibid. 35 Vita Nuova, ch. xxiv. 36 Alfie, Dante’s Tenzone, 91 ff. 37 Ibid., 34; Paradiso xiv, 104–8; 19, 104–8. 38 Jeremy Catto, ‘Florence, Tuscany and the World of Dante’, in The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and His Times, ed. Cecil Grayson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 9. 39 Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 13, 31. 40 Guido Cavalcanti, Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore in The Complete Poems, Bilingual edition, ed. Marc. A. Cirigliano (New York: Italica Press, 1992). 41 Ibid., 17, 38. 42 Ibid., 58; Jefferson B. Fletcher, ‘The Philosophy of Love of Guido Cavalcanti’, Annual Reports of the Dante Society, vol. 22 (1903), 9–35. 43 Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 56, no. 32. 44 Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Patrick Foster and Kenelm Boyde (Oxford: OUP, 1967), Vol. 1, no. 30. 45 Ibid., I, no. 66. 46 Dante, Lyric Poetry, 25; Barolini, Dante and Her Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 83. 47 Augustine, Confessions, 2 vols, ed. and trans. W. Watts, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1977), VIII, 38–43; Taylor, Dante Reads the Divine Comedy, 61. 48 La doloroso amor, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 25; Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 83. 49 Inferno, v, 106; Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Literary Culture, 83. 50 Purgatorio, xviii, 37–9. 51 Ibid., xviii, 70–4. 52 Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, 13, 30. 378

Notes 53 Shaw, Reading Dante, 245. 54 Paradiso, xxvi, 62. 55 Ibid., xxvi, 40–2. 56 Cavalcanti, The Complete Poems, Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore. 57 Inferno, x, 58–61; Auerbach, in Dante Poet of the Secular World 58, interprets these lines as referring to Virgil and points to an artistic disagreement over Dante’s dependence on the inspiration of the poetry of classical antiquity. 58 Ibid., x, 67–9. 59 Inferno, x, 127–32. 60 Epistole, iii, 8. 61 Vita Nuova ch. ii. 62 E’ m’incresce di me si duramente, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 54, no. 32; Santagata, Dante, 30–33. 63 Vita Nuova, ch. iii. 64 Santagata, Dante, 66. 65 Ibid., 40. 66 Vita Nuova, 29. 67 Ibid., 36, ch. 19. 68 Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 31. 69 Edward Moore, The Time-References in the Divina Commedia and Their Bearing on the Assumed Date and Duration of the Vision (London: De Nutt, 1887); Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Cambridge: publ. for the Dante Society by Harvard University Press, 1949). 70 Epistole xiii, 60, refers to Dionysius’s discussion of the heavenly hierarchy. 71 Robert Grosseteste, De Luce, trans. Claire C. Riedl (Marquette: Milwaukee, 1942), 10–17. 72 Paradiso, xxx, 100–8. 73 Ibid., xxx, 124. 74 Kay, ‘Dante’s Empyrean and the Eye of God’, 37–65. 75 Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, ed. and trans. John Magee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 41 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 76 Aristotle, De Sensu et sensatu in St Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri de sensu et sensatu, ed. Rene-Antoine Gauthier, OP, Leonine edition, vol. 45, part 2 (Rome: Commissio Leonina; Paris Vrin, 1985), 437b10–14, 16. 77 Augustine, De trinitate libri quindecim (Patrologia Latina 42); 11.2.5 Online. 78 Dante accepted the intromissive theory in his Convivio 3.9. 6–10; Kay, ‘Dante’s Empyrean’ 37–63; Robert S. Sturges, ‘Vision and Touch in Dante and Chaucer’, in Fulton, Chaucer and Italian Culture, 123–38; David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), 1–17; Dante and Guido Cavalcanti employed the extramissive theory in their lyric love poetry. 79 Kay, ‘Dante’s Empyrean and the Eye of God’, 37–65; Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 81, 179 Tre Donne intorno. 80 Purgatorio, iii, 94–9. 81 Ibid., xxvii, 32–6. 82 Convivio, 3.8. 83 Ibid., 4, 19–21. 379

Notes 84 Durling, Purgatorio, additional note 13, 618–20. 85

Inferno, ii, 71–2.

86

Paradiso, iii, 1. Giovanni Villani in his chronicle liv vi, ch. 92, would go further and gave an account of a comet that preceded Dante’s birth by nine months.

87

Ibid., xxviii.

88

Purgatorio, ii, 112.

89

Ibid., ii, 121–3.

90 Havely, Dante, 177–90. 91

Paradiso, xxviii, 4–18.

92

Purgatorio, xxxiii, 16–18.

93

Paradiso, iii, 124–30.

94

Ibid., v, 1–4. This is the extra mission theory in action. For an illustration of Beatrice overcoming the pilgrim with the rays of her eyes at the head of Paradiso, 4, by a Paduan artist in the mid-fifteenth century, see Illustrated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, ed. Peter Brieger and Charles Singleton, Bollinger Ser. 82, 2 vols (Princeton, NS, 1969), plate 435a.

95

Paradiso, v, 7–13.

96

Ibid., xxxiii, 145.

97

Ibid., xxxiii, 85–6.

98

Purgatorio, xxvii, 102.

99 Ibid., i, 19–21. 100 Inferno, ii, 55. 101 Paradiso, xv, 92–3. 102 Purgatorio, x, 139. 103 Havely, Dante, 33 104 Purgatorio, xi, 91–100. 105 Ibid., xv, 10–15. 106 Ibid., xv, 43–63. 107 Ibid., xvii, 82–140. 108 Paradiso, xxxiii, 140–5. 109 Ibid., xxiii, 70–3. 110 Ibid., xxx, 25–6. 111 Ibid., xii, 22–7. 112 Ibid., xx, 118–19. 113 Ibid., 67–9. 114 Ibid., 100–3. 115 Ibid., 133–8. 116 Ibid., 145–8. 117 Inferno, v, 88–102. 118 Paradiso, xx, 94–5. 119 Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 138–40. 120 Inferno, xxxii, 26. 380

Notes 121 Purgatorio, xxi, 7–10. 122 Inferno, xiv, 79. 123 Santagata, Dante, 73. 124 Ibid., 31, 136. 125 Purgatorio, xiv, 79–82. 126 Inferno, xxxii, 31–3. 127 Ibid., ii, 7–9. 128 Convivio, 3.5. 129 Ibid., 2, 100–3. 130 Purgatorio, vi, 71–5. 131 Ibid., vi, 82–5. 132 Ibid., ii, 79–81. 133 Inferno, xxiii, 94–7. 134 Ibid., xiii, 145–51; 14, 1–3. 135 Convivio, 3.3. 136 Paradiso, xvi, 22–6. 137 Purgatorio, iii, 22–8. 138 Ibid., xxv; Auerbach, Dante, 87. 139 Paradiso, ii, 41–2. 140 Convivio, 4. 28. 141 Mathew 25.24 142 Paradiso, xvii, 46–8. 143 Ovid, Tristia, ed. A. L. Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 1.3. 144 Paradiso, xxv, 1–10. 145 Ibid., xxvi, 91–120. 146 Ibid., xxx, 130. 147 Purgatorio, xxvii, 136–7. 148 Vita Nuova ch. 2. 149 Purgatorio, xxx, 22–33. 150 Sheilah J. Nayar, Flesh and the Continuity of the Eucharist in the Divine Comedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 95–135; Mary Alexandra Watt, The Cross That Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). In the 1270s Pope Gregory X stipulated that the elevation of the Host should be part of the liturgical service. 151 Vita Nuova, 14. 152 Paradiso, xxv, 103–11. 153 Purgatorio, xxx, 34–48. 154 Ibid., 115. 155 Ibid., 126. 156 Ibid., 13–15. 157 Ibid., 4–6. 381

Notes 158 Paradiso, xxiii, 70–3. 159 Ibid., xxx, 128–9. 160 Ibid., 38–40. 161 Ibid., 28–30. 162 Kay, ‘Dante’s Empyrean’, 37–65. 163 Paradiso, xxx, 100–3. 164 Purgatorio, xvi, 85–90. 165 Ibid., I, 130–2. 166 Convivio 4. 21; Durling, Paradiso, additional note 12, 749–82. 167 Paradiso, xxii, 151–4. 168 Ibid., xxvii, 67–72. 169 Ibid., 82–3 170 Ibid., 88–9. 171 Ibid., 91–9. 172 Ibid., xxii, 1–7. 173 Ibid., xxx, 82–90. 174 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, iii supp 69. 2. 175 Purgatorio, v, 130–1. 176 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1, 47 i, 246. 177 Inferno, xv, 23–4; Purgatorio, v, 130; Auerbach, Dante, 134–46. 178 Paradiso, xi, 34–6. 179 Ibid., xxx, 70–3. 180 ‘Become as Little Children’, Mathew 18.3. 181 Havely, Dante, 207. 182 Paradiso, xxix, 81. 183 Taylor in Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 181, suggests that the shadow is cast by the solid body of Paradise but the primum mobile is invisible from the earth and the Empyrean is pure light. The only solid body is the earth, the pilgrim and his book. 184 Troilus and Criseyde, ii, 17–21. 185 Ibid., iii 1695–792. 186 Ibid., 1707–8. 187 Ibid., ii, 400–6. 188 Ibid., 792–8. 189 Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, 110–11. 190 Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1322–3. 191 Ibid., iii, 1599–600. 192 Ibid., iii, 562, 733, 1430. 193 Ibid., v, 535. 194 Inferno, v, 121–2. 195 Fall of Princes, ll, 645–51. 196 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 566–7. 382

Notes 197 Ibid., v, 638. 198 Ibid., v, 643–4. 199 Ibid., ii, 925–31. 200 Ibid., v, 813–19. 201 Ibid., iv, 366–7. 202 Ibid., iv, 313. 203 Ibid., i, 104–5. 204 Sturges, ‘Vision and Touch in Chaucer’, 139. 205 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 650–54. 206 Ibid., v, 1810–55. 207 Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 224–43. 208 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1826–7. 209 Ibid., v, 1849. 210 Paradiso, xiv, 28–30. 211 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1833. 212 Taylor, Chaucer Reads Dante, 191–207. 213 House of Fame, ii, 720–1. 214 Paradiso, i, 109; Purgatorio, xviii, 28. 215 The House of Fame, ii, 840, 881–2. 216 Ibid., ii, 1024–34. 217 Ibid., iii, 1889–90. 218 Ibid., 2100–1. 219 Ibid., 2108–9. 220 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1823–27. 221 Ibid., v, 1829–30. Wallace, Chaucer an Introduction, 75; Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 50–77. 222 Troilus and Criseyde, v, 1849. 223 Ibid., v, 1099. 224 Decameron Day 4 story ii, 10. The young wife of a surgeon, Mazzeo della Mantagna, takes a lover because she is chilly and her husband has not blanketed her. Boccaccio even uses Dante’s word infreddata. 225 Paradiso, xxxiii, 13–15. 226 Decameron, Day 4 story ii. 227 Donald McGrady, ‘Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered’, The Chaucer Review, vol. 12, no. 2 (1977), 1–26. 228 Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1263. 229 Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, ll, 1–16. 230 Ibid., 49–57. 231 Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, vol. ix (Milan: Milan Mondadori 1964), vi 10; Kennedy, ‘From Imitation to Invention’, 225. 383

