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D A N T E’S BRI TI SH P U BL IC
Dante’s British
Public
Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth
Century to the Present
NICK HAVELY
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
# Nick Havely 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2014
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956094
ISBN 978–0–19–921244–6
As printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For
C.A.P.H.
the better writer
Contents
List of Figures viii

Abbreviations x
Introduction xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Prologue: A Wandering Comedy 1

1. Around Chaucer: Clerics, Comedy, and Monarchy 8
2. The ‘Goodly Maker’: Conscripting Dante in Henrician England 33
3. ‘The Hungry Sheep’: Protestant and Catholic Readings, 1556–1637 50
4. ‘Few can understand him’: Reputation, Ownership, Reading,
c.1600–c.1800 68
5. Expatriate Poetics: Foscolo and the British Public 128
6. Seeing the Seer: Victorian Visions 154
7. Dominions, Possessions, Dispersals: British Dantes Abroad,
c.1820–1882 194
8. Widening Circles, 1320–2013 260
Appendix 1: Chronology, c.1320–2013 284

Appendix 2: New/Old Dantes, c.1600–c.1700 299
Bibliography 305
Manuscript and Archival Sources 305
Printed Sources 307
Electronic Sources 338
Index 339
List of Figures
1. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Hamilton 207, f. 202r, by permission of
Bildarchiv, Preuâischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 2
2. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS C 198 Inf, f. 52r, spheres, orbits, zodiacal
signs, # Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana—Milano/De Agostini
Picture Library 81
3. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS C 198 Inf, f. 58r, quadrant and
zodiac, # Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana—Milano/De Agostini
Picture Library 91
4. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS C 198 Inf, f. 115v, sphere of Venus and
its epicycle, courtesy of Biblioteca Ambrosiana, # Veneranda
Biblioteca Ambrosiana—Milano/De Agostini Picture Library 92
5. From Opere di Dante Alighieri (Venice: Zatta, 1757–8), vol. 1, facing
p. B b 1, the flight of Geryon, courtesy of All Souls College, Oxford 118
6. Ary Scheffer, Paolo and Francesca (1835), # by kind permission of the
Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London 163
7. William Dyce, Francesca da Rimini (1837), courtesy of the National
Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 167
8. John Flaxman, ‘The Lovers Surprised’ (Paolo and Francesca), engraved by
Tommaso Piroli, from Compositions by John Flaxman, R.A., from the Divine
poem of Dante Alighieri (1807), copy in the George Smith Special
Collection, University of York 169
9. Detail from William Dyce, Francesca da Rimini (1837), courtesy of the
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 170
10. Anon., copy of Dyce’s Francesca da Rimini (probably dating between
1837 and 1882), in private collection, Italy, courtesy of the owner 174
11. William Dyce, Dante and Beatrice (1840s?), courtesy of Aberdeen Art
Gallery and Museums 175
12. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, MS Hamilton 201, Botticelli, illustration for
Paradiso 2, by permission of Bildarchiv, Preuâischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 176
13. Edinburgh, NLS MS 2168, f. 2, courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland 215
Scotland 219
Scotland 224
Scotland 225
Scotland 227
List of Figures ix
Scotland 228
Scotland 229
Scotland 230
Scotland 233
Scotland 234
Scotland 235
24. Oxford, Bodleian Eng. misc. d. 639, f. 193r, Seymour Kirkup,
‘Lucifero’, by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford 237
25. Steve Bell, cartoon, Guardian, 9 April 2013, courtesy of Belltoons 282
Abbreviations
BL British Library, London
BLJ Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand (13 vols., London: Murray,
1973–94)
BMS Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, ed. P. Brieger, M. Meiss, and
C. S. Singleton (2 vols., New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
CCR Calendar of the Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry VI
(6 vols., London: Public Record Office, 1933–47)
CHIL Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. P. Brand and L. Pertile (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry VI
(6 vols., Norwich: Norfolk Chronicle Co. for HMSO, 1901–10)
CSPV Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, relating to English Affairs, existing in
the archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of northern Italy, ed.
R. Brown et al. (38 vols. in 40, London: Longman Green, 1864–1947)
DBI Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. A. M. Ghisalberti et al. (78 vols. to
date, Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1960– )
DDJb Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch
DE The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. R. Lansing (New York and London: Garland,
2000)
DEL P. Toynbee, Dante in English Literature, from Chaucer to Cary (c. 1380–1844)
(2 vols., London: Methuen, 1909)
ED Enciclopedia dantesca, dir. U. Bosco, ed. G. Petrocchi (6 vols., Rome: Istituto
della enciclopedia italiana, 1970–8)
EN 9.1 Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, volume IX. i Studi su Dante, ed.
G. Da Pozzo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979)
EN 9.2 Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, volume IX. ii: Studi su Dante, ed.
G. Da Pozzo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979)
EN 11 Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, volume XI: Saggi di letteratura
italiana, ed. C. Foligno (Florence: Le Monnier, 1958)
Ep. 6 Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo XX: Epistolario di Ugo Foscolo
tom. VI, ed. G. Gambarin and F. Tropeano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1966)
tom. VII, ed. M. Scotti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1970)
tom. VIII, ed. M. Scotti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1974)
tom. IX, ed. M. Scotti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1994)
GD 2 The Gladstone Diaries, Volume II. 1833–1839, ed. M. R. D. Foot (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968)
GD 3 The Gladstone Diaries, Volume III. 1840–1847, ed. M. R. D. Foot and
H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)
Abbreviations xi
GD 5 The Gladstone Diaries, Introduction to Volumes V and VI. 1855–1868, ed.
H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
GD 10 The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Corres-
pondence, Volume X. January 1881–June 1883, ed. H. C. G. Matthew
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
GSLI Giornale storico della letteratura italiana
HCA Highland Council Archive, Inverness
JBBRAS Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
MLR Modern Language Review
NAS National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh
NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew (60 vols.,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; and online)
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
QBSAL Quarterly Bulletin of South African Libraries
RES Review of English Studies
RVF Petrarch, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, in Francesco Petrarca: Canzoniere, ed.
G. Contini and D. Ponchiroli (Turin: Einaudi, 1964)
TNA The National Archive, Kew, London
Introduction
Dialogues with Dante on the part of such authors as Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, both
Eliots, Joyce, Heaney, and others have been the subject of a number of important
monographs, but the big voices will be heard only intermittently here.1 This
account of the British public for Dante’s work reckons with but does not centre
upon the individual responses of major writers in English. It seeks, rather, to
investigate some of the conditions—intellectual, religious, political, bibliographic,
textual—under which such responses took shape. Through selected examples and
case-studies, it records and places in context some of the wider conversations about
and appropriations of Dante that developed—with varying degrees of information
and understanding—across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended
and diversified. Hence this book’s main title uses the term ‘public’, rather than
‘readers’.2
Readers and owners of books (the latter being not always identical with the
former), however, form a substantial part of that public, as the subtitle acknow-
ledges. Circulation of texts and reading practices served to shape and sustain the
wider conversations about Dante, and evidence about such activities will be a
substantial feature of this book’s case-studies. The texts that provided access to
Dante’s work over this period are of many kinds: they include not only manu-
scripts, printed editions, and complete translations, but also, for example, polemical
writing, encyclopedias, historical works, and (at a later stage) anthologies, critical
discussions, and introductory guides. The forms in which opinions about and
appropriations of Dante appear are likewise highly diverse, and some of them—
such as journals, letters, and annotations—offer significant evidence about reading
practices. A number of individual readers and ways of reading will be addressed
here—from the fourteenth-century Benedictine Adam Easton’s argument with
Dante’s Monarchia to William Gladstone’s close and repeated interrogations of
the Commedia, and beyond.
An author’s public is not, however, wholly made up of diligent, informed, and
attentive readers like Gladstone.3 It can also include those whose treatment of the
text is markedly prejudiced—like some of the Protestant conscriptors of Dante who
will be encountered here—as well as those whose knowledge of it may be partial,
oblique, or even non-existent. Fragmentary acquaintance with Dante’s work and
peripheral awareness of his reputation is, as this book will argue at several points
(especially in Chapter 4), often a significant feature of the poet’s presence over this
1 Thus the authors named above will be mostly off-stage, and Shakespeare is not in the theatre at all.
On Dante as absence or ‘analogue’ in Shakespeare, see DEL 1. xxiv, and Kirkpatrick 1995: 299–302
and 309–10.
2 On the idea of a ‘literary public’, see e.g. Randall 2008: esp. 242–3 and n. 67.
3 On kinds of reader, see Iser 1980: 27–30.
xiv Introduction
period. Even indirect knowledge of the text can result in some apt appropriation—
such as Steve Bell’s recent graphic parallel (based solely on the Gustave Doré
illustrations) between Dante’s Farinata and the late Baroness Thatcher.4
Dante’s potential public also becomes a subject of interest particularly to those
addressing a widening audience later in the period. Thus, for example, Maria
Rossetti’s successful introduction to Dante of 1871 (Rossetti 1884) asked how
the poet’s work might be made ‘a topic of conversation’ for ‘the many’; the Times in
1882 raised questions about whether any of the newly educated ‘millions’ might
ever be able to see ‘a MS. copy of “Dante” illustrated by the pencil of sandro
Botticelli’; and the most recent translator of the Commedia has admitted to
‘hoping that a small proportion of Dan Brown’s audience . . . might want to check
up on the poem’.5
As a way of describing many of the activities of such a diverse public over this
long span of time, the term ‘conversation’ has been and will continue to be used
here, perhaps with excessive frequency. The resonance of Osip Mandelstam’s
quirky and vividly materialist ‘Conversation about Dante’ of 1933 is partly respon-
sible for this.6 So also, however, are the views of the Regency grandee Thomas
Grenville, about Dante’s role ‘in the conversation of this country’, and those of the
late Victorian, Maria Rossetti, considering the poet’s possible future ‘in cultivated
society . . . as a topic of conversation’.7 I cannot think of a better term to convey the
expansive interaction between various voices and the networks of contacts that are
of interest here.8
In order to explore and reconstruct some of the relevant conversations and
contexts, a substantial range of archival evidence will be investigated—especially
that concerning collectors, owners, and readers of Dante manuscripts and early
printed editions—and a considerable amount of previously unpublished material
from a wide range of journals, letters, annotations, and inventories is thus included.
Different media and genres must also be reckoned with: due prominence is given to
the roles of collectors, readers, and writers of various kinds, but account is also taken
(especially from the nineteenth century on) of the appropriation of Dante’s work
in, for example, illustration and performance.
The culture of that ‘British public’, too, should not be narrowly circumscribed.
The initial scope and title of this book was ‘Dante in the English-speaking World’;
and although it has not been possible within the constraints of a single volume to do
justice to even a limited range of other anglophone cultures—let alone the variety of
4 See Fig. 25, below. The artist acknowledges that ‘my knowledge of Dante is limited to Doré’s
illustrations as I’ve never actually read the “Inferno” ’ (Steve Bell, personal communication).
5 See below, pp. 260, 283, and 298.
6 Mandelstam 1991. On Dante’s ‘resonance’ in Mandelstam’s own text, see Dimock 2001: 179.
7 See below, pp. 146, 262, and 267.
8 The term implies a more dynamic form of response than ‘reception’. The latter term will also be
used here (see Jauss 1982), whilst acknowledging that there are ‘several problems with Jauss’[s]
approach that have direct bearing on later “readers” of Dante’—e.g., overemphasis on ‘the
conformity of reading practices within designated periods’ and ‘direct contact between reader and
text’, and ‘underestimating the legacy of tradition’ (Gilson 2005: 7 and nn. 19–20); see also Ginsberg
2002: 5–6.
Introduction xv
‘global’ Dantes—their importance is to some extent acknowledged here, for in-