Notes 232 Paradiso, xxii, l22–5. 233 Ibid., xiv, 95–9. 234 Ibid., xxii, 125–32. 235 House of Fame, ii, 1077–83. 236 Ibid., ii, 1031–5. 237 Ibid., iii, 2108. 238 Ibid., 1103. 239 Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 20–49. 240 House of Fame, iii, 1405–6. 241 Ibid., iii, 2034–42. 242 Ibid., 1564–5. 243 Ibid., 1874–80. 244 Ibid., 1885–9. 245 Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 45–6. 246 Pecock, The Book of Faith, ed. J. L. Morison (Glasgow, 1909) pt II chap. iii, 2, 61ff; The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. William C. Greet, EETS, Orig ser., 171 (1927), 431ff; Levine, ‘Pecock and Valla’, 125. 247 Wallace, Chaucer, 96. 248 Canterbury Tales, The Second Nun’s Tale, 113–19. 249 Ibid., 321–4. 250 Inferno, xxxiii, 118–35. 251 The Canterbury Tales, The Friar’s Tale, 1303–1665 252 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 128. 253 De casibus virorum illustrium, 9 23.6. 254 Fall of Princes, ix, 2511–37. 255 Lydgate, Secrees of Philosophres, 79, 551–2. 256 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Arkana, 1991); Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964). 257 Plato, Phaedo, 69e–72e. 258 Paradiso, vii, 121–48. 259 Plato, Meno and Phaedo ed. David Sedley, trans. Alex Long (Cambridge CUP, 2011) 78b–84b. 260 Plato, Republic, bk x, 614–21. 261 Plato, Phaedrus, 245d–247c. 262 Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 15, 166–75. 263 Ibid., bk 15, 150–5. 264 T. D. Kendrick, ‘Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and the Gardens of Adonis’, The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 26 (1946), 118–22. Flowers of the garden of Adonis appear on the pre-1500 binding of a manuscript belonging to Kymer, and John Leland in a poem Cygnea Cantis, published in 1545, describes a swan descending down the Thames from Oxford to London and Humfrey’s Greenwich palace, called Placeda, mourning the ruin of the garden 384

Notes of Adonis. The device appears in the Neapolitan painter Antonello da Messina’s ‘St Jerome in His Study’, c. 1475 (National Gallery, London). 265 Phaedrus, 2761. 266 The Epitaphium is printed in R. H. Robbins, ‘The Epitaph for Duke Humphrey’, Neuphilogishe and Mitteilungen, vol. 56 (1955): 242–9; and R. H. Robbins. ‘ An English Epitaph for Duke Humphrey’, in R.H. Robbins (ed.), Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 180–3. The Epitaphium survives in two manuscripts: BL MS Harley 2251 fos 7–8v; BL Add MS 34360 fos 65v–67v. Both are in the hand of the scriptorium associated with John Shirley; see The Politics of Fifteenth Century England John Vale’s Book, ed. Margaret Kekewich Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs (Stroud: Alan Sutton for Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1995), 73–121. 267 BL Harl 2251, ‘Epitaph for the Duke of Gloucester’, fos 7–84; BL Add 3460 fos 65v–67v. 268 According to Caesar, Mercury was the chief god of the Celts. 269 ‘Epitaph for the Duke of Gloucester’ (Robbins) lll, 11–12; BL Harl 2251, fo. 7. 270 BL MS Harl 2251 fo. 8; ‘Epitaph for the Duke of Gloucester’, ll, 35–6 41–2. 271 George Ashby’s Poems, 5, ll, 141–3. 272 BL MS Harl 2251, fo. 6. The manuscript was written in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. 273 Details of the faded painting were recorded by an antiquarian in the eighteenth century. For illustration, see Petrina, Cultural Politics, 198. 274 Fall of Princes, ix, 3281; 3472–6. 275 BL MS Royal 2 B1. Suggested by the inscription of fo. 87v. 276 The chalice may be the chalice in Christ’s College, Cambridge, bearing the arms of Humfrey and Eleanor that he acquired when he was chief butler at Henry VI’s coronation. 277 BL Royal 2 B1 fo. 8; N. Morgan, ‘Patrons and Devotional Images in English Art 2019; in Reading Texts and Images Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Exeter: University Exeter Press, 2002) 93–121. Jane Kelsall, ‘Humphrey Duke of Gloucester 1391–1447’ (Fraternity of the Friends of St Albans Abbey, 2000), 14. 278 Registrum abbatiae Johannis Whethamstede, vol. 1, 178–83; Gransden, Historical Writings, 118. 279 Hughes, The Rise of Alchemy, 172–3. 280 BL MS Harl 2251, fo. 8; ‘Epitaph for the Duke of Gloucester’, ll, 37–8, 73–4.

Chapter 8 1

Charles d’Orleans Ballades et Rondeaux (Paris: Librarie Generale Francais, 1992) Recueil: Rondeaux En verrai ge jamais de la fin.

2

Jan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1924), 35.

3

Epistole, vii

4

Convivio, 3.15.

5

See front cover image.

6

James Thompson, City of Dreadful Night (Noster, Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1903) VI ll., 20–1. 385

Notes 7

Paradiso, xxi, 25–7.

8 Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, prologue. 9 Gower, Confessio Amantis, ll, 585–1088; Inferno, xv, 112–13; Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. 10 Fall of Princes, vii, 876. 11 Ibid., vii, 1210. 12 Ibid., 1316. 13 Ibid., 1150–260. 14 This was interpreted in the Middle Ages as the coming of Christ. 15 Fall of Princes, vii, 1320. 16 Paradiso, xxi, 28–30. 17 Ibid., xxi, 94–6. 18 Purgatorio, xxvi, 73–4. 19 Ibid., xxxiii, 139–451. 20 Ibid., 139. 21 Paradiso, xix, 123–5. 22 Ibid., iii, 70–3. 23 Paradiso, xix, 58–60. 24 Aristotle, Metaphysics, iv, 3–6; Crisafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 64–97. 25 Pecock, Repressor, 1, 8; Book of Faith, 125–6; Follower to the Donet, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, EETS, orig. ser., 164 (1924), 9; Levine, ‘Pecock and Valla’ 122. 26 Emden, BRUO, iii, 1422. 27 Inferno, xxvi, 136 28 Bruno Nardi, Dante e la Cultura medievale Nuovi saggi di Filosofia Dantesca (2n edition Bari: Laterza, 1941). 29 Juri Lotman, ‘Il viaggio di Ulisse nella Divina Commedia di Dante’ in Testo e contesto. Semiotica dell’arte e della cultura, ed. Simonetta Salvestroni (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1980), 81–103. 30 The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Later Middle Ages, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (Bristol Record Soc., VII, 1937), 157–63; Bristol and Gloucestershire Arch. Soc. Trans., xlvii (Bristol: Bristol and Gloucester Archeological Society, 1925), 123–9; The Great Red Book of Bristol, ed. E. W. W. Veale (Bristol: Bristol Record Society Publications). (Part 3, 1950, Part IV, 1953); J. A. Williamson, The Voyages of the Cabots and the Discovery of North America, 18–19; McFarlane, ‘William Worcester’, 222. 31 Magdalen College MS, 124. 32 Dicts and Sayings, 24, 174. 33 Inferno, iii, 94–6. 34 See BL Harl 4431 fo. 184v for image of Christine’s vision of the heavens. 35 Brownlee, ‘The Problem of the Father’; Richards ‘Christine de Pizan and Dante’, 100–11. 36 Purgatorio, vii, 28–30. 37 Minor Poems of Lydgate vol. 2, 682, ll, 324 ff. 38 Ibid., vol. 2, 12 ff.

386

Notes 39 Ibid., vol. 2, 85. 40 Ibid., vol. 2, 367–43; See also Disguisings at London, ed. Sponsler. 41 Canterbury Tales: The Monk’s Tale, 252, 3951–4; D. W. Robinson Jr., ‘Chaucerian Tragedy’, ELH, vol. 19, no. 1 (1952), 1–37. See also Chaucer, Boece, Metrum, i, 20–30. 42 Steve Ellis, Geoffrey Chaucer, 19. 43 Chaucer, The Minor Poems, ed. W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), 533–4. 44 Lydgate, Troy Book, ii, 896–923. 45 Corpus Christ College, Cambridge. MS 061; Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Appendix: The Troilus Frontispiece and the Dramatic Presentation of Chaucer’s Verse. 46 King Lear, Act 5, Sc. 3, ll. 185. 47 Maura Nolan, ‘Now Wo, Now Gladness Ovidiana in the Fall of Princes’, ELH, vol. 71, no. 3 (2004), 531–4. 48 Fall of Princes, i, 2406. 49 Ibid., i, 2161. 50 Ibid., vi, 8–14. 51 Ibid., iii, 1032–6. 52 Epistole, xiii, 29. 53 Crisafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 83 ff. 54 Fall of Princes, i, 2159–61. 55 Ibid., ix, 3621–8. 56 Greenacre’s, ‘A Lenvoye upon John Bochas’, printed in The Fall of Princes, Part iii, bk ix, p. 1023, ll. 1–28. 57 Boke of Nurture in Babees Book 183–4, 984–1000; BL Harl MS 4011 fo. 171 ff. 58 Book of Nurture, 164–6, 686–718. 59 Ibid., 166–9, 718–795; J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man. A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 29–36; The Book of Nurture, 719–94. The Salernitan verses, a twelfth-, thirteenth century poem from the school of Medicine in Salerno. 60 Convivio, 4.25. 61 Ibid., 4. 23. 62 Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, 108; J. A. Burrow, ‘Thomas Hoccleve: Some Redatings’, Review of English Studies, vol. 46, no. 183 (1995), 366–74; Everett-Philips, ‘Humphrey Duke of Gloucester’, 148–60. 63 The Pells Issue roll of 18 July 1416 authorizes an extraordinary loan to Hoccleve and an extraordinary method of payment of his annuity, indirectly by his friends, at the time when he says in the Complaint that he was very ill. MC. Seymour (ed.) Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), additional notes. 64 The date of the composition is indicated in the text ll, 15 and 55. 65 Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint, 162–8. 66 Ibid., 1–7. 67 The presentation copy which he gave to Humfrey Duke of Gloucester does not survive. The date of the poem is indicated by a reference ll, 136, to a newly passed act of Parliament 387

Notes against coin clipping signed in November 1421 and by Hoccleve’s confession of his age as 53 in ll, 246. Gloucester’s second return from France after 27 March 1422 is indicated by these references. Seymour, Selections from Hoccleve, additional note. 68 Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye in Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. Burrows, 1–938. 69 Ibid., 320 ff. 70 Ibid., 509–10. 71 Purgatorio, xi, 31–6. 72 Hoccleve, Lerne to Dye, 540. 73 Lydgate, Testament, 205–7, 257–61. 74 In the Siege of Thebes (1420) Lydgate describes himself as a fifty-year-old monk. 75 Lydgate, Secrees of Philosophers, 1491. 76 Ibid., 1456–7. 77 Ibid., 1296–491. 78 Ibid., 42, verse 186. 79 The following analysis is a contradiction of Pearson’s claim in his John Lydgate, ch. 1, that the Testament cannot be viewed as a personal document because Lydgate’s personality is irrelevant to an understanding of his poetry, which can only be related to ‘medieval values’ and not the inner self. 80 John Lydgate, The Testament, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part 1, ed. H. N. Macracken (London: EETS Extra Ser. 1911), 245–7. 81 Ibid., 257–61. 82 Ibid., 262–6. 83 Ibid., 231–2. 84 Ibid., 236–7. 85 Ibid., 666–9. 86 Ibid., 346–52. 87 Ibid., 376–7. 88 Ibid., 380. 89 Ibid., 671. 90 Ibid., 740–5. 91 Ibid., ii, 83–4. 92 Ariane Conty, ‘Absolute Art: Nicolas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei’, in Religion and the Arts, vol. 16, no. 5 (January 2012), 461–87. 93 Lydgate, Testament, 154–5. 94 Ibid., 89–94; 117, 418. 95 Ibid., 451–2. 96 Ibid., 158. 97 Lydgate wrote the Ballad on the departure of Thomas Chaucer to Paris in either 1414, 1417 or 1420; Emden, BRUO, ii, 1186. 98 Testament, 12, 41–2. 99 Testament, 880.

388

Notes 100 Ibid., 892–6. 101 Inferno, xv, 58–60. 102 Ibid., xv, 79–80. 103 Ibid., 55–7. 104 Ibid., 82–6; Crisafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 109–21. 105 Paradiso, ix, 55–7. 106 Purgatorio, xxxii, 102. 107 Ibid., vi, 1–12. 108 Ibid., xxxi, 58; Taylor, Chaucer Reads Dante, 90–7. 109 Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1321–3. 110 McLeod, Charles of Orleans, 23. 111 The English Poems of Charles of Orleans, vol. ii, ed. Steele; Fox, The Lyric Poetry of Charles d’Orleans. 112 Ballade, 99. 113 Ballade, cv. 114 Ballade, 59. 115 Anna Klosowska, ‘Tearsong: Valentina Visconti’s Inverted Stoicism’, in On the Love of Commentary, ed. Nicola Masciondra and Scott Wilson, Glossator 5 (2011), 173–98. 116 Fox, Lyric Poetry of Charles of Orleans. 117 Ballade, 99. 118 Paston Letters, vol.1, 134; BL Add. MS 28212, fo. 22. 119 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 208 ff. 120 Scrope, Epistle of Othea, xvii, 27–8. 121 BL MS Add. 28209, fo. 21. 122 Epistle of Othea, xxxi, 12–13. 123 D. K. Hawkyard, ‘Some Later Medieval Fortified Manor Houses,’ MA thesis, Keele University, 1968; Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century Volume 2, Fastolf ’s Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 124 Worcester, Boke of Noblesse, 64–5; BL MS Royal B, xxii, fo. 32v. 125 Boke of Noblesse, 16. 126 Paston Letter, no. 583. 127 Worcester, Itineraries, 322–4. 128 Paston Letter, 517–18. 129 Ibid., vol. ii, 203. 130 Worcester, Boke of Noblesse, 27. 131 Holinshead heard these stories from the earl of Ormond. 132 Pearsall, John Lydgate, ch. 4. 133 Ibid., ch. 2; J. Norton-Smith ed. John Lydgate, Poems (Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 195. 134 Paradiso, xv, 88–9. 135 Paston Letters, ii, 355–6, 162–3, 102, Paston Letters, i, 158. 389

Notes 136 Ibid., 610. 137 Worcester also used the sign in his long book Sloane MS 4 fo. 57. 138 Emmanuel Coll Camb MS 1, 2.10. 139 Ibid., fo. 11b. 140 Ibid., fo. 13b; Dicts and Sayings, 54. 141 Emmanuel College MS 1.2.10, 13v, 46vb; Dicts and Sayings, 146; M. R. James, ‘Catalogue of Western Manuscripts’, in The Library of Trinity College Cambridge: A Descriptive Catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900–1904), 29–30. 142 Worcester also compared the white flowers of bind weed to scaring bells (Sloane MS 4 fo. 49v). 143 Worcester, Itineraries, 122. 144 The House of Fame, iii, 2007–15. 145 Hoccleve, Dialogue with a Friend, 215–7. 146 Fall of Princes, 1 Prologue, 387–90. 147 Bodleian Library MS, Laud Misc. 570 for. 16r. 148 Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, 1. 149 Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, vi, 399. 150 Ibid., iv, 12. 151 Ibid., 330–412. 152 Ibid., 374–85. 153 For Decembrini’s translation, see Alfred C. Hiatt, ‘The Reference Work in the Fifteenth Century: John Whethamstede’s Granarium’, in Makers and Uses of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A.S.G. Edwards, ed. C. M. Meale and Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014). 154 Hoccleve, Learn to Die, 201–10. 155 The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed Jean Paul Richter transl. by Mrs R.C. Bell and Edward John Poynter (1888). 156 Inferno, xxiv, 47–50. 157 Ibid., xv, 118–20. 158 Paradiso, xvii, 52–4. 159 Ibid., x, 118–20. 160 Ibid., xvi, 16–17. 161 Inferno, ii, 59–60. 162 ‘Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord’; Purgatorio, 19, 43–5. 163 Charles S. Singleton, ‘The Poets Number at the Centre’, MLN, vol. 80, no.1 (John Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1–10. 164 Purgatorio, xvii, 65–72. 165 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 431. 166 Purgatorio, xxxii and xxxiii. 167 Paradiso, xxxiii, 82–7.

390

Notes 168 Charles d’Orleans, Ballades et Rondeaux, ed. Jean-Claude Muhlethaler (Paris: librairie Generale francaise, 1992), Rondeau 286. Klosowska, ‘Tearsong,’ 197. 169 James Robinson, ‘The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer Dante Boccaccio and the Ghostly Politics of the Trecento’, in Chaucer and Italian Culture, ed. H. Fulton, 66–82. 170 Purgatorio, xii, 13–14. 171 Ibid., xii, 19–20. 172 Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 211–12. 173 Ibid., 320. 174 Ibid., 348–50. 175 Purgatorio, xii, 94–6. 176 Anelide and Arcite, 166–8. 177 Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 146. 178 Ibid., 41; Durling, ‘Boccaccio an Interpretation: Guido’s Escape in Decameron VI 9’, in Aldo S. Bernardi and Anthony Pellegrini, ed. Dante Petrarch Boccaccio Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honour of Charles S. Singleton (Binghampton, NY, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), 284. 179 Robinson, ‘The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer’, 45–65. 180 Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica (New Chronicles), 3 vols., ed. G. Porta (Parma, Guanda, 1990–91), ix, lxxii, 431. 181 Fabian Alfie, ‘Politics, and Not Poetics: A Reading of Guido Cavalcanti’s Sonnet Una figura della Donna mia’, Italica, vol. 93, no. 2 (2002), 209–24. 182 Robinson, ‘The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer’, 64–5. 183 Decameron, Day 6 tale 9.

Chapter 9 1

Inferno, xxxii, 73–4.

2

Ibid., ix, 61–4.

3

Convivio 3.9.

4 Gower, Confessio amantis liber vii, 368. 5 Worcester, Boke of Noblesse, 49. 6 Cicero, De re public, trans. Clinton 6.9–29; Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God Occidental Mythology, 325–9. 7

Paradiso, xxvii, 64–5.

8

Fall of Princes, VI, 92–5.

9

Purgatorio, v, 100–3.

10 Aristotle, De sensu (On the Senses) ed. and trans., G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), 445b Atistotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), 1.1–2. 11 Plato, Republic, 523–5.

391

Notes 12 Ibid., 500 c-e. 13 Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1987), 3. 14 Paradiso, v, 124–7; ‘And what is laughter if not a flashing of the soul’s delight’. Convivio, 3. 8. 15 Paradiso, xxxiii, 124–32. 16 Ibid., xix, 64–6. 17 Ibid., xxix, 25–8. 18 Ibid., xiii, 55–6. 19 Ibid., 52–4. 20 Ibid., xx, 5–6. 21 Ibid., xiii, 76–8. 22 Convivio, 2. 14. 23 Paradiso, xiii, 136–8. 24 Inferno, xx, 28–30; Cristafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 83–5. 25 Paradiso, xx, 94–5. 26 Ibid., xx, 94. 27 Paolo Nasti, ‘The Wise Poet: Solomon in Dante’s Heaven of the Sun’, Reading Medieval Studies, vol. xxvii (2001), 111. 28 Santagata, Dante, 51. 29 Convivio, 4. 8, 253; Durling Paradiso, 13, notes, 130–42 and ‘Mio figlio ove’ (Inferno x, 61) in Picane, 2001, 303–29. 30 Inferno, xxvi, 124–6. 31 Purgatorio, xii, 4–6. 32 Paradiso xxxi, 62–3. 33 Ibid., xxxii, 145–7. 34 Inferno, ii, 34–5. 35 Ibid., xix, 88; Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, 145–7. 36 Cristafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 43–9. 37 Purgatorio, 30, 109–45. 38 Cristafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 109–11. 39 Inferno, xxvi, 19–21. 40 Paradiso, x, 109–11. 41 Inferno, iv, 41–2. 42 Paradiso, xx 46–8. 43 Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, 71. 44 Inferno, viii, 44–5. 45 Plutarch, Concerning Nature, trans. W. W. Goodwin (London: Penguin, 2019), Bk V, ch. 12. 46 Convivio. 3.12. The sun is merely a metaphor for God’s light, a way of comprehending the divine. Barbara Seward misleadingly says it is the sun that gives life to the rose and the rose that makes manifest the sun’s power and glory. This should be understood anagogically in terms of the interaction between the Empyrean and the primum mobile. ‘Dante’s Mystic Rose’ Studies in Philology, vol. 52, no. 4 (1955), 515–23.