stance, in the accounts of Mountstuart Elphinstone in India and George Grey in
South Africa (Chapter 7).9 Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts
and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain will be
given prominence—from clerics and merchants ‘around Chaucer’, through itiner-
ant scholars, collectors, and tourists in the early modern period, to the exiles and
expatriates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Thus the Prologue to this book carries the title of ‘A Wandering Comedy’ and
explores the contexts and history of the first surviving manuscript of the Commedia
(Berlin Hamilton 207) that is known to have reached Britain, where it was the
object of a transaction between Italian merchants in mid-fifteenth-century London.
It was probably re-exported to Italy soon after, but its origins, purchasers, its return
to Britain, and eventual migration to Germany as part of the Hamilton collection
form part of a narrative about manuscripts as ‘cultural possessions’ that will be
taken up again later on.10
Meanwhile, the book’s first chapter, which traces a century-long itinerary
‘Around Chaucer’, relates the activities of four clerics—two Italian Franciscans
and two English Benedictines—in disseminating ideas about Dante and acting as
intermediaries between Italy and England during the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries. The next two chapters (Chapters 2 and 3) outline the earlier and
later stages in the formation of the British ‘Protestant’ Dante’, focusing upon the
perception of Dante’s status as one of the ‘crowns of Florence’ in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, his potential for recruitment as a ‘writer against
Rome’, and the polemics and debates relating to his conscription as ‘proto-
Protestant’ in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Chapter 4 then
relates the gradual and complex process by which, over the course of two centuries,
public understanding of Dante began to extend from the ‘few’ to the (relatively)
‘many’. It thus presents some new evidence about allusions to Dante, identifies the
presence of his work in some major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collec-
tions, and reviews some of the activities and publications which reflected and
sustained the poet’s ‘rehabilitation’ among the late eighteenth-century reading
public.
Resources for and reflections of the British ‘reading nation’s’ growing cult of
Dante in the early nineteenth century are the wider subject of Chapter 5.11
Contributions to this cult on the part of the Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, resident in
London during the last decade of his life, are assessed here, along with the influence
of other Italian and British expatriate writers, critics, and editors. Visualization of
and close engagement with Dante and his work intensify in the middle of the
9 Also in some of the examples in the Chronology (Appendix 1). On the ‘globalization of Dante’,
see Dimock 2001: 181; her long list of languages into which the Commedia has been translated (n. 18)
should also include Afrikaans; see Cullinan and Watson 2005: 14, 33–6, and 94. For American
(United States) Dantes, key works are La Piana 1948, Giamatti 1983, Verduin 1996, Looney 2011,
and Dupont 2012. Yet more widely, see also Branca and Caccia 1965, and Esposito 1992.
10 In the final section of Chapter 7.
11 For the term ‘reading nation’, see St Clair 2004.
xvi Introduction
century, at a time when the poet is being authoritatively identified as the ‘central
man of all the world’.12 Three case-studies in Chapter 6 thus illustrate how this
‘Seer’ was being scrutinized: through the eyes of an actor (Frances Kemble), a
painter (William Dyce), and a scholar politician (William Gladstone). Through the
century, British material ownership of the poet as a cultural possession took a
variety of forms and underwent several significant changes. Three main examples
are investigated in Chapter 7: the acquisition and donation of manuscripts as a
feature of the imperial enterprise (Elphinstone in India, Grey in South Africa); the
activities of Anglo-Florentine collectors and scholars (Isabella Macleod, Francis
Brooke, Lord Vernon, Seymour Kirkup); the sale of the Hamilton collection
of manuscripts (including the Botticelli illustrations in MS Hamilton 201) to
Germany in 1882 and the accompanying concerns about Dante’s status as part
of a national heritage. Finally, the chapter about ‘Widening Circles’ brings some
aspects of the story up to the present, illustrating ways in which the poet’s work has
been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to ‘the many’. Whilst
acknowledging the important work that has been and continues to be done on the
responses of the major modernist and post-modern writers, it deals primarily with
some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the
past century, particularly through translation, illustration, fiction, and various
forms of performance.
Chronologically and geographically, the scope of the project has proved challen-
ging, and (as the subsequent acknowledgements and footnotes will indicate) it has
depended on earlier and more expert scholars, together with the support of a wide
community of researchers, not only in Britain and Italy, but also in (for example)
Australia, India, South Africa, and the United States. It has also exploited the
patience of archivists and librarians from Milan to Mumbai, and from Cambridge
to Cape Town. A colleague at Harvard once likened the conduct of these enquiries
to the shambling persistence of the late Peter Falk’s detective Lieutenant Columbo;
whilst one at York (more sinisterly) compared it with the patient arachnid vigilance
of an Elizabethan spymaster.
Five key works have throughout inspired and directed the lines of investigation:
three monumental surveys, by Paget Toynbee, Marcella Roddewig, and Michael
Caesar (which together identified most of the suspects to be hauled in for ques-
tioning); and two ground-breaking critical studies of Dante reception by Steve Ellis
and Alison Milbank.13 The work that follows does not aspire to be sesto tra cotanto
senno (‘sixth among so much wisdom’),14 since it would be hard to match, let alone
challenge, the prominence of such scholarly landmarks. It takes those landmarks,
instead, as departure points from which to explore and map some more of the
‘cultural hinterland’.15
12 Ruskin 1851: 2. 342; 3. 158.

13 DEL; Roddewig 1984; Caesar 1989; Ellis 1983; Milbank 1998.
14 Inferno 4. 102; R. M. Durling’s translation in Dante 1996: 75.
15 The last phrase is used in an exemplary study of Petrarch in Protestant England, Usher 2005: 187
and 195.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due in the first place to Andrew McNeillie, then Senior Commissioning
editor at OUP, for a conversation at a bus-stop in 2005. This led to a contract for
the book, and in 2006 the Leverhulme Trust awarded a Fellowship, which enabled
much of the primary research for the project to be completed.
As the Introduction and many of the notes to the subsequent chapters indicate, a
large number of students, friends, and colleagues have heard, discussed, read, and
commented upon parts of this book. For thirty years of conversations about the
Commedia and its reception, I am much indebted to undergraduates and post-
graduates who followed courses on Dante at the University of York. For invitations
to give papers on the subject, for discussion, and for all sorts of assistance with the
project over several decades, I am grateful to (amongst others) Guyda Armstrong,
Aida Audeh, John Barnes, Caroline Barron, Piero Boitani, James Bolton, Paolo
Borsa, Helen Bradley, Trev Broughton, Mike Caesar, Caron Cioffi, Lilla Crisafulli,
Christian Dupont, Patsy Erskine-Hill, Godfrey Evans, Cristina Figueredo, Anne
Hudson, Daniel Karlin, Chris Kleinhenz, Christoph Lehner, Ilaria Mallozzi, Mar-
tin McLaughlin, Paola Nasti, Philip Norcross, Christopher Norton, Anna Pegor-
etti, Alessandra Petrina, Claudia Rossignoli, David Rundle, Corinna Salvadori, Bill
Sherman, James Simpson, Wayne Storey, Chris Taylor, Aroon Tikekar, Jonathan
Usher, Daniel Wakelin, David Wallace, Tim Webb, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
Those who have further endured the trial of the written word by generously
commenting on drafts and chapters include: Aliette Boshier, Will Bowers, Andrea
Campana, Kenneth Clarke, Godfrey Evans, Olga Ferguson, Stefano Gattei, Peter
Hainsworth, Barbara Hardy, Mike Jones, Dennis Looney, James Robinson, Diego
Saglia, Helen Smailes, Jeremy Tambling, and Vidya Vencatesan. A complete draft
was read by Cicely Palser Havely, whose editing has enabled the book to say what it
has to say more clearly and in better order.
Throughout, the research has been aided and enhanced by a number of librarians
and archivists across the world. Especial thanks are thus due to: Rachel Bond and
Penny Hatfield (Eton College Library), Monica Del Rio (Archivio di Stato,
Venice), Melanie Geustyn (National Library of South Africa), Christine Hiskey
(Holkham Hall Archives), Susan L’Engle (Vatican Film Library, St Louis Univer-
sity), Peter Mennie (Highland Council Archive, Inverness), Caroline Pilgermann
(Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin), Mridula Ramanna, Mangala
Sirdeshpande, and Usha Thakkar (Asiatic Society, Mumbai), Suzanne Reynolds
(Holkham Hall Library), Julianne Simpson (John Rylands Library, Manchester),
Joanna Soden (Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh), Chris Taylor (National
Library of Scotland, Edinburgh), and (constantly) the staff at the Taylorian
Institution, Oxford.
xviii Acknowledgments
Permission to reproduce privately owned archival material at the Highland

Council Archive, Inverness (from the Macleod of Cadboll Papers), has kindly
been granted by the Trustees of the Torquil Macleod Estate. The author and
publishers would also like to thank the institutions and individuals mentioned in
the List of Figures for permission to reproduce works in their collections. We are
particularly grateful to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for their generous
permission to reproduce the images in Figures 13–23 free of charge; to Philip
Norcross for help in locating an early copy of William Dyce’s Francesca da Rimini;
and to Roberto Donnini for permission to reproduce it. A further debt of gratitude
is owed to the Leavis Fund and the Department of English and Related Literature
at the University of York for a grant towards the cost of obtaining images and
permissions.
Completion of the whole process has been facilitated by the patience and skill of
staff at Oxford University Press, especially Jacqueline Baker, Suzanne Downie,
Rachel Platt, and Rebecca Stubbs; whilst the expertise of Jeff New as copy-editor
has been invaluable, and the reader should be especially grateful—as the author
is—for the vigilance of Deborah Renshaw, as proofreader, in spotting numerous
missing cross-references and bibliography entries. The work of indexing has (for the
third time in as many years) been undertaken by Dr James Robinson (Leverhulme
Early Career Fellow at Durham University), to whom I am also much indebted for
many informative conversations about Dante’s British public.
Prologue: A Wandering Comedy
An unprepossessing manuscript of Dante’s Commedia in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek,

MS Hamilton 207, bears the marks of its travels. Bound simply in parchment, its
200 or so paper folios are towards the end increasingly ragged and stained. It is
amongst the smallest of the Commedia manuscripts—measuring a mere 30 by 27
centimetres—a portable item for a reader on the move.1 Its date is generally agreed to
be the early fifteenth century.2 The text is written in a single scribal hand and is
probably Tuscan. A few annotations, in hands dating from the fifteenth to the
sixteenth centuries, identify notable names; for the first three cantos of the Inferno,
a variant version of the vernacular Selmi Glosses (produced in Florence or Siena
before 1337) appears in the margin; and vernacular rubrics preface each canto of
the Paradiso. On the final page a Latin colophon gives the date and place of Dante’s
death and prays for his soul.3 On the face of it, then, this is an ordinary Tuscan
Commedia, of a kind that circulated among mercantile readers of the time—one of
the many paper copies of the poem that came in the course of the fifteenth century to
outnumber the more expensive parchment manuscripts by more than two to one.4
What makes the manuscript less ordinary is that—some fifty years after Chau-
cer’s appropriations of Dante—it is the first copy of the Commedia to locate itself at
a place and a time in Britain.5 Two-and-a-half lines in the vernacular follow the
Latin colophon at the foot of its final page (Fig. 1).
In a mercantile hand, the inscription records exactly where and when this text
of the Commedia was sold: on 1 August 1451 in London. It is difficult to read, since
the water damage and staining that affects part of the manuscript is at its worst in
the final outer leaves, and a number of scholars from 1887 onwards have partially
deciphered the text.6 With the help of ultra-violet light, however, it is now possible
to propose a fuller reconstruction.
‘I bought this book in London’ (Questo libro chonpr’i[o] i[n] londra) is clearly
how the note begins, and the following word might be either istando, or possibly
1 On the sizes of Commedia manuscripts, see Boschi Rotiroti 2004: 29–32.

2 Roddewig 1984: 11 (no. 19) dates the watermark of the paper 1416–18, but it could be a little
earlier, possibly 1411–13; see Piccard 1980: nos. 464 and 474.
3 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Hamilton 207, f. 202r: Explicit paradisus & Chomedia Dantis Alagerii
d[e] Florentia: Qui decessit in ciuitate Rauenne i[n] An[n]o d[omi]nice i[n]carnationis mcccxxi die s[anc]te
crucis de mense septembris. Anima euius requiescant [sic] i[n] pace Am[en] deo gr[aci]as.
4 Miglio 2001: 298. On the production of Commedia manuscripts in the fifteenth century, see also
Bertelli 2007: 39–76.