392

Notes 47 General Prologue, 544. 48 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 248–60. 49 The Manciple’s Tale, 324–5; 359–63. 50 P. J. Klempe, ‘The Women in the Middle: Layers of Love in Dante’s Vita Nuova’, Italica, vol. 61 no. 3 (1984), 185–94. 51 Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante; Inferno, v, 61; Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 29. 52 Convivio, 2.12. 53 Vita Nuova, xiv. 54 Boccaccio maintained otherwise. 55 Santagata, Dante, 323–4. 56 Amor, da che convien put ch'io mi doglia, Dante's Lyric Poetry, 89, p. 207. 57 Santagata, Dante, 205; Epistole, 1v, 2. 58 Inferno, ii, 73–4. 59 Purgatorio, xix, 25–8. 60 Hollander, Dante, 122–3; Purgatorio xxxi, 45. 61 Inferno, ix, 52. 62 Ibid., ix, 61–4. 63 Warner, ‘The Dark Wood’, 464. ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit’, Corinthians 3:6. 64 Ibid., v, 136–7. 65 Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1748–59. 66 Inferno, v, 131–2; Paradiso, xxxiii, 94; Taylor, Dante Reads the Divine Comedy, 71. 67 Inferno, ix, 61–3. 68 Purgatorio, viii, 19–21. 69 Paradiso, ii, 1–6; Taylor, Dante Reads the Divine Comedy, 107. 70 Troilus and Criseyde, i, 415–18. 71 Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, 172. 72 Santagata, Dante, 304; Epistole, XIII, 3. 73 Epistole, xiii, 21. 74 Convivio, 3.15. 75 Barolini, Undivine Divine Comedy, 222–56. 76 Paradiso, i, 109–14. 77 Barolini, Undivine Comedy, 222–56. 78 Paradiso, v, 109–12; Crisafi, ‘Dante's Masterplot’, 166–71. 79 Crisafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 185; Robert Wilson, Prophecies and Prophecy in Dante’s Commedia, Bibliotheca Dell Archivum Romanicum Florence: publ. Leo S. Olschki (2008) 165. 80 Paradiso, xvii, 59–60. 81 Purgatorio, xxix, 37–8. 82 Paradiso, xx, 3–7.

393

Notes 83

Ibid., x, 7–8.

84 Dante, Lyric Poetry (Foster and Boyde) 77–80. 85

Ibid., xvii, 106–8; Auerbach, Dante, 169.

86

Purgatorio, xx, 37–9.

87

Inferno, xxvi, 12; Crisafi, ‘Dante’s Masterplot’, 190–5.

88

Purgatorio, xxxi, 55.

89 Cervantes, Don Quixote (London: Penguin, 2003). 90

J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1979), Bk II.

91

C. H., Hereford, ‘Dante and Milton’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 8, no. 1 (1924), 191 ff.

92

Comments of John Ruskin on the Divina Commedia, comp. George P. Huntington, introd., Charles Eliot Norton (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903); John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice 3 vols (London, Smith Elder, 1851), iii, sec. liii.

93

Alison Milbank, ‘Ruskin and Dante Centrality and de-centring’, Bulletin of John Rylands Library, vol. 73, no. (1) (1991), 119–34.

94

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 (London: George Routledge, 1897), vol. iii, ch. xii, sec. 6; Huntington, Comments of John Ruskin on the Divina Commedia.

95

John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), ch. xxiii.

96

Modern Painters, vol. iv, ch. iii, sec. 24.

97

Ibid., vol. iii, ch. xiv.

98

Ibid., sec. 48.

99

Ibid., vol. iii, ch. xv, sec. 20.

100 Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving (New York: George Allen, 1904), lecture ii sec. 67, 68. 101 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. ii, ch. viii. 102 ‘“The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso” by Gioseppe C. Di Scipio’, review by Rachel Jacoff. Italica, vol. 63, no. 3 (1986), 303–7. 103 Modern Painters, iii, ch. xiv. 104 Ibid. iii, ch. xv, sec. 20. 105 Ibid iii, ch. xv, sec. 20. 106 Ruskin, Giotto and His Works in Padua (New York: David Zwirner, 2018) ch. xvi. 107 Modern Painters, vol. iii, ch. xxxii, sec. 29. 108 Ibid., iii, ch. xv, sec. 7. 109 Ibid., iii, ch. xv, sec. 20. 110 Ibid., xxvii, sec. 131, 132; Purgatorio, xxviii, ll, 23–4. 111 Dante, Eclogues II, 61–2; Santagata, Dante, 328. 112 Ruskin, On the Old Road (New York: Allen, 1905), ch. iii, sec. 69; Fors Clavigera, xviii. 113 On the Road, ch. iii, sec. 69. 114 Modern Painters, iii, ch. xv, sec. 20. 115 Ibid., iii, ch. xv.

394

Notes 116 Ruskin, Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones; vol. 1 and 2 (New York: George Allen, 1879), ch. x, sec. 8. 117 Unto This Last, xxxi, 127. 118 Paradiso, ii, 1–6. 119 Modern Painters, iii, xv, sec. 21. 120 Purgatorio, xxvi, 61. 121 Botticelli’s drawings were housed in the library of the duke of Hamilton until 1862 when they were sold and left the country for Berlin. Havely, Dante’s Public, 267. 122 Inferno, xviii, 1–2. 123 Ibid., viii, 77–8. 124 Ibid., xv, 1–3. 125 Ibid., ix, 6. 126 Ibid., ix, 28–9. 127 Thompson, City of Dreadful Night VI, ll, 20–1. 128 Ibid., xvii. 129 Ibid., xix l. 1. 130 Ibid., xxi ll. 72. 131 Piero Boitani, 'Moby Dick' in Dante from the New Millennium. 132 Robert Crawford, ‘James Thompson and T. S. Eliot’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 23, no. 1, spring (1985), 23–41. 133 Inferno, iii, 46–57. 134 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, 60–5. 135 Ibid., 130–1. 136 Purgatorio, xxx, 142–5. 137 Four Quartets Little, Gidding, 3. 138 Inferno, xv, 54. 139 D. Llorens-Cubedo, ‘Midwinter Spring, the Still Point and Dante. The Aspiration to the Eternal Present in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’, Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 48 (2013), 61–73. 140 Purgatorio, iv, 112–25. 141 Epistole, v. 14. 142 Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014). 143 Paradiso, xvii, 34–6. 144 Joyce, Ulysses, 933. 145 Purgatorio, i, 115–7. 146 Inferno, xxxiv, 133–40. 147 Joyce, Ulysses, 818. 148 Paradiso, xxxiii, 145. 149 Santagata, Dante, 13. 150 Seamus Heaney, The Strand at Lough Beg, from Fieldwork (London: Faber, 2001).

395

Notes 151 Seamus Heaney, Station Island (London: Faber, 1984). 152 Inferno, viii, 52–3. 153 Ibid., xxxii, 76–109. 154 Ibid., xxxiii, 115–17. 155 Ibid., xxix, 33–5. 156 Santagata, Dante, 58–8. 157 Convivio i, 2. 158 Ibid., 2, 9. 159 Station Island, 65. 160 Ibid., vii, 80. 161 Ibid., viii, 82. 162 Ibid., 82–3. 163 Ibid., 83 164 Ibid. 165 64 Darcy O’Brien, ‘Piety and Modernism: Seamus Heaney’s Station Island’, James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (1988), 52. 166 Station Island, ix, 85. 167 O’Brien, ‘Piety and Modernism’, 62. 168 Station Island, ii, 66. 169 Ibid., ii, 66 ff. 170 With the approach of the millennium poets writing in English continued to engage with Dante’s shade. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff, ‘Still here; Dante after the Millenium’, 451–65. Derek Walcott wrote a Caribbean Homeric epic in intermittent terza rima where he encounters the shade of his biological father, a poet who died when he was an infant and who exhorts him to give a voice to the people of Saint Lucia. Derek Walcott, Omeros (Faber, 1990). 171 Paradiso, ii, 130–1,142–5. 172 Santagata, Dante, 88–120. 173 Leo Ulrich, ‘The Unfinished Convivio and Dante’s Re-reading of the Aeneid’, Medieval Studies, vol. 13 (1951), 213–24. 174 Ovid too mentioned the stars near the end of his Metamorphosis in his celebration of Augustus. Metamorphosis, xv, 843–70. 175 Convivio 3.5. 21. 176 Inferno, xxxiv, 139. 177 Purgatorio, xxxiii, 145. 178 Paradiso, xxxiii, 145. 179 Peter Dronke, ‘The Conclusion of Dante's Commedia’ in Dante, ed. Jeremy Tabling (Londson: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 160–82.

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416

INDEX

Abati Bella degli Durante mother of Dante 314–15 Adam the Englishman coiner 132 Agothocles of Syracuse 158–9 Alchemy Crossing borders 269, 271 Dante 129 Greek philosophy 82, 92, 111–12, 132, 135 Humfrey Duke of Gloucester 137, 197, 264 John Lydgate 133–4 John Whethamstede 132 Marriage of Rome and Britain 112 St Alban 83–7, 92, 112 Spiritual alchemy 99, 108–9, 262 treatment of Henry VI 105, 133 Alexander the Great 77, 94, 101–3, 106, 134, 160, 162–3, 166, 206, 281 Alighieri Dante (c. June 1 1265–September 14, 1321) The Banquet (Il Convivio) 13–17, 23, 28, 40–1, 55, 57, 67, 91, 93, 130–1, 205, 222, 232, 237, 257, 267, 277–8, 312, 315, 334, 336–7 Letters 17, 57–8, 172, 178, 220, 263–4, 317, 319, 325 Monarchia 4–5, 9, 15, 24–6, 33, 48, 58, 97, 130, 145 On vernacular Eloquence (de vulgari eloquentia) 14, 40, 42 Vita Nuova 29, 37, 165, 173, 177, 178, 183–4, 186, 191, 215, 218, 220–2, 234–5, 241, 244, 283, 288, 315–6, 319, 331, 336 Acceptance of Fortune 140–1 Admiration for Rome 75, 88, 97, 98 Admiration for Greece 91–4 Appears before Boccaccio 258 Blasphemy 215 Bonds of living and dead 221 Boundaries 267–9 Centrality 324 Childhood love of Beatrice 37, 177–8, 180–1 Circumscribed universe 47, 118, 125 Condotiere 229 Conversion in attitudes towards women 171 Convert 218, 286, 318–19 Destiny 146–7, 149 Dreams 19–20, 193, 216 Divine grace 228 End of world 298

Exile 12–14, 278 Free will 149 Ghibbelines 57 Greek philosophy 47–8 Hopes for the Roman empire 7, 13, 15, 48, 53, 57–8, 59, 60–1 Identification with Ulysses 131, 237, 246, 261, 312, 316–17, 321 Implication in sins of Inferno 116–17, 126–7, 129, 131, 253 Intellectual pride 117, 122, 131, 311 Intimate male friendships 213–14 Latin language 48 Light 308–10 Love of antiquity 55–6 Love of the world 230–1, 293 Love of Virgil 54–5, 76, 181 Mother 313 Necromancy 21, 129 Nostalgia 285–6 Obscurity 4–6 Onset of mature love for Beatrice 220 Onset of friendship with Guido 220 Optical theories 222–3 Oxford 7, 36 Pilgrim 332 Popularity in Italy 16–17, 30 Portraits 268 Pride 226 Prior of Florence 214 Prophet 20 Protestantism 6 Resurrection of the body 239 Reunited with Beatrice 224 Soteriology 45, 72, 78, 80, 228 Symbolism of number nine 221–2 Sympathy for Francesca 174–5 Unification of Italy 7 Union of sexual and divine love 246 Universe as a work of art 3, 47, 119–20, 144, 297–8 Vernacular 40–1, 61, 67, 76, 130–1, 172, 310, 315 Verona 145–6, 148 Violence 333–4 Alighieri Antonia (or) Beatrice (Sister) daughter of Dante 16, 319

Index Alighieri Pietro son of Dante 16–17, 58, 334 Commentary on The Divine Comedy 17 Amphibalus priest who converted St Alban 81, 83–4 Anjou Charles (d. 1285 (Count of Provence and King of Sicily of 54, 58, 215 Antigone daughter of Humfrey duke of Gloucester 106 Aquinas Thomas (1225–1274) Dominican friar 13, 20, 47–8, 98–9, 222, 227, 308, 310–11, 330 On an individual’s essence or habitus 150, 239 Aristotle (384–322 BC) 17, 46–7, 92–3, 97–8, 100, 102, 105, 107, 110, 139, 159, 215, 222, 232, 237, 281 De anima 308 Ethics 73, 91, 166 Politics 91, 101, 103, 109, 111 Reputed author of Secreta secretorum 132 Wise king as protector 102–3 Arthur Plantagenet (d. 1447) The illegitimate son of Humfrey duke of Gloucester 87–8, 203 Arundel Thomas (1353–1414) archbishop of Canterbury 19, 62, 75, 271 Constitutions of 1409 37 Friendship with Salutati 26–7, 33 Ashby George (C. 1390–1475) clerk of the signet 43 Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 43, 263 Athens 72, 91, 102, 104, 207, 232 Augustine St of Hippo (354 AD–430AD) 55, 60, 66, 100, 283, 330 On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina christiana) 9 The City of God (De civitas dei) 60 Confessions 9 Augustus or Octavian (63 BC–14 Aug 14AD) The first Roman emperor 4–5, 20, 49, 53–5, 63–5, 68, 70–2, 75, 80, 102, 106, 108, 160, 162, 168, 220 Universal peace 56–7 Baptistry of San Giovanni, Florence 89, 127, 140, 211, 215, 233–4, 301, 313, 324, 328 Mosaic of Hell 167 Sheepfold 231, 270 Bardi family, Florentine bankers 29–30, 189, 220, 235 Bardi Simone dei, husband of Beatrice Portinari 29–30 Bardi Walter 29 Families’ connection to Beatrice 29 Barlow Henry Clark student of Dante (1806–1876) 7–8 Critical Historical and Philosophical Contributions to the Study of the Divina Commedia 7–8

418

Bartolomeo della Scala, lord of Verona (1277–1304) 144–5 Protector of Dante 144–5 Basilica San Zeno, Verona 145, 205, 233 Rose window showing the wheel of Fortune and Empyrean 145, 205, 233, 255 Beaufort Henry Cardinal (c.1375–11 April 1447) 65, 67, 70–1, 73–5, 78–9, 87, 100, 106–7, 203 Beckett Samuel, Irish novelist (1906–1989) 327, 329–30, 225–6 More Kicks than Pricks 329 Beckington Thomas bishop of Bath and Wells (1390–1465) 38, 68 Beauchamp Richard earl of Warwick (1382–1439) 70, 79, 81, 135, 193 Beaufort Henry bishop of Winchester and Cardinal (c.1375–11 April 1447) 65, 67, 70–1, 73–5, 78–9, 87, 100, 106–7, 203 Beccaria Antonio secretary to Humfrey duke of Gloucester (c.1400–1474) 11, 39, 67, 97, 193 Liber d’Amore 96 Translation of Corbaccio 67–8 Translation Plutarch’s Life of Romulus 104 Bede St., (672, 3– 26 May 735) 18, 177 Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum 18 Bedford John duke of (John of Lancaster) (20 June 1389–14 September 1435) 22, 39, 43, 64, 70, 74, 79, 81, 87 Chancellor of Humfrey duke of Gloucester 38 Bertoldi Giovanni (John of Serravalle) Franciscan bishop of Fermo (1350–15 February 1445) 33–6, 213 Commentary on the Divine Comedy 21, 34–5, 38, 44 Journey to England 35 Translation of The Divine Comedy 37 Blake William English poet and painter (1757–1827) 6, 8, 11 Jerusalem 6 Preface to Milton 11 Boccaccio Giovanni (1313–1375) 3, 11, 13, 15, 24, 27–8, 37, 40, 46, 48, 60, 65, 70, 130, 138, 192, 207, 255, 287, 294, 297, 299, 307, 314–17, 322, 336 Beatrice and Dante 180–1, 188 Corbaccio 193–5 Commentary on The Divine Comedy (Esposizione sopra la commedia) 14, 29, 212–13 Decameron 215, 249, 301 Filostrato 188, 244 Fortunes of Famous Men (De casibus illustrium virorum) 169, 252, 258, 274–5 Francesa and Paolo 173–4

Index Genealogy of the Gods (De genealogia deorum) 40, 94, 315 Guido Cavalcanti 31, 215, 301–2 Lectures on Dante 17, 30, 36 Renaming Commedia 16 Boethius, Roman senator and philosopher (c.1447–23 October 524) 22, 32, 75, 80, 103, 140, 164, 274, 299, 319 Consolation of Philosophy 161, 164 Let it be Perpetual (O qui perpetual) 94 Bolingbroke Henry (Henry IV king of England) (April 1367–20 March 1413) 27, 59 Bonaventure (Giovanni di Fidanzia) Franciscan theologian (1221–15 July 1274) 9, 227, 324 Breviloquium (Brief Reading) 9 Boniface VIII Pope (Benedetto Caetani c. 1230–1303) 12–13, 36, 49, 148, 165, 257, 298, 311, 313 Damnation by Dante 20 Boni Pietro (Petrus Bonus) alchemist 135 Precious New Pearl (Margarita Preciosa Novella) 135 Botticelli Sandro painter (c.1445–11510) 83, 208, 326 The Book of Husbandry, a Middle English translation of Palladius’s De re rustica 43, 68, 77–8, 88, 101, 114, 137–9, 210, 261, 264, 294 History of the Florentine People 84 Life of Dante (Vita de Dante e Petrarch) 39 translator of Aristotle’s Ethics 39, 48, 96, 98 Translator of Aristotle’s Politics 96, 100 Translator of Plato’s Phaedra 96 translator of Plutarch’s Lives 74 Bradwardine Thomas, mathematician (1300– 26 August 1349) 46, 132 In Defence of God against the Pelagians (De causa dei contra Pelagius) 48 Brendon of Clonfert (the navigator) (c. Ad 484–c.577) 18 Voyage of St Brendon (Navigatio Sancti Brendon Abbatim 18 Bruni Leonardo, Italian humanist (1370– 9 March 1444) 17, 26, 33, 36, 44, 68, 94–5, 195, 214 Bubwith, Nicholas bishop of Bath and Wells (1355–27 October 1424) 33, 356, 38 Dedicatee of Bertoldi’s translation and commentary of The Divine Comedy 34 Burgh Benedict clerk and translator (1413–1485) 281 Secret of secrets 281 Buridan Jean, french philosopher ((1301– 1358) 46 De caelo et mundo 46 Meteorology (Meteorologia) 41 Relativity 47 Byron George Gordon, Lord (22 January 1788–19 April 1824) 5, 174

Cacciaguida degli Elisei (1091–1148). Great grandfather of Dante 47, 54, 87, 118, 154, 178, 226, 231, 233, 249, 264, 292, 295, 299, 330 nostalgia 286 Prophecies concerning Dante’s destiny 145, 148 Calais 5, 29, 71, 74, 206 Calcidius (fl 4th century AD) Translation of Timaeus 94, 96 Camelot 86–8 Campoldino Battle (11 June 1289) 214–15, 229, 308 Capgrave John Austin Friar, confessor to Humfrey Duke of Gloucester (21 April 1393–12 ? August 1464) 32 Cangrande della scala 15, 17, 145, 172, 312 Patron of Dante 15, 30, 145, 148 Chronicle of England 44 Commentary on Genesis 44 Castiglionchio Lapo da (the Younger (c.1405–1438) 74, 104 Translation of Orations of Isocrates 104 Translation of Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes 104 Castiglione Zeno Bishop of Bayeaux 39, 68, 96 Inspired Humfrey’s interest in Dante 37 Cato Marcus Portius (the elder) (234BC–149BC) De agri cultura 71 Cato of Utica (the younger) (95BC–12 April 46 BC) 18, 20, 34, 55, 75, 157, 170, 211, 224, 224, 285, 309 Cavalcanti Cavalcante de’ father of Guido Cavalcanti (1220–1280) 212, 215, 217, 219, 242, 259, 298, 300, 320 Cavalcanti, Guido, poet (1255–29 August 1300) 2, 31, 37, 120, 177, 212, 214 Donna me Prega 216–20, 300 Atheism 214–15, 218, 226, 300, 312–13, 334 Death 214 Poetry 214–17 Rivalry with Dante 214 Caxton William, merchant and writer (c.1422–c.1491) 4, 22, 135 Cervantes Miguel de Spanish writer (29 September 1547–22 April, 1616) Don Quixote 322 Charles VI King of France (3 December 1368–21October 1422) 22, 88 Library 63 Chastellain Georges, poet (1405–20 April 1475) Le Temple de Boccace 109 Chaucer Geoffrey, poet ((c.1342/3– October 1400) Anelida and Arcite 299–300 Book of the Duchess 123, 165, 245, 288 Canterbury Tales 61–2, 130, 150, 185, 197, 241, 243, 255, 275, 287, 291, 299, 306