5 On Chaucer and Dante, see below, pp. 4–5, 8–9, 31, 261–2.
6 For partial readings, see Biadene 1887: 328; Wiese 1929: 47; and Roddewig 1984: 11.
2 Prologue
Fig. 1. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Hamilton 207, f. 202r, by permission of Bildarchiv,

Preuâischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin
c’andò (he came). The next is the common abbreviation for con (‘with’). At the very
edge of the water stain we can (though with some difficulty) read le gallee (‘the
galleys’). With the assistance of UV light on the worst part of the water stain, a
name and a possible sum of money then swim into view.7 The name is ‘Miss[er]
Benideto’, which, with the more legible word at the start of the next line, gives the
full title of this galley captain: miss[er] benideto uituri. In the second line of the note,
following auosto (‘August’) is a group of possibly fifteen characters, of which several
look like numerals. These are much more difficult to read, but it is likely that they
represent ‘£1. 10s. 4d. sterling’.8 The owner’s entire note thus reads:
Questo libro chonpr’i[o] i[n] londra c’andò con le gallee chapitanio mi[sser] benideto uituri
del mccccli a dì primo auosto [di unum £ x s iv d] de moneda d[i] stralini.
I bought this book in London, when Captain Messer Benedetto Vituri was there with the
galleys on the first day of August in the year 1451 for £1. 10s. 4d. in sterling currency.
7 I am grateful to the staff of the Handschriftenabteilung at the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, for
allowing the page to be inspected by this means.

8 Assistance with the notation here was given by Prof. James Bolton of Queen Mary’s University of
London, Prof. Linne Mooney, University of York, and Dr Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli.

Prologue 3
The note thus seems to record a transaction between two Italians. Who, then,
might have imported this Commedia into England and sold it on that early August
day in 1451? It might have been ‘chapitanio Misser Benedetto Vit[t]uri’ or one of
his fellow merchants—since this would be the most obvious reason for the buyer’s
note to mention the arrival of ‘the galleys’.9
Venetian galleys had been active in the trade with Flanders and England since the
early fourteenth century, and continued to make regular voyages on this route
during the first half of the fifteenth.10 Groups or ‘nations’ of Italians were subject to
consular control in London by the early fifteenth century, and by 1409 there was a
Venetian vice-consul who, together with twelve merchants, constituted the presi-
dency of the London factory.11 Venetian vessels also called in at Southampton, and,
according to English customs records, one ‘Benedictus Victorio’ brought cargo
there in a carrack twice in 1437–8, presumably on his way to and from Flanders.12
During the year in question (1451), a decree of the Venetian senate was issued on 11
March ‘for fitting out three galleys for the Flanders and London voyage’.13 This fleet
was almost certainly ‘the galleys’ which the note in Hamilton 207 refers to, since an
account of customs duty payable at Venice on its cargo names the same commander:
Enforcing payment of the duty of one per cent on merchandise brought from England by
the galleys commanded by Ser Benetto Victuri, to be consigned to the masters of the
Arsenal, according to the Act of 20th December.14
Capitan[eus] vir nobilis / S[er] Benedictus Victuri (as the original document describes
him) is thus the capitanio who was present in London ‘with the galleys’ on 1 August
1451. Ser Benetto (as the title and the epithet nobilis indicate) was no ordinary
seadog: he was descended from a family that was listed among patrician notables in
the fourteenth century and continued to produce high-level administrators and
military leaders on into the sixteenth.15 A senate decree of 12 August 1451
acknowledges a significant role that he played on its behalf through negotiating
with the Duke of Burgundy in Flanders, ‘on our affairs and those of our merchants’,
during the voyage that had brought him to London.16
9 See Ruddock 1951: 19 and Spufford 2002: 396–8.

10 Lane 1973: 337–52 and map 9; see also Fryde 1983: 320–4. The Venetian trade involved the
export of items such as cloth, skins, block tin, and lead, and the import of luxury goods, such as spices,
silk, jewellery, carpets, etc.; see Bradley 1992: 103–4, 143, and 186. It had been affected by recession at
the time of the galley voyage in 1451 (see Nightingale 1995: 470–1) but would recover later in the
century (Sutton 2005: 232).
11 Ruddock 1951: 133–6.
12 London TNA E122/209/1, ff. 22v, 26r, 56v, and 58v. I am grateful to Dr Helen Bradley of the
London Record Society for providing these references.

13 CSPV 1. 74–5. The original document is in Venice, Archivio di Stato, Senato Deliberazioni Mar,
registro 4, ff. 37v–40r; it names the commanders (patroni) of the three galleys, but not the capitanio in
charge of the whole fleet.
14 CSPV I. 76; original in Venice, Archivio di Stato, Senato Deliberazioni Mar, registro 4, f. 117r
(3 May 1452).
15 See Chojnacki 1973: 73; Mallett and Hale 1984: 296; and Queller 1986: 179.
16 Venice, Archivio di Stato, Senato Deliberazioni Mar, registro 4, f. 82v: mandato n[ost]ro fuerit ad
Illu. d[omin]um ducem Burgundie/pro aptantis cau[s]is [?] n[ost]ris et mercatorum n[ost]ror[um] in illis
partibus [not in CSPV 1].
4 Prologue
The Venetian records thus indicate a plausible means of transport for this
migrant Commedia and a possible vendor, but the buyer remains anonymous,
despite the trouble he took to record his purchase. He is likely to have belonged
to one or other of the Italian mercantile communities in England or Flanders; for
example, the Florentine Medici Bank had branches in Bruges and (from 1446 to
1478) in London.17 Members of this class were already cultivators of Dante’s poem
during the fourteenth century, whilst in inventories of fifteenth-century merchants’
libraries the Commedia figures with the second-highest frequency after the Gospels,
and much more often than the Decameron.18 Such merchants were ‘readers with
pens in their hands’, and, like the later family bibles, copies of the Commedia
became sites to record births, marriages, deaths, current events, recipes, and even
(as here) recent purchases.19 There is also some evidence of copies like this one
accompanying and even being produced by members of the notarial and merchant
class in the course of long-distance travels.20 The evidence about the importation,
acquisition, and annotation of this Commedia in London in 1451 thus contributes
something further to the knowledge about Italian mercantile readings of Dante—a
subject on which ‘much work remains to be done’.21
Selling the Commedia in this form, at this time, and at this distance from its
origin is not only of interest with regard to the poem’s Italian circulation. It also has
significance for the presence and reception of Dante in late medieval Britain. The
sale in London demonstrates one specific means—merchant shipping—by which
further copies of Italian texts (vernacular and Latin) could have reached England
from Italy during the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century.22 It also
raises the possibility that books of this sort could have arrived by similar means even
earlier—for example, through merchants from Italian towns such as Lucca, who
had been trading in London around Chaucer’s time.23 Moreover, although the sale
of this particular Commedia was clearly a deal done between Italians abroad, it took
place at a time when some British readers had already become interested in the
poem. As the following chapter will show, around Chaucer’s late fourteenth-
century appropriation of the grete poete of Ytaille in dream poems, the Troilus,
and the Canterbury Tales, such interest was particularly evident in clerical circles,
and the Latin translation of and commentary on the Commedia (1416–17) by
Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle, with the support of an Italian cardinal and two
17On the Medici in London, see Holmes 1996.

18Bec 1983: 103–4. On merchant readers of Dante, see also Branca 1965, and Gilson 2005: 8.
19 Miglio 2001: 311 (lettori con la penna in mano) and 317–19.
20 This seems to have been the case with a manuscript similar to Hamilton 207: Florence,
Laurenziana 4024, which was copied by a cloth-merchant of Prato in 1418–19, in the course of a
journey to the far south of Italy (Otranto); see Roddewig 1984: 51 (no. 116) and Miglio 2001: 312.
21 Gilson 2005: 241, n. 26.
22 On another possible source, book-purchases by British ‘academic tourists’ in Italy around this
time, see Rundle 2013: 545–6.

23 See Childs 1983: 67, 69, 71, 78; and Nightingale 1995: esp. 83, 85, 93–4, 182, 223, 225–6, and
279. Copies of one of Dante’s key texts—Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou Tresor—were circulating in
England from early in the fourteenth century; see Reynolds 1982: 22–3 and n. 17, Holloway 1987:
15–17, and Galloway 2011: 76–8 and 111–14. On Italian merchants and their languages, see Guidi-
Bruscoli 2014.
Prologue 5
English bishops, must have arrived in Britain—along with whatever text(s) Chau-
cer used—considerably earlier than Hamilton 207.24 The vernacular Commedia
that was sold on 1 August 1451 probably did not remain in Britain long, yet its
presence prompts some questions about the nature of Anglo-Italian cultural con-
tacts in London around that time.
The Paston Letters offer one glimpse of such contacts a few years after that sale.
Around 1458 a London civil servant, Henry Windsor, writes to John Paston
I about their mutual friend William Worcester, an accountant, physician, writer
on chivalry, and avid bibliophile:
Item [also], sir, I mey sey to you that Wiliam [Worcester] hath goon to scole to a Lumbard
called Karoll Giles, to lern and to be red in poetré or els in Frensh, for he hath byn with the
same Karoll euery dey ii tymes or iii, and hath bought diuerse bokes of hym, for the which,
as I suppose, he hath put hymself in daunger [debt] to the same Karoll. I made a mocion to
William to haue knoen part of his busines, and he answered and said that he wold be as glad
and as feyn of a good boke of Frensh or of poetré as my Maister Fastolf wold be to purchace
a faire manoir; and therby I vnderstand he list not to be commynd [spoken to, admonished]
in such matiers.25
The nature of the shared reading in poetré and in Frensh and the extravagant book-
buying remains tantalizingly unspecific, although it seems that Boccaccio’s De
casibus virorum illustrium was among the texts on which William Worcester
spent all that money.26 ‘Karoll Giles’, the Lumbard who provided this service was
actually Carlo Gigli, a merchant descended from a family who were among the
leading members of the governing class in Lucca.27 The Giglis’ wealth, like that of
other prominent Lucchese families, was founded on the silk trade, and they were
socially and geographically mobile.28 Carlo himself was born in Bruges around
1400, and was the eldest of six brothers, two others of whom seem also to have
had connections with London. He is known to have been in London by 1452,
where he had documented dealings with English merchants and gentry in that
year and in 1454–5, and letters of denization were issued for him, his wife, and
his heirs in March 1460.29 Documents—including letters from him about the
24 See below, p. 17.

25 Dated ‘Probably 1458, 27 August’; see Davis 2004: 174–5 (no. 574).
26 Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 198; cited by Wakelin 2007: 94. On Worcester’s range of
reading, see Wakelin 2007: 93–108.