419

Index House of Fame 28, 41, 61, 121, 150, 186, 243, 245, 251, 291 The Knight’s Tale 274 The Monk’s Tale 274, 283 Parliament of Fowls 62, 123–4, 134, 140, 151, 186, 243, 245, 251 Translation of The Consolation of Philosophy (Boece) 209 Treatise on the Astrolabe 42, 121 Troilus and Criseyde 61–2. 130, 150, 185, 190, 197, 241, 243, 255, 275, 287, 291, 306 Antiquity 61–2, 93 Bilingual 11, 33 Earth bound poetry 121–3, 210, 255 Fame 254 Fortune 152–4, 156 Humours 101 Italy 27–31 Nature 115–21 Nostalgia 289 Refuses to judge 301 Satire of Dante 21–2, 28, 62, 122, 150, 185–6, 249, 299, 322 Scepticism concerning love and the afterlife 210, 241–6, 248, 250–1, 254, 256–8, 319 Sympathy for women 188, 190, 195 Tragedy 274 Vernacular 2, 21, 41–2, 61, 315, 318 Chrysoloras Manuel, Greek scholar (1355–15 April 1414) 95–6 Cicero Marcus Tullius Roman statesman and philosopher (3 January 106–7 December 43 BC) 61, 64, 68–71, 73, 75–8, 82, 85, 91, 100, 106, 110–213, 272, 291, 307, 336 The Dream of Scipio 93–4, 123, 165, 251, 260, 306 Cincinattus Lucius Quintus Roman statesman ((c.519–c.430BC) 75, 78, 157 Cobham Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester (c.1400–7July 1452) 64, 78–9, 93, 140, 165, 192, 197–201 Constance Council of 11, 33, 35–7, 39 Constantine the Great Roman emperor (c. 272–22 May 337AD) 49, 56, 80, 228 Curteys William abbot of Bury (1429–1446) 69, 104, 154 Donation of 26, 49, 59 Cusa Nicholas German philosopher (1401–1464) 284 De visione dei 284 Mona Lisa 319 Decembrio Pier Candido Italian humanist (24 October 1399–12 November 1477) 76, 97 Translates Plato’s Republic for Duke Humfey 96–7 Deguileville Guillaume French writer (1295–1360)

420

The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (Le Pelerinage de la vie Humaine) 22 Del Monte Pietro papal collector and secretary to Humfrey duke of Gloucester (c.1400–1440) 67–8, 74–5, 193 Dolce Stil Novo (sweet new style) 94, 173, 213, 216, 221 Dominic St, Dominican friar and theologian (6August 1179– 6 August 1221 227, 319 Donati Corso, leader of the Black Guelphs (d. 6 October 1308) 13–15, 142, 148, 213, 215, 317 Donati Forese, poet and brother of Piccarda, (1250–July 1296) 148, 171–3, 176–7, 179, 212–13, 249, 286 La Tenzone 215, 334 Donati Nella, wife and widow of Forese Donati 169, 171, 176, 194, 207, 293 Her loyalty 171–2 Donati Piccarda, nun of order of St Clare and sister of Forese Donati 94, 2, 94, 141, 148, 152, 171, 174, 207, 225, 236, 270–1 Surrender to a higher will 236, 270, 311 Dore Gustav French artist (6 January 1832–23 `January 1883) 326, 338 Doria Branca Ghibbeline (c.1233–1325) Consigned by Dante to Hell while living 16, 20 Dryhthelm monk of Melrose (fl c 700) Vision of Hell 16 Durer Albrecht, German painter (May 1471–April 1528) 292, 279, 303 Easton Adam Benedictine monk and Cardinal (c1328/1338–15 September 1397) 26, 33 Attacks Monarchia 28 Defensarium ecclesia potestatis 25 Edward III, King of England (13 November 1312–21 June 1377) 28–9, 289 Eliot George, novelist (22 November 1819–22 December 1880) 5, 7–8 Felix Holt the Radical 9 Eliot T.S. poet (26 September 1888–4 January 1965) 327–9 Four Quartets 328 Little Gidding 238 The Wasteland 327 Empyrean 1, 3, 13, 19, 46–7, 56, 59, 92, 98, 118–20, 222–5, 227, 230, 233, 239–40, 249, 252, 256, 273, 309, 320, 325, 335 Eynesham Edmund Monk of, Journey into Purgatory and Paradise 18 Farinata degli Uberti, leader of Ghibbeline faction (1212–11 November 1264) 6, 8, 212, 214, 258, 264, 323 Classical interests 69, 111 Household 66, 290

Index Library 63 Inspiration for Shakespeare’s Falstaff 291–2 Nostalgia 291–2 Fate 141, 147, 150–3, 157, 212, 258, 272, 318 Fastolf, Sir John K.G (1380–5 November 1459) 2, 22, 31–2, 64, 82, 94–5, 100, 133, 164, 204, 293–4 Florence 50, 53, 56, 58, 63, 65, 75, 89, 94–7, 101, 116–19, 121, 125–9, 131, 140, 142, 147–8, 152, 156, 167, 172–3, 175, 178, 184, 193, 212–14, 220, 229, 21–3, 235, 238, 240–1, 244, 249, 255, 258, 267–8, 270, 286, 296, 300–1, 316–17, 321, 324, 326–8, 330, 332–3, 335–6 Foscolo Ugo Italian writer (6 February 1778–10 September 1827) 6, 8 Francesca da Rimini, (1255–1283/4) 7, 14, 36–7, 172, 175, 177, 179, 182, 188, 207, 218, 223, 22–6, 243–5, 248, 286, 312–13, 315–16, 318, 331 Dante’s sympathy 173 Family background and marriage 173 Similarities to Beatrice 176, 179 Francis Saint of Assisi (d. 3 October 1226) 2, 3, 50, 149, 227, 319, 334 Free will 3, 8, 20–1, 26, 47, 123–5, 146, 149, 152–3, 156, 166–7, 179. 191, 196, 226, 260, 307 Frulovisi Tito Livio, humanist scholar (fl 1430’s and 1440’s) 39, 73, 97, 193 Humfroidos 71 Vita Henrici Quinti 64 Galileo Galilei astronomer (15 February 1564– 8 January 1642) 309 Gaunt John of duke of Lancaster (6 March 1340–3 February 1399) 29, 122 Gawain Poet author of Gawain and the Green Knight 31 Pearl 31, 41 Purity 31 Ghibbelines 13–14, 56, 58, 127, 152, 212, 214, 217, 332–3 Gibbon Edward historian (8 May 1737–16 January 1794) 110–11 Giotto di Bondone, painter (d. 8 January 1337) 2, 12, 29, 50, 211, 214, 268 Gladstone William Ewart statesman (29 December 1809–19 May 1898) 7 Gower John, poet (1330– October 1408) 31, 101, 150, 306 The Lover’s Confession (Confessio amantis) 31, 268 Dante anecdote 31 Grace 21, 37–8, 41, 44, 54, 83, 120, 124–5, 138, 145, 151, 176, 178, 185, 187, 189, 196, 200–1, 213, 226–8, 250, 257, 280, 284, 295, 298, 308, 310, 312–13, 318

Grey William bishop of Ely (d. 1478) 32, 271 Interest in Greek literature 96 Grosmont Henry Ist duke of Lancaster (310– 23 March 1361) 85, 123 The Book of Holy Medicine (Le livre du seint Medicines (85 Guelphs 13–15, 54, 56–8, 137, 148, 152, 177, 212, 214, 286, 332–3 Guigli Carlo Italian merchant 32 Gunthorpe John dean of Wells (Od. 1498) 32, 96–7 Hainault Jacqueline, countess of Hainault (d. 8 October 1436) 79, 107, 198, 201 Hallam Robert bishop of Salisbury and chancellor of Oxford ((d. 4 September 1417) 33 Heaney Seamus Irish poet (13 April 1939–30 August 2013) 327, 332–9 Field Work 332 Station Island 332 Henry V (of Monmouth) King of England (16 September 1386– 31 August 1433) 63, 66, 70, 75, 78, 101, 160, 162, 168, 274, 289, 291 nostalgia surrounding 267, 290 Parallels with Julius Caesar 53, 64–5, 80 vernacular 43, 44 Henry VI, King of England (6 December 1421– 21 May 1471) 39, 66, 75, 79, 87–8, 100, 108, 111, 139, 147, 161–2, 192, 199, 200, 202, 264 Education 70, 74, 102, 105 Mental health 92, 105, 107, 133, 206 Henry VII (Henry of Luxembourg) emperor 15, 60, 143, 267 Crowned in Rome 15 Death 49, 146 Hoccleve Robert, poet and clerk (1368–1426) 4, 43, 67, 295 Book of the Craft of Dying 279 Complaint 278 Dialogue with a Friend 294 Melancholy 267, 278, 280, 282 Holbein’s portrait of Christ 160 Holes Andrew canon lawyer at the papal court, 94 Homer author of The Iliad and The Odyssey (b.750 BC). 61, 74, 98, 322, 331 Humfrey Duke of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI (3 October 1390– 23 February 1447). Alchemy 111, 132, 199 Dante 11, 39 Devotion to Henry V 66 Education of Henry VI 70, 106–7 Emulation of Julius Caesar 63–5 Friendship with Whethamstede 104 Funeral monument 262–3 Identification with Saint Alban 79, 108–9 Library 68, 72 Lust 197–8