27 On the identification, see Hughes 1992: 132 and nn. 122–3. For Gigli’s ancestry and the status
of his family in Lucca, see Meek 1978: 190; Bratchel 1995: 94, 106, and 240 (n. 212); and Clough
2003: 124 and n. 10.
28 On the Lucca silk trade, see Bratchel 1995: 132–44 and 157–66; and on the Lucchesi as
merchants in late medieval London, see Nightingale 1995: esp. 225–6 and 279, and Sutton 2005:
40–1, 228–9, and 301. For Carlo Gigli’s career and travels, see Bianchi, 1988: 71–6, Bradley 1992:
290–1, and Clough 2003: 124–8.
29 CCR 1447–54, 347–8 (11 July 1452); CCR 1454–61, 30 and 61 (7 Nov. 1454 and 25 Nov.
1455); and CPR 1452–61, 579 (1 Mar. 1460). One of Carlo’s brothers, Ser Nicolao (referred to as
‘Nicholas Gyles, merchant of Luke/Lucca’), was granted an exemption from subsidies in return for
supplying ‘divers cloths of silk and gold’ to the King’s Great Wardrobe (CPR 1446–52, 375 (22 May
1450)), and he is also recorded as selling silver and gilt plate to a leading member of the Grocers’
Company, Stephen Brown, in the same week as Benetto Vitturi’s arrival in London (CCR 1447–54,
284 (3 Aug. 1451); see also Nightingale 1995: 437, 442–3, and 465).
6 Prologue
English civil war30—continue to place him in London up until 1465, when his will
bequeaths his books in England and Italy to his eldest son, Giovanni.
Johanni filio meo primogenito lego ac dono libros omnes . . . quos in italia . . . ad usum suum
ac studium emptos[,] ceteros quoque omnes humanitatis libros quos tumque in anglia teneo
seu tenere solebam latine prescriptos, quorum ego delectabar . . .
To my first-born son Giovanni, I give and bequeath all the books that were bought in Italy
for his use and study, as well as all the books to do with the studium humanitatis and written
in Latin, which I have thus owned and enjoyed in England . . . 31
Around 1467 Carlo left for Bruges, where his family had been trading earlier in the
century, and where he himself died.32 His son, Giovanni (born in 1434), would in
the 1480s become papal collector in England, archdeacon of London, and canon of
Lincoln, also acting as Henry VII’s envoy to Rome and ending up as bishop of
Worcester.33
Thus, although Italians in London were few in number at this time and based in
a small number of wards in the City, their communities were by no means isolated
or culturally inactive. Some could and did collect books, develop literary interests,
and make contacts that went socially, geographically, and intellectually well beyond
their enclaves. Carlo Gigli is known to have had dealings with the upper echelons of
Venetian society and the Roman curia, including the humanist pope Pius II, to
whom he addressed one of his letters about the English wars.34 During the early
1450s his son Giovanni is said to have studied at Oxford (where he could have
benefited from Duke Humfrey’s donations), and he also seems to have made use of
those books his father left him, since he was also a humanist writer of some
reputation who played some part in ‘promoting the revival of English literary
culture after the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses’.35 With their Tuscan,
mercantile, and literary connections, then, Carlo Gigli and his family look like
the sort of people who would have been interested in the kind of deal which
brought books of high status to fifteenth-century London.
Evidence about the sale of a vernacular Commedia by and to an Italian in London
around the time when Giovanni and his father were in the city (and when William
Worcester was buying foreign books from Carlo Gigli) may thus be of relevance not
only to the reception of Dante in the fifteenth century, but also to the forms and
levels of contact between England and Italy. Insofar as Dante was being read at all
in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, he is most likely
30 For Gigli’s letter to Pius II about events in England from April to July 1460, see Bianchi 1988:
110–22. On three other letters of February 1461 (to Michele Arnolfini in Bruges), see Clough 2003:
126 and nn. 24 and 27.
31 Will of Carlo Gigli, registered 12 July 1465, London, London Metropolitan Archive, MS
9171/5/, f. 376Av. I am grateful to Dr Helen Bradley for this reference.

32 Clough 2003:127–8 and n. 33.
33 Clough 2003: 128–40. See also Weiss 1947; DBI, s.v. ‘Gigli, Giovanni’, and ODNB, s.v. ‘Gigli,
Giovanni (1434–1498), papal official, diplomat, and bishop of Worcester’.

34 Bianchi 1988: 110–22.
35 See Weiss 1947: 384, Carlson 1988: 284–5, ODNB, s.v. ‘Gigli, Giovanni (1434–1498), papal
official, diplomat, and bishop of Worcester’ [last paragraph], and Wyatt 2005: 54.
Prologue 7
to have been read in Latin; and the appearance of a vernacular Commedia at this
time looks like a rather rare migrant. Moreover, the export of such texts by those
travelling away from a source of cultural activity is considerably less frequent
than imports by those visiting such a source—like, for example, William Gray,
Chancellor of Oxford, studying and collecting books in Florence and Rome during
the 1440s—or John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, in Padua and Ferrara in the late
1450s.36 Nonetheless, the Italian deal done in London on 1 August 1451, as
outlined here, creates some wider cultural reverberations in the international
reception of the Commedia, suggesting a conversation about the poem that may
have gone some way beyond the question of its price.
The preliminary account of this particular Commedia prompts a number of
questions about manuscripts and editions of Dante’s works, and their collectors,
owners, and readers, which will be addressed at a number of points in this book.
How did they come to be in the collections and locations where they are recorded?
Why were their owners interested in acquiring them? What do the acquisitions
suggest about the knowledge and reading of Dante’s work? How does the British
public for that work relate to ownership and readership elsewhere in the world?
Some time after 1451 MS Hamilton 207—as it would eventually become—
presumably travelled back to Italy with its Tuscan purchaser or his heirs, returning
to Britain in the early nineteenth century as an item in the major aristocratic
collection from which it takes its name, and migrating once more, to become part
of the Preubischer Kulturbesitz, in 1882.37 The wanderings of this Commedia can
thus be related to issues that will be investigated over some six more centuries in the
chapters that follow. The nature of a British reading public for Dante before and
around the time of Chaucer will be explored in Chapter 1; the manuscript’s
probable absence from Britain extends over a period in which he is thought to
have been little known (Chapters 2–4); its return coincides with what has been seen
as a ‘rehabilitation’ or ‘cult’ of Dante in the nineteenth century (Chapters 5–6); and
its final journey to Berlin at the end of that century forms part of a diffusion of
‘British Dantes’, reflecting the movement of the Commedia from private, limited
ownership to wider public use (Chapters 7–8).
36 Dr David Rundle (personal communication); and Rundle 2013: 545–6. See also Childs
1983: 83.
37 On the Hamilton Collection, its development and dispersal, see below, pp. 243–59.
1
Around Chaucer: Clerics, Comedy,
and Monarchy
Most of Chaucer’s clerics have contacts with Italy or with Italian literature. The
Pardoner has roamed as far as the papal curia, now re-established at Rome.1 The
Clerk not only appropriates Petrarch’s (and Boccaccio’s) work in his Tale, but also
claims to have made direct acquaintance with the late lauriat poete at Padua.2
Chaucer’s Monk reports on the latest mayhem in Milan and goes on immediately
to retail a tabloid version of an older story from Pisa: a terrifying and heart-rending
tragedye of Hugelino, whose attributed source is ‘the grete poete of Ytaille | That
highte Dant’.3 Invocations to the Virgin Mary by the Prioress and the Second Nun
both draw upon St Bernard’s appeal at the beginning of the last canto of the Paradiso.4
Friar Hubert implies an infernal public for Dante, through a vagrant devil’s tribute to
the poet’s expertise on Hell.5 The Wife of Bath—a clerk in all but name—actually
translates a whole terzina from the Purgatorio on the subject of true nobility.6 Her
exploitation of the ‘wise poete of Florence’, among other ‘auctoritees’ from ‘scoles of
clergye’, attracts the patronizing attention of clerical professionals such as the Friar.7
Over the past few decades much work has been done on Chaucer’s reading of
and response to Dante: on how the English poet might have accessed the Italian
texts; on the cultural and political impact of his journeys to Italy; on the presence of
Italian mercantile communities in late fourteenth-century London; and to some
extent on responses to Dante on the part of contemporaries, such as Gower and the
Gawain-poet.8 More recently, attention has been turning to Chaucer’s dealings
1 (Following its return from Avignon c.1378.) Chaucer General Prologue, line 671 (in The Riverside
Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); all subsequent line
references are from this edition, unless otherwise indicated).
2 Chaucer Clerk’s Prologue, 26–38.
3 Chaucer, Monk’s Tale, 2399–462.
4 Chaucer, Prologue of the Prioress’s Tale, 474–80, and Second Nun’s Prologue, 36–56, both
appropriating lines and phrases from Paradiso 33. 1–21.

5 Chaucer, Friar’s Tale, 1515–20.
6 Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Tale, 1125–30, translating Purgatorio 7. 121–3. The Wife’s arguments
about nobility also parallel some of those in the Convivio 4 (see e.g. the discussion in Schless 1984:
183–94 and Minnis 2005), but the Convivio was much less widely disseminated than the Commedia: it
survives in only 46 manuscripts (some of them fragmentary) and is mentioned in only a handful of
fourteenth-century sources (see Dante 1995a: lxxx–lxxxi).
7 Friar’s Prologue, 1276–30.
8 See e.g. Boitani 1983; Schless 1984; Wallace 1985; Taylor 1989; Bradley 1992; Wallace 1997;
Edwards 2002; Ginsberg 2002; Havely 2005. For a review of the scholarship, see Clarke 2011b. On
Clerics, Comedy, and Monarchy 9
with Italian textuality, to the ‘materiality of the book’ as part of his complex
encounter with trecento culture, as well as (once again) to his activities as translator
and inheritor of Italian authors.9
This chapter explores the hinterland of that encounter by investigating the role
of some learned and highly mobile clerical readers around the time of Chaucer in
accessing, publicizing, and debating Dante’s work at an early stage of his reception
in Britain—from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the
fifteenth. Traces here are intermittent and difficult to assess. Even in Chaucer,
the presence of the ‘grete poete of Ytaille’ has been described as necessarily ‘a Dante
of fragments’.10 And (to change the vehicle of the metaphor) investigating even a
part of Dante’s complex itinerary around Chaucer recalls the poet of Paradiso’s
warning to those small vessels seeking to follow in his wake across deep and
uncharted waters:
non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.
Do not set out into the deep, lest perhaps you lose me and remain adrift.11
The clerics who are of interest here originate from a wide range of European
locations: Sicily, Rimini, St Albans, and Norwich; and their itineraries include an
equally wide range of places, including Cambridge, Konstanz, Pavia, Siena, and
Avignon. There was, by Chaucer’s time, a long-standing and increasing two-way
traffic of clergy, students, and academics between England and Italy.12 Destinations
included, for example, the studia of Padua and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge;
whilst ecclesiastical business led to Italy or, earlier in Chaucer’s time, to that place
which, like the House of Fame, stood ‘in middes of the way’: the papal court at
Avignon, whose culture, as we shall see, mediated Dante’s reputation and work on a
number of occasions through the fourteenth century and beyond.
Amongst the clerics ‘around Chaucer’ there are some readers and writers of
particular interest here: two Italian Franciscans who promoted the Commedia and
had contacts with England; and two English Benedictines who visited Italy and
show awareness of several aspects of Dante’s work. It is not claimed that any of
these four clerics actually knew Chaucer—although at least one of them must have
heard of him. Instead, the aim is to outline some of the ways in which their
approaches to Dante may relate to and differ from those of the English poet. When
exploring this area of cultural interaction—the trafficking and circulation of texts—
it is easy to overstate the function of individual agency. Thus, whilst attention will
be given to these writers’ specific dealings with Dante—to such activities as
quotation, allusion, commentary, translation, and political debate—it is essential
Gower and Dante, see Watt 1999: 389–91 and 403–8.; and for further discussion of the Gawain-poet
and the Commedia, see Shoaf 1995: 190–7, and Putter 1996: 4–6 and 188–9.
9 See Clarke 2007 and 2011a (esp. 5–6 and 163), and Rossiter 2010.
10 Ginsberg 2002: 30.
11 Paradiso 2. 5–6. All quotations from the Commedia, unless otherwise indicated, are from the
edition by A. M. Chiavacci Leonardi (Dante 1997).

12 See Parks 1954: part 3 and Childs 1983: 77–82.
10 Clerics, Comedy, and Monarchy
to relate these activities to the wider cultural issues in which Dante’s work and
reputation are implicated: the circulation of and access to texts; fourteenth-century
writers’ negotiation of the ‘new vernacular author’;13 and the relationship between
Latinity and vernacularity. Thus, this chapter does not deal directly with ‘what
Dante meant to Chaucer’ but with how a wider public of learned readers and
writers around the English poet’s time and place read and wrote about his daunting
precursor.
THE MYSTERY OF F RIAR R OGER: T RANSL ATING

THE ‘ POETA V ULGARIS’
The first of these scenes from late medieval clerical life involves a Franciscan friar.
Dante’s vernacular enterprise in the Commedia has on a number of occasions been
compared to the work of the mendicant orders, so it is not surprising to find the
friars involved in the reception of the poem and in the use and abuse of the poet’s
work at an early stage in its afterlife.14 One such reading is the extensive commen-
tary on the Inferno completed between 1328 and 1333 by the Carmelite, Guido da
Pisa, who is described as ‘one of the most important of the earliest students of the
poem’ and who appears to have been citing Dante as early as 1318.15 A very
different response was the attack on Dante and his Monarchia by the Dominican,
Guido Vernani of Rimini, some time between 1327 and 1334. Vernani’s De
reprobatione monarchiae is associated with the condemnation of the treatise by
the papal legate to Emilia Romagna in 1328 or 1329 and with other evidence of
hostility to Dante among the early trecento Dominicans.16
For the Franciscans, the Commedia, with its exaltation of their founder and of
evangelical poverty, provided congenial reading from soon after the time of its
composition, and there is some evidence of its conscription by radical elements,
such as the fraticelli in mid-fourteenth-century Florence. In 1361 an apocalyptic
poem by one Fra’ Giovanni of Florence (probably a fraticello) presents St Francis
and Joachim of Fiore as witnesses to the travails of St Peter’s ‘ship’ (the Church),
and then has them allude to Dante by describing how ‘modern pharisees’ are
drinking the blood of the Church (as in Paradiso 27. 58–9).17 The same friar
may have been the author of another Joachimist apocalyptic poem which describes
pellegrina Italia by echoing Beatrice’s words about humanity as a starving child (Par.
30. 141); this again foresees shipwreck in the sea of ‘greed’ (cupidigia) and ends
with an exact quotation of the prophetic last line from Paradiso 27: ‘and the true
13 See Minnis and Scott, with Wallace 1991: 439–58.

14 Connections between Dante’s enterprise and that of the friars are noted by Hawkins 1999:
28–30 and Havely 2004a: 186–7.
15 See Kelly 1989: 19.
16 See below, pp. 27–8. Vernani’s treatise was probably begun in 1327 and circulated in 1329; see
DE 855, also Matteini 1958:27–43 and Cassell 2004: 44–9.

17 Compare Inferno 27. 85 (nuovi farisei) and Paradiso 27. 58–9 (the blood of the Church).
fruits will then appear after the blossoms’.18 For some more orthodox Franciscans,
too, the Commedia—with its promotion of St Francis and evangelical poverty, and
its ways of staging Christian history and dogma—provided congenial reading, and
the poem was also amongst the vernacular texts that they continued to use in
preaching through the fourteenth century and on into the period of the Observants
and San Bernardino.19 A notable product of such interest in Dante was a Latin
translation of and commentary on the Commedia which will feature later in this
chapter, but in Italy there is other evidence also of a Franciscan reception of Dante
well before this.
An early—perhaps very early—example is the citation and discussion of passages
from the Commedia in a cycle of Lent sermons for students and clerics, the
Quadragesimale de scolis or scolarum by the Sicilian Franciscan, Rogerius de Platea
or de Heraclea (c.1304–83). Rogerius was a prominent member of the Franciscan
Order and was Provincial of the Order and bishop of several dioceses from about
1336 to 1383.20 According to several of the manuscripts, he obtained his bacca-
laureate at the University of Naples and was subsequently active on behalf of the
Inquisition in Calabria. From 1336 to 1345 he served as Sicilian Provincial for the
Franciscan Order; in 1360 he was created bishop of Bosa on the west coast of
Sardinia and in 1363 he was translated back to his Sicilian homeland, to the see of
Mazara near Trapani, where he remained for the last twenty years of his life.21
Friar Roger’s sermons exist in various forms in seven manuscripts. In two of the
four manuscripts containing the full cycle of fifty-six Lenten sermons a range of
passages from all three parts of the Commedia are quoted, but not all, even of these
full versions, contain equal amounts of quotation from the poem.22 Such quota-
tions occur mostly in sermons concerned with specific sins, such as avarice, and in
those designed to promote penitence and unworldliness.
One of the most striking features of this Franciscan reading is its sustained
interest in Dante’s role as visionary and authoritative poet. In the sermon on the
epistle for the third Sunday in Lent (Ephesians 5: 1, Estote imitatores Dei), Friar
Roger refers to St Paul’s journey to Paradise (2 Cor. 12: 2–4) and notes that similar
uncertainties about the corporal or incorporeal nature of the vision are also
expressed by Dante in the Paradiso, which he then quotes (with a southern Italian
accent):
18 Paradiso 27. 148 (e vero frutto verrà dopo il fiore). See Reeves 1969: 214–17 and Havely 2004a:
181–2.
19 See Moorman 1968: 478 and Casciani 2006.
20 Allusions to Dante in one of the manuscripts of his sermons (Assisi, Sacro Convento MS 492)
was first annotated in 1949, and at that time relatively little was known about Rogerius; see Palumbo
1966. More recent studies of ‘Rogerius de Platea [modern Piazza Armerina]’ aka ‘Rogerius de Eraclea
[modern Gela]’ are: Roccaro 1987; Roccaro 1992: 1–36; Cenci 1995; and Romano 2008.
21 Palumbo 1966: 465–7.
22 All fifty-six sermons are in four of the manuscripts: Assisi, Sacro Convento MS 492; Florence,
Laurenziana plut. 24 cod. 5; Nürnberg, Stadtbibliothek MS lat. theol. Cent. IV, 3; and Berlin
Staatsbibliothek MS Magdeb. Domkirche 231. For lists and descriptions of the known manuscripts,
see Cenci 1995: 279–90 and Romano 2008: 172–3. There are thirteen passages from the Commedia in
the Assisi MS, but only six in the full Florentine version, and only two in the Nürnberg and Berlin
texts.
raptus fuit usque ad [terciu]m celum et audivit archana verba quae non licet homini loqui.
Quod configurans poeta uulgaris ait/
Sy yo era supra di me quel che creasti
nouelamente, amor ch’el ciel gouerni,
tu ’l say ke col tua lume mi leuasti
[St Paul] was taken up to the third heaven and heard mysterious words which it not given to
humans to tell about. In imitation of this, the vernacular poet says: ‘Whether I transcended
myself by being there in spirit, you will know, Love that rules the heavens, since you drew
me upwards with your light.’23
Several folios later he then launches into an ambitious mythographic account of
Dante’s journey through learning (scientia) to wisdom (sapientia) through the first
two cantiche of the Commedia, with the final stage being signalled through the
invocation to the god Apollo at the beginning of the Paradiso:
Sed duo erant Dii sub quorum nomine poetae coronabantur, scilicet Bachus et Apollo.
Bachus enim solummodo Deus scientiae vocabatur seu dicebatur; Apollo vero dicebatur
Deus Sapientiae. Unde sic fiebat quod qui laureandi erant in scientia sola coronabantur sub
nomine Bachi et illi qui in Sapientia laureabantur sub nomine Apollis et illi qui in utraque
sub nomine utriusque. Unde poeta vulgaris tractavit de poesis Inferni et Purgatorii sub dictu
Bachi, quasi dicat quod ratio naturalis seu moralis potest illa dictare quia ulterius tractaturus
erat de Paradiso ubi sunt illa quae ratio naturalis nescit dictare, hinc est quod ipse dixit:
A buono Apollo allu oltimu lavoro
fammi de lu tuo lavor si fatto vaso
comme dumandi da lo amato alloro
infine a quell’uno jogo di Parnaso
mi fu ma or con ambedue
mo opo intrare nelle ringa rimaso.
. . . there were two Gods under whose names poets were crowned, that is, Bacchus and
Apollo. Bacchus in fact was referred to or named only as the God of Knowledge; whilst
Apollo was called the God of Wisdom. Hence it so happened that those who were to be
made laureate for knowledge alone were crowned under the name of Bacchus, those for
wisdom under the name of Apollo, and those for both under the name of both. Hence the
vernacular poet deals with Hell and Purgatory in his poems under the command of Bacchus,
as if to say that natural and moral reason sufficed to deal with those things, whilst the final
matter to be dealt with was Paradise where there are things that natural reason cannot
convey, hence he says:
‘Good Apollo, for this last task, make me the kind of vessel worthy of your beloved laurel.
Till now, one of the peaks of Parnassus gave me enough, but now I need to call upon both as
I face the final challenge.’24
Here, the Franciscan friar also approaches the poeta vulgaris as an authoritative
figure, but he seems to be on the verge of validating theology through poetry, in a
way that might have made some of his clerical contemporaries (particularly
23 Quadragesimale de scolis/scolarum, in Assisi Comunale MS 492, f. 62v (partly transcribed by
Palumbo 1965: 470), quoting Paradiso 1.73–5 in an unknown southern Italian version.
24 Quadragesimale, f. 69v–70r, transcribed by Palumbo 1966: 472.
Dominican ones) uncomfortable and might well have been viewed sceptically by
Chaucer.25 The appeal for Apollo’s guidance in the last stage of the Commedia is a
passage that Chaucer turns to and reshapes at the beginning of the ‘lytel laste boke’
of The House of Fame, and he acknowledges Dante’s poetic authority whilst
qualifying his own position in relation to it.26
These passages, and the other appropriations of the Commedia in Friar Roger’s
sermons, have been known, at least to Franciscan scholars, for the last half-century.
Their dating, as we shall see, is uncertain, but they provide important evidence
about the early dissemination of Dante’s work in southern Italy. They show that
the preacher must have had access to all three parts of the Commedia, or at least
to an anthology that included excerpts from them. Copies of the Inferno were
certainly present in Sicily by about 1370, whilst a vernacular commentary on part
of St Matthew’s Gospel (Sposizione del Vangelo della Passione secondo Matteo), dated
1372, contains a number of Dantean images and expressions—and it has been
suggested that the latter may be a late work by Friar Roger himself.27
In mid-career, this Franciscan preacher and commentator on Dante may have
travelled as far as England and the University of Cambridge. During the fourteenth
century Cambridge had been gaining status among European universities, espe-
cially for its faculty of theology, due partly to the presence of its Franciscan
community, which had become well established by 1267 and by the middle of
the next century numbered some sixty friars.28 In the Bull Redemptor noster (issued
in 1336) Pope Benedict XII had set out a number of new Constitutions for the
Franciscans. Its ninth section, De studiis, amongst other things, provides for the
Minster General of the Franciscans and the General Chapter of the Order to
present a non-English friar from ‘north or south of the Alps’ every third year to
lecture on the Sentences in order to obtain the master’s degree at Paris, Oxford, and
Cambridge (the three universities with theological faculties at that time).29 There is
some evidence of Italian friars being selected to lecture at Oxford under this scheme
during the mid-to-late fourteenth century, although the dates are not always
precise, and some of those selected did not appear.30 For Cambridge, however,
there is a list of seventy-three magistri fratrum minorum (‘Franciscan masters’)
attached to Thomas of Eccleston’s Chronicle.31 At number seventy in this list, and
25 On Chaucer’s implied attitude to Dante as poeta theologus or as ‘scribe of God’ in the House of
Fame, see Ellis 1988 and Taylor 1989: 39–49.

26 Chaucer, House of Fame 1091–100.
27 See Resta 1967: 414 on the Inferno listed in an inventory of Federico IV in 1367. Another
(clearly in a southern Italian dialect) formed part of the estate of the Franciscan archbishop of Palermo,
Matteo della Porta who died in 1377; see Monfrin 1961: 229 and n. 2, and Williman 1980: 264, no.
98 (see below, p. 29). On the St Matthew commentary, see Resta 1967: 419, Bruni 1980: 226–7, and
Rotolo 1981: 541–2 and n. 121.
28 See Moorman 1952: 78–9.
29 Benedict XII, Redemptor Noster, ed. M. Bihl, in Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 30 (1937),
309–90 and 346.