421

Index Martyrdom 106–8, 206–8 Medical condition 100, 102, 204 Occult 200–3 Oxford 72, 79, 98 Patron of letters 2, 26, 32, 43–4, 50, 68–9, 192, 279 Patronage of humanists 67, 96, 104 Patronage of Lydgate 158, 161, 258, 294 Philosopher king 101, 103 Plato 98, 99–100, 102–3, 259, 2762, 295 Rift with Henry VI 74–5 Retirement in Plesaunce 75–6, 137 Imola Benvenuto da 17, 33, 213 Commentary on The Divine Comedy 11, 21, 26, 37, 213, 226 Jason, leader of the Argonauts and winner of the Golden Fleece 69, 92, 131, 158, 225, 240 Joachim of Fiore, theologian (1135–30 March 1202) 311, 58 John Pope XXII (c.1244 –4 December 1334) 129, 145 Orders burning of Monarchia 24 Joyce James, Irish novelist (2 February 1882–13 January 1941) 122, 165, 180, 327, 330, 332, 335–6 Julian of Norwich, anchoress (b. 8 November 1342) 41, 185, 328 Julius Gaius Caesar (12 July 100 BC–15 March 44 BC) 4, 20, 49, 53–5, 63–5, 68, 70–2, 75, 80, 106, 108, 160, 162, 168, 220 Justinian I the Great Byzantine emperor ((482–14 November 565) 45, 55–7, 61 Kempe Margery, mystic (1373–1438) 19, 32 Kymer Gilbert, chancellor of Oxford and physician (d. 1463) 132, 198, 202, 262 Dietarium 101, 106, 132, 198, 204 Latini Brunetto, philosopher (1220–1294) 13, 48, 101, 215, 328 IL tresoretto 13 Meets Dante in Hell 213, 295 Tutor and mentor to Dante 29, 56, 117, 213, 285, 336 Light Beatrice’s eyes 183, 205, 221, 225, 227–8, 240, 305, 336 Conception of personality 146–8 Divine love 1, 3, 8, 26, 41, 98, 115, 119–22, 142, 144, 145, 209, 212, 219, 226–8, 272–3, 298, 309 Intellect 55, 95–7, 110, 117, 224, 264, 310 Madness 324–6 Origins 222–3

422

Paradise 18–19, 236, 239, 309 Plato 308 Significance undermined in Chaucer 244, 251–2 Livy Titus Livius historian (64/59BC–AD 12/17) 39, 63–4, 72, 75 Lollardy 100, 135 Lombardi Marco, diplomat 31, 37 Dante’s alter ego 31 London 74, 132, 141, 164, 193, 199, 202, 271, 284, 291 Chaucer London poet 29, 42 Civic rituals 70–1, 162, 273, 275 Compared to Florence 255 Inferno 6, 279, 326–9, 330 Italian merchants 28, 31–2, 249, 255 New Troy 62, 71, 80, 132 Lucia Saint of Syracuse (d. 304 AD) 92, 175, 188–90, 251, 308 Lydgate John poet and Benedictine monk (1370–1451) 11, 22, 65, 71, 73, 80, 87, 115, 150, 169, 193, 201, 205, 244, 262, 269, 284, 297, 307, 322 The Churl and the Bird 133 The Fall of Princes 5, 32, 40–2, 65, 68, 71, 77, 80, 97, 100, 105–6, 110, 121, 133, 154–8, 161–7, 196, 199, 205, 244, 258, 260, 262, 264, 268, 274–6, 294–8, 307 The Life of Our Lady 197 The Life of St Alban 45, 81, 86–7, 110–12, 133, 206 Secret of Secrets (Secreta secretorum) 26, 105, 111, 281 Serpent of Division 65, 105, 135, 160–1 Testament 281, 285 Troy Book 4, 80, 121, 197 Alchemy 85, 105, v111, 134–8, 160–2, 165, 168, 275, 294 Chantepleure 275, 277 Chaucer 43, 284 Classical interests 69, 81, 85, 102, 161 Conversion 283 Cult of St Alban 81–2 Dante 40, 121 Faith 196–7 Fear of Commons 100 Fortune 136–41, 154–8, 160–2, 165, 168, 275, 294 Melancholy 281–2 Mummings 70, 162–3 Malaspina Moroello condottiere (1268–8 April 1315) 15, 316–17 Dedicatee of Purgatorio 15 Patron of Dante 14, 145, 152

Index Maletusta Paolo lover of Francesca (1246–1285) 5, 7, 39, 173–4, 176–7, 185, 218, 245, 306, 312, 331 Manfred King of Sicily son of Emperor Frederick II (1232–26 February 1266) 54, 60, 170 Appears before Dante in Purgatory 54 Mann Thomas German novelist (6 June 1875– 12 / August 1955) 115, 131, 140 Martel Charles of Anjou eldest son of King Charles II of Naples (8 September 1271–12 August 1295) 56, 65, 75, 160 Explains providence to Dante 146–7 Matelda Countess of Tuscany (c.1046–24 July 1115) 189 In The Divine Comedy 31, 58, 78, 123, 299 Baptizes the pilgrim 189 Milton John poet (9 December 1608–8 November 1674) 6 Paradise Lost 322–3 Moleyns Adam, royal administrator (d. 6 February 1450) 67, 95, 97 Montaperti Battle (4 September 1260) 13, 212, 333 Montefeltro Buonconte da I (Bonconte) da, Ghibbeline general (1250– 11 June 1289) 149, 216, 229 Montefeltro Guido I da, Counsellor (1220–29 september 1298) 257, 287, 311, 149 Moore Edward, Dante scholar (1835–1916) 8 The Oxford Dante 8 Norton Thomas Bristol MP 43, 137, 242 The Book of Husbandry 43, 137 Norton Thomas grandson of Thomas Norton MP (c.1436–c.1513) Ordinal of Alchemy 137 Novello Guido (Guido II da Polenta) Dolce stil Nuovo poet (1275–1330) 15 Patron of Dante, 176, 317 Podesta of Ravenna 15 Occult 4, 101, 105, 129, 169, 98–200, 203, 264 Orleans Charles duke of (24 November 1394–5 January 1465) 4, 22, 77, 79, 107, 163–4, 191 Ballads 287–8 Dante 164–5, 288 Melancholy 190–1, 288–9, 294 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) poet (20 March 43 BC–17AD) 2–3, 45, 47–8, 55, 61, 70, 75, 85, 91, 126, 136, 139, 158, 213, 216, 230, 232, 246, 271, 305 Metamorphoses 92–3, 135 Tristia 59 Alchemy 135 Dante challenges to a duel 126

Oxford 11, 18–19, 24–5, 32, 34–5, 43, 48, 73–4, 78–9, 192, 199, 204, 271, 281, 294 Dante in Oxford 36 The Divine Comedy at 44, 51 Gloucester’s donations of books 68–9, 72, 96–7, 104, 143 Gloucester Hall 284 Magdalen College 95 Merton College and fourteenth century science 46 Paris Mathew. Benedictine monk (1200–1259) Chronica maiora 18 The Passion 54, 83–7, 93, 99, 109, 139, 153, 157–8, 169, 172, 284 Paston John I, gentleman (10 October 1421–21/22 May 1466) 31, 33, 95, 289, 292 Paston John II, royal householder (b. 1422) 291 Paul Saint,l the Apostle (d. c.62–64 AD) 12, 19–20, 22, 24, 59, 92, 150, 218, 333 Peasants’ Revolt 1381, 62, 100 Pecock Reginald, bishop and theologian (1395–1461) 42–3, 48, 271 Book of Faith 255 Petracco di Parenzo di Garzo, father of Petrarch (1267–1326) 24 Petrarch Francesco poet (20 July 1304–19 July 1374) 5, 16, 24, 27, 29–30, 39–40, 44, 48, 60, 70, 100–1, 207, 260, 276, 288, 317 Dante 28, 31, 148 Phaeton son of th son god Helios 55, 92, 118 Friend of Dante 24–5 Pisan Christine de, poet (September 1364–c.1430) 23, 75, 116, 337 Book of the Path of Long Study (Le Chemin de long estude) 184 The City of Ladies 288 Le livre de la Prod’homie 288 Bereavement 337 Dante 184, 272 Pistoia Cino da Florentine poet (1270–1336/7) 14 patron of Dante 14 Platea Rogerius Prior Franciscan Order 23–4 Lectures on Dante at Cambridge 24 Plato, philosopher (428/7 or 424/3–348/347 BC) 92, 95–8, 102, 110, 132, 162, 262, 267, 271–2, 292 The body and the state 99 Phaedo 259–60 Phaedrus 259–60 Proves non existence of death 259 Republic 48, 94–6 Timaeus 48, 94–6

423

Index Plesaunce the Greenwich circle 38, 40, 43–4, 68–9, 72–3, 75, 77, 92, 107, 111, 131–2, 190, 192, 200, 203, 210, 259, 264, 277–8, 284 Plutarch Greek historian (AD46–after AD 119) 71, 104, 95, 97 Polenta Guido I Vecchio Lord of Ravenna, (1250–1310) 179 Father of Francesca Rimini 179 Polenta Guido II da Novello (d. 1330) nephew of Francesca da Rimini 3 Patron of Dante 176, 317 Podesta of Ravenna 15 Stil nuovo poet 173 Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) (29 September 106 BC–28 September 48BC) 55, 63, 75, 160 Portinari Beatrice (Bice) Dante’s muse (1265–1290) 31, 36–7, 49, 54, 58, 78, 118, 124, 131, 144, 149, 165, 169, 172, 184, 186, 188, 190–1, 193, 205, 209–10, 212, 215, 217–18, 222, 231,–3, 241, 244, 249, 251–2, 275, 284, 286–8, 313–14, 320, 324, 329, 331, 336 Appearance 177, 179, 183, 234 Childhood 181 Capacity to love 148, 226–7 Constancy 152 Death 172, 175, 177–8, 216, 221 Denies her greeting 178 Explanation for spots on the moon 147 In Heaven 187, 235 Identification with the Virgin Mary 187, 196 Learning 169, 179, 195 Marriage and family 29, 177 Meets Dante 224 Mother to Dante 180, 183, 238 Myth of 316–19 Number nine her number 220, 302 Prophecies 9, 55, 59, 120, 146 Reflects God’s light and love 219–21, 223–6, 309 Sexuality 181 theological explanations 119, 142, 239–40, 260 Portinari Folco, Florentine banker, father of Beatrice Portinari, (d. 31 December 1289) 29, 143, 181 Pole William de la first duke of Suffolk (16 October 1396–2 May 1450, 88, 100, 164 Premierfait Laurent, French humanist (1380–1418) 158, 192, 275 De casibus nobles hommes et femmes 40 Des nobles hommes et femmes 32 Primum Mobile 3, 46–7, 118–20, 142, 144, 147, 182, 209, 222–5, 227, 236, 238, 244, 272, 281, 319 Ravenna 15–16, 76, 155, 173, 214, 317 Dante’s last refuge Home of Francesca 174