30 See Little 1938: 205–9; and Moorman 1947: 295.
31 In Little 1951: 58–61.
probably present at Cambridge during 1351–2, is one frater Rogerius de Cicilia.32

It seems likely that, although there were several friars of this name, this Rogerius
was the author of the Quadragesimale.33 A papal decree of 1367, awarding a
magisterium at the University of Paris to dilectus filius Rogerius de Heraclia, ordinis
fratrum Minorum professor, mentions that this Sicilian friar had already studied
and lectured on the Sentences (as provided for in Benedict XII’s Bull of 1336) in
diversis studiis.34
How, then, might the friar’s mid-century lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences
at Cambridge relate to his cycle of sermons which quote the Commedia? One
proposed date for that cycle is a few years earlier than 1336, soon after Friar Roger’s
graduation from the University of Naples and shortly before he became Provincial
Minister for the order in Sicily. This quite early dating in his long career (which
lasted until 1383) would give the Quadragesimale considerable interest as a response
to the Commedia not much more than a decade after the poem’s completion; and
it would mean that ‘Rogerius de Cicilia’ would have been on record as a reader
of and commentator upon Dante well before his arrival to lecture at Cambridge
in 1351.
Other dates, however, have been proposed. It has also been shown that four of
the manuscripts refer to the death of Richard Fitzralph at Avignon in 1360, and
that they also mention the teaching of the Franciscan Giovanni della Marca from
1350 onwards—which would suggest a much later date of composition.35 On the
other hand, the Quadragesimale evolved over a period, in at least two and possibly
three redactions, and whatever the dates of composition or compositions, it would
still be possible to envisage the Sicilian friar as having read Dante at some point
before his forties, when he went to Cambridge.36 Of course, lecturing on Peter
Lombard’s Sentences is a rather different exercise from reading and interpreting,
let alone enthusing about or promoting the Commedia—for which we have only
the Italian material in the Quadragesimale and the uncertainty about the date of that
text. But, given his willingness to share Dantean material with the scholarly
audience of his sermons, it seems likely that ‘Rogerius de Cicilia’ would also have
been ready to discuss this prominent vernacular poet with Franciscan colleagues at
home and perhaps also abroad.
Not much seems to be known in detail about the academic and intellectual
culture of Cambridge Franciscans in the years immediately after the plague
of 1348, let alone whether they would have been interested in the work of
the new Italian poeta theologus.37 But the probable location of the Sicilian friar in
mid-fourteenth-century Cambridge has at least two wider possible implications. It
32 See Moorman 1947: 293–5. 33 Palumbo 1966: 466; Roccaro 1992: 28 and n. 32.
34 Decree of 1367, quoted in Cenci 1995: 294. 35 Cenci 1995: 272–5.
36 On the two or three possible redactions, see Cenci 1995: 292, and on the issue of dating the
Quadragesimale, see Romano 2008: 173–4 (concluding that the question ‘cannot be resolved at
present’).
37 See Moorman 1952: ch. 6; and Cobban 1975: ch. 2, and (on the theology faculty) Cobban
1988: 224–31.
indicates an early channel of communication and a context for interest in Dante’s

work in England, perhaps among Franciscans or other cultured clerics some thirty
years before Chaucer’s reference to Dante alongside Virgil and Claudian and his
subsequent allusions to the Commedia in The House of Fame.38 Secondly, it reflects
a clerical investment in a commented and Latinized Dante that will continue
beyond Chaucer into pre-humanist England, through the work of a later and
more well-known Franciscan who had both Dantean interests and more ascertain-
able English connections.
‘ RUSTIC LATIN’: SER RA VA LL E’S COMMEDIA
At the Council of Konstanz between January 1416 and January 1417, Giovanni
Bertoldi da Serravalle, who was then bishop of Fermo near Rimini, completed a
Latin translation of and commentary on Dante’s Commedia, which now survives,
unlike its original, in very few manuscripts.39 The Council itself, ending the schism
in the Papacy and debating reform in the Church, was an international affair, and
so was Serravalle’s project.40 Two English bishops and an Italian cardinal were,
according to him, involved in ‘enjoining and encouraging’ the work, which was
completed quite rapidly, taking less than five months over the translation and less
than twelve for the commentary. Their role is acknowledged several times in the
text, for example, at the end of the translation:
Explicit translatio libri dantis edita a re[ver]endo patre et d[omi]no fr[at]re johanne de
s[er]aualle Arriminensis dioces[is] Ep[isc]opo et principe firmano de ordine mi[n]ore
assumpto. Principiata de me[n]se januarii Anno d[om]ini m[illesim]o ccccxvio et completa
de me[n]se maii euisd[em] anni in ciuitate Constanciensis . . . Que translatio fuit [com]
pilata & f[ac]ta ad instantia . . . Domini Amedei . . . Cardinalis de Saluciis . . . Nycolay de
Bubwych . . . et d[om]ini Roberti hal[u]m
. . . qui ambo sunt de Regno Anglie in quo suas sedes habent . . .
here ends the translation of the Book of Dante, produced by the reverend father and lord,
Brother Giovanni da Serravalle of the diocese of Rimini, bishop of Fermo and member
of the Franciscan Order. It was begun in the month of January ad 1416 and completed in
the month of May of the same year in the city of Konstanz. This translation was compiled
and produced at the instigation of Lord Amedeo . . . Cardinal of Saluzzo . . . ; Nicholas
38 Chaucer, House of Fame, 445–50, 499–508, 523–8, 530–44, and 1091–109.

39 On Serravalle’s life, see DBI s.v. ‘Bertoldi, Giovanni (Giovanni da Serravalle)’; and on his
translation of the Commedia, see esp. Lombardi 1987 and Wallace 1999. The three surviving
manuscripts of his translation and commentary are: Vatican, BAV MS Capponiano 1; London BL
MS Egerton 2629; and an incomplete text at Eger (Hungary), Bishop’s Library, containing the
translation and the commentary on Inferno (see Vaisz 1883).
40 See the chapter on Konstanz (ch. 82) in Europe: A Literary History 1348–1418, ed. D. Wallace
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). On other forms of literary production at the Council,
see Hobbins 2009: 193–7; and on the subsequent dissemination of texts from Konstanz to collections
in Germany, Poland, Sweden, France, and elsewhere in Europe, see Lehmann 1959: esp. 256–69.
Bubwith . . . and Lord Robert Hallum, both from the realm of England where they hold
their sees.41
Serravalle’s translation of the Commedia might initially be seen as a humanistic
project, giving the text, through Latin, the linguistic identity and status that some
trecento critics thought it ought to have had ab initio. In his prologue, however,
Serravalle insists on the ‘rough and inept’ way in which his ‘rustic’ Latin prose
renders the ‘sweetness and beauty’ of Dante’s verse, and acknowledges that ‘in such
a short time I do not think it would be possible to accomplish a fitting translation,
following high rhetorical standards’ (non puto fore possibile in tam parvo tempore . . .
fieri translationem decentem in bona rhetorica et laudabile).42 What Serravalle
presents here to his colleagues, therefore, is not a humanistic Latinization of the
Commedia, but a rough-and-ready ‘window onto a vernacular text for non-Italian
clerics’,43 and especially for his two named English associates: Nicholas Bubwith,
bishop of Bath and Wells, and Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury.
Unlike his earlier Franciscan colleague Friar Roger, Serravalle thus tells us
something specific about his English contacts and a potential British readership
for his translation. He not only mentions the two English bishops; he also indicates
how he might previously have got to know them. In his commentary on Inferno 20
he mentions that he had himself actually been to England:
Prope Sibiliam, forte per centum leucas, est mons Giubelcar, iuxta quem montem mare
Oceanum per angustum spatium septem leucarum fluit et vadit, et ingreditur mare Med-
iterraneum; et ego iam transivi per illud angustum spatium, quando redibam de regno
Anglie ad partes Ytalie per mare . . .
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 narrow strait when I was returning by sea from the realm of England to the
land of Italy.44
During his busy career as lector, preacher, bishop, and diplomat in places including
Ferrara, Pavia, Florence, Rome, and Perugia,45 one of the few times when he could
have taken such a journey would have been around 1398, the year in which he also
visited the Holy Land and the eastern Mediterranean.46 This is not to suggest that
his voyage to England in the late 1390s might have brought him into contact with
the—then rather elderly—author of the Canterbury Tales. But by that time
Serravalle was already a well-informed reader of the Commedia, having benefited
directly from Benvenuto da Imola’s exposition of the text whilst at the Franciscan
41 Serravalle, Liber Dantis in Vatican, BAV MS Cappon. 1, f. 474v. The same names occur in the
incipit, the dedication, and the conclusio to Serravalle’s commentary; see Serravalle 1891: 3, 5, and
1215.
42 The ‘Dedicatio’, in Serravalle 1891: 5–6. On Serravalle’s attitude and procedure as translator
(with examples), see Wallace 1999: 13–16 and 19–20 (with n. 32).
43 Wallace 1999: 23—although it needs to be noted that the translation and commentary are also
dedicated to an Italian cardinal, Amedeo di Saluzzo (see below, pp. 31–2 with n. 131).
44 Commentary on Inferno 20. 124–6, in Serravalle 1891: 259.
45 Lombardi 1987: 101–3. 46 Ibid. 102, and Serravalle 1891: xvi–xvii.
convent in Ferrara from 1379 to 1383.47 It is possible, therefore, that if his

acquaintance with his English fellow clerics, Bubwith and Hallum, began in
1398, so might the dialogue on Dante that was later to yield the text produced at
such speed during the Council of Konstanz.
Serravalle’s translation of and commentary on the Commedia had a significant
English afterlife in and beyond the fifteenth century. Of the two English bishops
who encouraged the production of the text, the more intellectually dominant was
Robert Hallum of Salisbury, but he can have had little time to read Serravalle’s
work, let alone bring it back to England, since he died at Konstanz in September
1417.48 It is likely, on the other hand, that his colleague Nicholas Bubwith, bishop
of Bath and Wells, who was the principal English envoy at the Council, did bring a
copy home. This was probably the text that the antiquary John Leland saw in Wells
Cathedral Library some time in the 1530s, and described (slightly inaccurately) as
Dantes tra[ns]latus in carmen Latinum.49 That manuscript no longer exists, but
there were others in British libraries in the fifteenth century, although they too have
since disappeared. At some point between 1417 and 1444 the uncle of Henry VI,
Duke Humfrey of Gloucester, acquired at least one copy (from whatever source) for
his collection at Greenwich Palace. Duke Humfrey’s use of books seems largely to
have been for self-promotion rather than self-improvement; nonetheless, his col-
lection would eventually be of some considerable benefit to the world of learning.50
His third donation of books to the University of Oxford in February 1444
comprised 135 manuscripts, two of which (nos. 117 and 120) are books of or
about Dante:
Item commentaria Dantis secundo folio et tormentabunt [ . . . ]
Item librum [sic] Dantis secundo folio a te [or ate?]51
The first of these two items, from the evidence of the contemporary catalogue, was
clearly Serravalle’s commentary. The phrase et tormenta (very close to the phrase
which the catalogue gives as the start of folio 2 of the Oxford volume) occurs in the
second preamble to the commentary, near the beginning of folio 2 in both the
Vatican and the Egerton manuscripts; furthermore, Leland’s later account explicitly
identifies Serravalle as the author of the ‘Commentarii . . . super opera Dantis
Aligerii’ that was still in the library in the early sixteenth century.52
47 Lombardi 1987: 101. On the influence of Benvenuto’s commentary on Serravalle’s, see Barbi
1934: 79–98.
48 On Hallum, see ODNB, s.v. ‘Hallum [Hallam], Robert (d. 1417), bishop of Salisbury’.
49 See ODNB, s.v., ‘Bubwith, Nicholas (c.1355–1424), administrator and bishop of Bath and
Wells’. Leland’s listing of the Serravalle manscript at Wells is in Leland 1715: 3. 155 (no. 4 on the list).
50 On Humfrey and his books, see Vickers 1907: 426–38; Weiss 1967: 40–53 and 64–7; Petrina
2004: ch. 4; and Wakelin 2007: 25–31.

51 Catalogue of Books donated to the University of Oxford by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester,
Indenture dated 25 February 1443/4, in Oxford, Bodleian Library University of Oxford Archives, MS
Registrum F, f. 68v. See also DEL 1. 20–2, and Sammut 1980: 82–3 (nos. 117 and 120).
52 Leland 1715: 3. 58. On the subsequent dispersal of Duke Humfrey’s manuscripts at Oxford, see
Rundle 2004: 115.

The second of Duke Humfrey’s Dantes is more problematic: the librum Dantis
with a te or ate occurring as the first word on its second folio. This has been read as
two separate words, as Inferno 1. 91: ‘A te convien tenere altro viaggio’ (‘You must
take another way’, Virgil’s advice to Dante), which would thus indicate ‘the . . .
existence in England of a copy of the “Divina Commedia” in the original at this
date—the earliest copy on record’.53 The evidence for Humfrey’s ownership of an
Italian Commedia is, however, by no means conclusive. The manuscript of the
Oxford list of books has a little space between the a and the te, but on close inspection
it appears that the letters are linked, which makes it possible that the Latin morpheme
-ate is being referred to. Two of the three extant manuscripts of Serravalle’s Liber
Dantis (Vatican and Egerton) begin with the commentary, but the third (Eger) starts
with the translation. If the latter ordering (translation then commentary) was that of
the Oxford librum Dantis, then the Latin -ate ending would have occurred numerous
times in the prologue and summaries which precede that translation. Furthermore,
the Oxford cataloguer’s rendering of the title as librum [rather than liber] Dantis
could have derived from a misreading of the manuscript’s colophon, which in this
case would have been the explicit to the commentary. Hence, the second of these libri
Dantis could have been a complete version of Serravalle’s text, comprising the
translation followed by the commentary. Moreover, Duke Humfrey’s donation
includes no vernacular texts—which would make it yet more likely that both the
Dantes he gave to Oxford in 1444 were Serravalle’s Latin work.54
Neither the Oxford nor the Wells copy of Serravalle’s Dante has survived, yet
their early importation certainly indicates the availability of the Commedia to a
wider British public beyond Chaucer.55 Serravalle’s Latin prose translation and
commentary offered a convenient annotated version of the poem for a new
educated class of reader: for clerics such as Bubwith, Hallum, and their circles,
and for those students and scholars who might later have had access to Duke
Humfrey’s books. The complex European itineraries of this Latin Commedia will
be returned to later in this chapter; meanwhile, we should take account of a
prominent English cleric (and associate of Duke Humfrey) who knew and referred
to both Serravalle’s and Dante’s work.
‘ NOTABLE COMEDIES ’: DANTE AT ST ALBANS
The Benedictine monk John Whethamstede was a prominent figure on the English
religious and intellectual scene during the early and mid-fifteenth century. Born in
53 P. Toynbee, letter to the Times Literary Supplement (22 Apr. 1920), p. 256, col. 2.
54 The four texts by Boccaccio and the seven by Petrarch all (as far as they are identifiable) appear to
be in Latin; see DEL 1. 21–2. As Weiss (1967: 65) points out, it is very unlikely that Humfrey could
have read the Commedia in Italian, ‘considering that he had [Boccaccio’s] Corbaccio translated into
Latin [BL MS Lat. Misc. d. 34] and owned the Decameron in French [Paris BNF Fr. no. 12421]’.
55 The origins of the manuscript that is now in the British Library (MS Egerton 2629) are uncertain:
it may have arrived in Britain only around the beginning of the nineteenth century and could be the copy
donated by Philip II to the Escorial Library some time before 1576 (see Roddewig 1984: 38 and 397).
Hertfordshire around 1392/3, he entered St Albans Abbey some time between

1405 and 1408. He became Prior of Students at the Benedictine house of
Gloucester College in Oxford around 1414 and incepted in theology about
1417. He served as Abbot of St Albans twice: first from 1420 to 1440 and then
from 1451 until his death in 1465.56 He is known to have founded libraries both
there and at Gloucester College; and he was recognized in his own time as ‘an
eminent churchman, diplomat, preacher, letter writer and encyclopaedist, a mu-
nificent builder at St Albans and Oxford, a magnate, a patron and benefactor’.57
His leading role as churchman and diplomat led him to undertake a long journey to
Italy during 1423–4, in order to attend the Councils at Pavia and subsequently
Siena; and more will be said later about the effects of clerical conference-going in
Italy and elsewhere during this period.58
Prominent visitors to St Albans in the abbot’s time included Henry VI and
his uncle, Humfrey of Gloucester, well known for his book-collecting, literary
patronage, and cultivation of Italian humanists.59 Whethamstede’s own patronage
extended to ‘scribes, scholars, composers, poets, goldsmiths, painters and glaziers’,
and he contributed significantly to the expansion of the monastic library at
St Albans.60 He also acted as patron to another Benedictine monk and member
of Duke Humfrey’s circle, the poet John Lydgate, whom he commissioned to write
the Liff and Passion of Seynt Alboon during his first tenure as abbot in 1439.61
Characterized as ‘one of the last of the English medieval polymaths’, Whetham-
stede was a prominent figure in the ‘monastic renaissance at St Albans’ and in the
development of fifteenth-century English classicism; he was almost as prolific in his
literary output as his fellow Benedictine Lydgate, and as historiographer, anthol-
ogizer, and encyclopedist he was ‘working within well-defined genres of monastic
literature’.62 His output comprises nearly fifty texts, of which several are ambitious
encyclopedic projects, and three of them provide specific examples of how this
abbot of St Albans read and referred to Dante.
The abbot’s own name, deriving from his birthplace, Wheathampstead, was
Latinized as Frumentarius (‘Corny’), and he continues the cereal punning when
giving titles to his works: to one of his main historiographical projects, the
Granarium; to his collection of quotations, the Pabularium (‘fodder’) poetarum;
and in that of his classical dictionary, the Palearium (‘chaff-store’) poetarum. Several
of these contain references to Dante, as we shall see, but the Palearium also provides
evidence both of Whethamstede’s actual reading of passages in the Commedia and
of the form in which he accessed the text.
56 Weiss 1967: 30–8, and ODNB, s.v. ‘Whethamstede [Bostock], John (c.1392–1465), scholar and
abbot of St Albans’. On his life and work, see also Gransden 1974–82: 2. 371–86; Carlson 1999; and
Alakas 2009: ch. 2
57 Howlett 1975: 6. 58 See below, p. 22.
59 On Duke Humfrey, see above, p. 17.
60 Howlett 1975: 6, and Howlett’s contribution to Sharpe 1996: 542–4 and 563–83.
61 Howlett 1975: 249.
62 Weiss 1967: 38; Clark 2004: 234–7; and (as quoted last) Alakas 2009: 73.
The Palearium poetarum is found in a handsomely illuminated manuscript of

140 parchment folios and 692 entries dealing with a wide range of mostly classical
persons, places, and things.63 It is said to have been ‘obviously modelled on
Boccaccio’s De Genealogiis Deorum’;64 yet, although Whethamstede does cite the
latter throughout (alongside classical sources such as Ovid, Virgil, and Statius), he is
not engaging in a Boccaccio-like project of mythographical interpretation, still less a
defence of poetry.65 Instead, he aims to provide a detailed guide to literary
references and sources, which is organized alphabetically, cross-referenced, and
linked to places in the books or chapters of the texts.66
Whethamstede’s frequent, precise, and accurate references to Boccaccio’s De
Genealogiis in the Palearium—at least ninety of them—are, however, indicative of
his appetite for the works of Italian writers in Latin. The various manuscripts of his
Granarium indicate that he also knew Latin works by Petrarch, Salutati, and
Bruni.67 In the Palearium he devotes a complete entry to Paolo da Perugia, librarian
of Robert of Naples, who is often cited by Boccaccio in the Genealogiae.68 His
article on Sacra (rites) shows that he knew a work on Roman politics which he
attributes to ‘Andrea Fflorentino’, Andrea Fiocchi.69 Two articles here also make
several quite precise references to Dante.70
The first are in an article about names (Nomen), where Whethamstede has added
a footnote about Roman practice in his own hand:
Vero quare omnes romani pro maiori parte sunt binomii. Vide in commento Johannis
Ariminensis super Comediam Dantis capitulo sexto bene citra medium.
Indeed, therefore, all the Roman names are generally in two parts. See the commentary by
John of Rimini on the Comedy of Dante, the sixth canto [of Paradiso] well before the
middle.71
Whethamstede here makes two further specific references: to Paradiso 6 and
Justinian’s speech about famous Romans (especially lines 46–7); and to the source
in which he read about the subject—Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle, who describes
himself as Arriminensis in the colophons to his translation of and commentary on
the Commedia.72
The second appearance of Dante in the Palearium also involves a passage in the
Paradiso and occurs in another of Whethamstede’s autograph additions. The article
63 BL Add. MS 26764.
64 Weiss 1967: 36, n. 14. Weiss’s view of Whethamstede’s intentions here (as elsewhere) seems to
reflect an ‘attempt to cast the abbot as either an early humanist or a failed humanist’; see Alakas 2009:
48–50.
65 Although he does refer to Boccaccio’s ‘commendation’ of poetry in Books 14 and 15 of the
Genealogie in the course of his article on Poeta (BL Add. MS 26764, f. 99r).
66 Thus citing references ‘well before’ or ‘well after the middle’, ‘near the end’, or ‘throughout’.
67 Weiss 1967: 36, nn. 7–11.
68 BL Add. MS 26764, f. 88r, on Paulus perusinus (see the frequent references in Boccaccio’s
Genealogiae, e.g. 1. 14 and 15. 6).

69 BL Add. MS 26764, f. 111v.
70 These were first noticed by Weiss 1936: 358 and 359, n. 6.
71 BL Add. MS 26764, unpaginated slip attached to f. 79.
72 On Serravalle, see above, pp. 15–18.
on Rhipheus begins as an account of a mountain in Thrace, but the abbot then adds
a note on a minor yet important character in the Commedia at the foot of the page:
Troiano qui tantam pietatem exercuit et iustitiam quod iuxta opinionem Dantis suis meruit
virtutibus perpetuam salvationem. Vide in eodem Dante comedia tercia capitulo vicesimo.
Vide eciam de eodem in Virgilio in secondo Eneidorum.
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, the twentieth
canto; also, on this same man, Virgil in the second [book of] the Aeneid.
This second note shows Whethamstede beginning to address a problematic feature
of Dante’s soteriology: the redemption of the noble pagan Rifeo in the sixth heaven
of Paradise.73 The allusion to Book 2 of the Aeneid in this context also suggests that,
like many other readers of Paradiso 20, he may have been perplexed to see a
character from Virgil’s poem in Heaven, whilst its author is condemned to Hell.
Elsewhere in the Palearium there are articles on such potentially Dantean topics as
the rivers of Hell; on Geryon, the three-bodied monster; Glaucus, ‘the poor
fisherman who became a sea-god’ (as Whethamstede summarizes it); and Marsyas,
the satyr drawn out of his body by Apollo; but these prompt references to Roman
authors, not to Dante, nor to Serravalle’s translation or commentary.74 Nonethe-
less, the Palearium’s actual allusions to the Commedia can be seen to reflect several
significant aspects of the reception of the poem in northern Europe: first, how
important Latin would be as a vehicle; and secondly, how quickly Serravalle’s Latin
translation and its commentary went into circulation in England and provided
‘fodder’ at least for a clerical and monastic readership. Whethamstede might
perhaps have been using one of the copies of Serravalle’s work that Duke Humfrey
would donate to Oxford University, but it is also possible that other manuscripts of
the translation were to hand.75
Whethamstede, however, knew very well that Dante’s Commedia was composed
in Italian, not Latin. In a brief compendium of poets’ lives, which may have been
intended to form one of the sheaves in his great Granarium project, he includes
Dante, along with Petrarch and Boccaccio:
Dantes de aldigeriis poeta florentinus tres de Paradiso videlicet P[ur]gatorio & inferno
[f. 160v] in suo vulgari eloquio scripsit notabiles comedias//
Dante Alighieri the Florentine poet wrote in his vernacular speech three remarkable
comedies, namely on Paradise, Purgatorio, and Inferno.76
73 BL Add. MS 26764, f. 110v; cf. Paradiso 20. 67–72. The problem of justice for the ‘noble
pagans’ is articulated in the previous canto, Paradiso 19. 67–90.