424

Imperial city 55, 146 Last refuge 55, 316, 337 Mosaic of Christ 155 Regulus Marcus atilius Roman consul (299BC– 250BC) 157, 158, 283, 307 The Resurrection 3, 7, 128, 130, 157, 205, 209, 212, 234–6, 239, 250, 253–4, 260, 262, 267, 279–80 Richard II, King of England (of Bordeaux) (6 January 1367–14 February 1400) 23, 26–7, 29, 31, 62, 107, 132, 249, 264, 288, 314 Rienzo di Cola demagogic orator (1313–8 October 1354) 25 Commentarium in monarchiam Dantis 25 Ripley George alchemist (c.1415–1490) 33, 133 Compound of Alchemy 133–4 Ripley Scroll 134 Rolle Richard hermit of Hampole (1330–29 September 1349) 161, 290 Hampole Office celebrating his attainment of the Empyrean 19 Romance of the Rose (Le Roman de la Rose) 22–3, 116, 184, 200, 243 Romano Cunizza da lover of Sordello (1198–1279) Appears in The Divine Comedy 175, 240 Rome Heavenly city 59, 286 Papal Jubilee 11–12, 59, 166, 211 Pilgrimage centre 11–12, 220–1, 235, 255, 333, 335 Roos Sir Richard, poet (c.1410–1482) 64, 163, 192, 207, 289 La Belle Dame Sans Mercy 190–2 Russell John Marshal of Humfrey duke of Gloucester (fl.1450) 43, 76, 277, 281 The Book of Nurture 43, 277 Saint Albans Benedictine abbey 11, 18, 25–6, 38, 44, 53, 63, 68, 80, 81–3, 86, 88–9, 94, 107–8, 112, 271 Lay fraternity 7 Library 96, 107 Saint Patrick’s Purgatory 11, 36, 211, 333 Saltry Henry of 18 Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patrici 18 Salutati Coluccio, chancellor of Florence (16 february 1331–4 May 1406) 27, 30, 34, 49, 95, 271 Concering Fate (De fato) 38, 65 Declamation of Lucretia (Declamatio Lucretiae) 38, 65 Divine Comedy source of solace in his bereavement 26 Labours of Hercules (De laboribus Heraclis) 38, 94, 337 Translator of The Divine Comedy 26, 33

Index Theories on history of Latin language 48 Scipio Africanus (Aemillianus the younger) Roman general and subject of the Dream of Scipio (185BC–129BC) 75, 93, 108, 123–4, 251 Scogan Henry, poet (1361–1407) 71 Morale Ballade 71 Scrope Stephen Esq Translator (1397–1472) 69, 82, 133 Book of the Epistle of Othea to Hector 66, 290, 294 Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers 14–15 Complaints to his stepfather 64 Melancholy 289 Possible inspiration for Shakespeare 290 Secret of Secrets (Secreta secretorum) 102, 111, 132, 134, 139, 198 Seneca Lucius Annaeus philosopher ((c.4BC–AD 65) 45, 64, 68–9, 73, 75–6, 78, 85, 106, 155, 157, 162, 164, 294, 307 Shakespeare William playwright (15 April 1564–23 April 1616) 5, 290–2, 297, 310, 315 Hamlet 289–90 Henry IV Parts 1 and II 292 King Lear 157, 275 Shelley Percy Byshe poet (4August 1792–8 July 1822) 6, 8 Episychidron 6 Prometheus 6 Triumph of Life 6 Sigismund Holy Roman Emperor (14 February 1368–9 December 1437) 36, 64 Socrates, philosopher (d. 390 BC) 95–6, 98, 102, 108–10, 162, 259, 272 Sophocles, tragedian (497/96 BC–406/405 BC) 106–7, 322 Antigone 107–7, 263 Sordello da Goito troubador (c.1180–1269) 57, 67, 120, 175, 230, 240, 273 Stillington Robert bishop of Bath and Wells (1420– May 1491), 97 Strode Ralph, Merton philosopher (1350–1400) 28 Friend of Chaucer 150 Tennyson Alfred Baron, poet (6 August 1809–6 October 1892) 7 Thompson James, poet (23 November 1834–3 June 1882) 326–7 The City of Dreadful Night 326–7 Tiptoft John 1st earl of Worcester (8 May 1427–18 October 1470) 32, 164 Journeys to Italy 32, 96 Transmutation 109, 115–16, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 134–6, 138, 140, 147, 157, 198, 251, 262–3, 280, 294

Trevet Nicholas Dominican friar (d. c 1334) 18 Commentary on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy 19 Troy 7, 62, 70–1, 80, 81, 97, 112, 117, 121, 132–3, 156, 161, 186, 197, 244–5, 248, 252, 274, 287 Ubaldini Ruggieri degli archbishop (d.1295) In Inferno with Ugolino 152 Ugolino dedlla Gherardesca nobleman (1220–March 1289) 28, 152–3, 174, 312, 332–4 Ullerston Richard, chancellor of Oxford ((d. August or September 1423) 37, 42 Ulysses 7, 119, 129, 132, 137, 149, 160, 193, 237, 270, 272, 287, 311, 316, 319, 330–2, 335 Dante’s identification with 3, 11, 21, 29, 92–3, 117, 130–1, 234, 237 Intellectual curiosity and arrogance 122, 130–1, 240, 261 Upton Nicholas, precentor Salisbury (1400?–1457) 76 Libellus de officii Militarii 76 Usk Thomas, collector of customs and writer ((d. 4 Mar, ch 1388) 313 Valois Charles 3rd son of King Philip III of France and founder of House of Valois1 (12 March 1270–16 December 1325) 12–13, 148, 214, 298 Valois Catherine, daughter of Charles VI queen of Henry V (27 October 1401–3 January 1437), 79 Venuto Paolo OFM 24 Exposition Dantis Alighieris 24 Verona 14, 17, 24, 31, 56, 67, 95, 145, 148, 195, 212 bitterness of exile 148 Inspiration for Empyrean 60, 144, 233, 265 Villanova Romeo da, minister of Raymond Berger ((1170–1250) Dante’s alter ego 149 Villani Filippo, chronicler (fl end of the 14th century and beginning of the fifteenth century) 17, 287 Commentary on The Divine Comedy (Expositio seu comentum super Comedia Dantis Alighieri 17 Vinci Leonardo da, polymath (15 April 1452–2 May 1519) 74, 319 Virgil Publius Vergelius Maro (15 October 70BC – 21 September 19BC) 9, 11, 13, 17, 20, 23, 25–6, 33, 37, 40, 45, 61, 66, 76, 80, 93, 98, 117–17, 120, 124, 128, 130–1, 145–6, 150, 155, 165, 167, 170, 174, 179, 182, 184, 188–9, 193, 195–6, 205, 211, 213, 219, 221, 223–4, 226, 228, 230, 232–3, 235, 250, 254, 257, 272, 287, 295–7, 299, 311–12, 314, 317, 328–30, 333, 335, 337

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Index Aeneid 45, 48, 91, 336 Fourth Ecologue 78 Georgics 77 Leaves Dante 152, 178–81, 204 Limbo 73, 98, 273 Prophecy of the birth of the Saviour 57, 78 Putative father 54, 126, 180–1 Rift with Dante 127 Virgilio Giovanni del Humanist scholar from Bologna (late 13th century–c.1327) (d. 1348) 56, 189, 301 On Dante’s popularity 16 Challenges Dante to write in Latin 76 Virgin Mary 5, 28, 164, 172, 183, 189–90, 196, 282, 331 Visconti family of Milan 25, 30, 61, 100, 129 Visconti Filippo Maria duke of Milan (3 September 1392–13 August 1447) 69, 96 Library 68 Visconti Giovanni archbishop of Milan (1290– 5 October 1364) 30 Interest in Dante 30, 288 Visconti Nino grandson of Ugolino della Gherardesca (1265–1298) 152, 170 Visconti Valentina, Duchess of Orleans mother of Charles of Orleans (1371–4 December 1408) 288–9 Walsingham Thomas, chronicler and benedictine monk ((d. 1422) 45, 62, 105, 112, 272 Continuation of Gesta abbatum (Deeds of the Abbey) 81 Chronica maiora 81 Ditis ditatis (Dictys enriched) 94 Historia Alexandri 94 Ypodigma Neustriae (Chronicle of Normandy) 63 Classical interests 63 Wells Cathedral library 38, 97 Whethamstede John, Abbot of St Albans (d. 20 Jauary 1465) 11, 67, 74, 80, 85, 87–8, 94–5, 105, 202, 264

426

Chaff Store (Palearium) 45, 68, 80, 94 Granary of Famous Men (Granarium de virorum illustrium 25, 44–5, 69, 96, 104, 137, 259 Alchemy 132, 137 Classical interests 45, 63, 68, 108, 135, 137 Cult of St Alban 53, 81, 109, 111 Dante 28–9, 44–5 Italian journeys 25, 96 Philosopher king 92, 104 Plato 96, 100, 104, 259 Wilton Diptych 134, 264–5 Worcester William, antiquary (1415–1482) 82, 112, 204 Book of Nobility (Boke of Noblesse) 64, 66, 75, 103, 291 Itinerary (Itinerarium) 68–9 Notebook 95, 135, 202 On Friendship (De amicitia) 69 On Old Age De senectute) 69 Admiration for Rome 53, 64, 309 Alchemical medicine 132–3 Classical interests 69 Dante 32 Greek myths 93 Greek tragedy 106 Italian literature 31–2 Irish origins 66 Loyalty to Sir John Fastolf 269, 291 Melancholy 206, 291–3 Nostalgia 291 Plato 95 Woodville Anthony 2nd Earl Rivers (1442–25 June 1483) 32, 164 Wyclif John, philosoper (d. 31 December 1384) 25, 41, 79, 262 Yonge James, translator (fl. 1406–1438) 36, 66 Secret of Secrets 36, 66 York Richard 3rd duke of York 21 September 1411–30 December 1460) 63, 75, 88