74 BL Add. MS 26764, ff. 47v, 50v, 51r, and 68r. The folio (51r) carrying the article on Glaucus has
a lower section excised; might that perhaps have contained another of the abbot’s Dantean notes?
75 On Duke Humfrey’s donation, and on the copy that remained at Wells until the sixteenth
century, see above, pp. 17–18.

76 Vitarum quorundam poetarum compendium, in BL Cotton Titus D XX, f. 160 r–v. I am much
indebted to David Rundle of the University of Essex for identifying this source.
The ‘three crowns of Florence’ are the only moderns to be included in this
compendium of chiefly Roman writers (along with a few token Greeks). In the
case of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Whethamstede is concerned solely with their Latin
works, which were those mainly circulated in northern Europe. Petrarch is identi-
fied mainly as the author of ‘the excellent work on the Punic war which he called
the Africa’; whilst the long account of Boccaccio is devoted almost entirely (and as
might be expected) to a summary of the fifteen books of his ‘most excellent work on
the genealogies of the gods’.77 Dante, on the other hand, stands out amongst all this
Latinity as one who wrote his ‘remarkable comedies’ in suo vulgari eloquio. Use of
the Serravalle translation of the Commedia did not, it seems, blind Whethamstede
to the fact that he was dealing with a pre-eminently vernacular poet. Moreover, this
account is of some interest as an early (perhaps the earliest) English representation
of Dante as one of the ‘three crowns of Florence’, a triumvirate that was to provide a
model for the formation of an English vernacular canon later in the fifteenth and
the early sixteenth centuries.78
Whethamstede’s active role as churchman and diplomat led him to undertake a
long journey to Italy during 1423–4, in order to attend the Council at Pavia and
subsequently Siena, and to defend his monastery’s interests at the papal curia.79 In
the course of this journey he had the opportunity to encounter Italian intellectuals,
lament the quality of his own Latin, and explore some of his ‘literary assump-
tions’.80 Yet his interests were not only in poetry and mythography, but also in the
ecclesiastical politics of his time. He was well informed about conciliarism in
general, and was clearly interested in controversies about papal power.81
Ecclesiastical politics provide a context for further direct reference to Dante in
another of Whethamstede’s works. A small, plain manuscript at Cambridge is
Whethamstede’s commonplace book, written mostly in his own hand,82 and its
second half contains—along with a considerable amount of verse, epitaphs, and
recipes—two major articles on ‘Pope’ and ‘Nation’.83 These articles are thought to
be the only surviving fragments of one of the abbot’s other encyclopedic works, the
Manipularium doctorum. The entry on ‘Papacy’ covers twenty pages, and addresses
issues such as the title and authority of the pope and the vexed question of the
Papacy’s temporal power and possessions.84
It is in the context of ‘temporalities’ and the nature of the Pope’s entitlement to
them that Whethamstede cites a group of sources, beginning with Dante:
Iuxta quartos cum quibus concorda[n]t Dans de monarchia mundi Thomas de potestati
papali et Alvarus de planctu ecclesie Marsilius de ecclesiastica potestate ac alii multi.
77 It does, however, mention that Boccaccio wrote ‘things worthy of note about his own time’ (no-
[ta]bilia te[m]pore suo), which could refer to Boccaccio’s De casibus, a version of which Whethamstede’s
colleague Lydgate translated.
78 See below, pp. 36–7. 79 On this eventful journey, see Riley 1870–1: 1. 129–82.
80 Riley 1870–1: 1. 136–8; on his letter to a learned Venetian and its views on rhetoric and reading,
see Alakas 2009: 68–72.

81 See Harvey 1985. 82 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 230/116.
83 See Howlett 1975: 152–3.
84 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 230/116, ff. 142r–f. 151v.
Concurring with those holding the fourth viewpoint [on papal possessions] are Dante [in]
Of World Monarchy, Thomas [prob. John of Paris], On [Royal and] Papal Power, Alvaro
[Pelayo], On the Lamentation of the Church, Marsilius [of Padua] On Ecclesiastical Power
[i.e. Defensor pacis], and many others.85
The reference to Dante’s Monarchia here has been seen as ‘the first English allusion
to this text’, and one that thus ‘opens interesting possibilities on other manuscripts
either [Duke] Humphrey or Whethamstede might have possessed’.86 But what
kind of reference is this, and what kind of reading on the abbot’s part might it
imply? A cursory scanning of the article might suggest that Whethamstede was
aware of Dante’s condemnation of the Donation of Constantine in Book 3 of the
Monarchia, and of his assertion there that the Church, by virtue of its apostolic
foundation, is ‘utterly unsuited to receiving temporal things’.87 Indeed, a couple of
pages before citing Dans de monarchia mundi, Whethamstede has summarized the
views of those who claimed that no one could pretend to be a true pontiff,
si presumat temporales divitias in usum p[ro]prium possidere. Et adducu[n]t isti pro ipsis ex
scriptura sacra auto[rita]tes plures ut puta Nolite thesaurizare &c Mt. 6o nolite possidere aurum
&c Mt. 10o
if he presumes to possess temporal riches for his own use. And in support of their case, they
cite many authoritative passages from the holy scriptures, for example: Lay not up for yourselves
treasures etc. (Matthew 6: 19); Do not possess gold (Matthew 10: 9).88
The argument that possession of temporal wealth negates the pope’s apostolic
authority thus parallels Dante’s case, and one of the scriptural passages it draws
upon (Matthew 10: 9) is actually cited for the same purpose in Monarchia 3.10. But
Whethamstede attributes this argument to the Waldensians and their followers, not to
Dante. Conversely, he lists the Dante of the Monarchia amongst those who considered
the pope entitled to hold temporal possessions, thus imputing to him ‘a moderate view
of papal power, giving pope and king separate spheres and not deriving the one from
the other’.89 The idea of the separation of temporal and spiritual powers is indeed
consistent with Dante’s views in Book 3 of the Monarchia, but the ‘moderate’ view
that Whethamstede attributes to him on papal property is certainly not.90
Where and how might Whethamstede have obtained his rather confused infor-
mation about the Monarchia? Dissemination of Dante’s political treatise was very
limited in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and only about twenty manu-
scripts survive today.91 And although it has been established that Duke Humfrey
85 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 230/116, f. 145v.

86 Petrina 2004: 352. 87 Dante, Monarchia 3.10.14.
88 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 230/116, f. 144r.
89 Harvey 1985: 117–18.
90 Harvey 1985: 118. As Harvey points out here: ‘at most [Dante] would allow the pope to receive
property as a guardian and does not approve wholeheartedly of property owning by the church’. On the
argument about property and the authority of the papacy in Monarchia 3, see Havely 2004a: 155–7.
91 See Kay 1998: xxxiii–xxxv. The fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Monarchia all date from
the second half of the century and may ‘show signs of having been regarded as dangerous (hidden
amongst other kinds of writing; made anonymous)’ (Caesar 1989: 3). For accounts of the manuscripts,
see Dante 1995c, and Shaw 2011.
owned and donated copies of Serravalle’s Commedia and that Whethamstede read
the text in this version, there is no evidence of a manuscript of the Monarchia
having been either in Humfrey’s library or in the abbot’s collection at St Albans. It
seems likely that Whethamstede knew the Monarchia at second hand, and that the
source for his references both to Dante and to Marsilius of Padua (whose views on
papal property he similarly misrepresents) is the attack on both writers by another
English Benedictine whose work he knew: the theologian and papal polemicist Adam
Easton, who composed a work in which Dante is cited a number of times at Avignon,
probably in the 1370s.92 The first English reading of Dante’s Monarchia thus
involves an earlier cleric who was a contemporary, not of the Abbot of St Albans,
but of the poet of the Canterbury Tales. It also leads to Avignon as a context for that
reading, and as a possible location for the wider transmission of Dante’s work.
EASTON ’S M O NA R C H I A
Adam Easton (born around 1330 in Norfolk) entered the Benedictine order at the
Cathedral Priory in Norwich probably around 1348, made a distinguished aca-
demic debut at Oxford in the 1350s, and was highly regarded by his monastic
colleagues.93 Subsequently, however, from about 1368/9 onwards, he was to spend
most of his career at the papal curia, initially in Avignon, where he was in the
household of the English cardinal Simon Langham until the latter’s death in 1376,
and acted as a proctor for the English Benedictines.94 With the Papacy’s return to
Rome and the election of an Italian pope, Urban VI, in 1378, he relocated to Italy
and remained there through the beginning of the schism and through very
turbulent times—including imprisonment from 1385 to (probably) 1387 at the
hands of the paranoid pope.95 His last years were spent as ‘a venerable man of
learning’ at the curia of Boniface IX, and his tomb in the church of Santa Cecilia in
Trastevere gives the date of his death as September 1397.96
Easton’s main interests, activities, and influence seem to have been scholarly
rather than actively political, but his most substantial surviving work, the Defensor-
ium ecclesiastice potestatis, is a polemical text which was probably presented to
Urban VI soon after his election in 1378 and gave Easton the status of ‘a leading
pro-papalist at the outbreak of the Schism’.97 The Defensorium attracted interest
92 Harvey 1985 (118 with n. 74 and 120 with n. 89) identifies Easton as the likely source for
Whethamstede’s references to Dante’s Monarchia and Marsilius’s Defensor pacis. Whethamstede’s

library at St Albans contained copies of the work in which Easton cites Dante (the Defensorium
ecclesiastice potestatis, as discussed below), and he compiled a tabula (index) for it; see Bale 1990: 5 and
516, and Sharpe 1996: 567 (no. 18) and 579 (no. 53).
93 On his early career, see Pantin 1955: 175–7; and ODNB, s.v. ‘Easton, Adam (c.1330–1397),
Benedictine monk, scholar, and ecclesiastic’.

94 MacFarlane 1955: 14–15. 95 Harvey 1999: 196–202.
96 MacFarlane 1955: 32–3. Harvey (1999: 211 and n. 187, citing K. Eubel, Hierarchia catholica
medii aevi, 1 (Münster, 1898), 24) gives the date as 15 August 1398.
97 Harvey 1999: 213. For earlier accounts of the Defensorium, see Grabmann 1931; Pantin 1936
and 1955: 178–80; and MacFarlane 1955.

during the debates about papal authority in the middle of the following century,
and its three surviving manuscripts date from that time.98 The work takes the form
of a dialogue between a King (Rex) and a Bishop (Episcopus), disputing ecclesiastical
rights to both temporal and spiritual dominion, and, as the summary of its planned
fifth book indicates, one of its main aims is to assert the primacy of the pope’s
authority as ‘the true monarch of the kingdoms of this world’.99 It is a substantial
work (366 folios in the Vatican manuscript) and it eventually secured Easton the
main prize of his career: elevation to the cardinalate in 1381. Had its full programme,
as laid out in the prologue, been realized it would have been even more substantial:
Easton planned six books, one of which would have been devoted entirely to refuting
Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis. In the existing text of the Defensorium Marsilius is
not much of a presence, but especially in the second half of the work Easton identifies
and engages closely with several other adversaries to papal power. One of these is
Wyclif, and it has been shown how Easton makes use of De civili dominio from the
middle of the Defensorium onwards.100 Another was Dante, whose Monarchia is cited
a number of times in the last third of the existing work.101
Book 3 of the Monarchia forms the keystone of Dante’s thinking on the
Papacy—declaring its unsuitedness to be more than a guardian of temporalia and
denying its claim that the authority of the Empire was dependent on that of the
Church. Easton accurately quotes and closely interrogates Dante’s text (sometimes
at considerable length) on no less than eight occasions, beginning with an exchange,
initiated by the King, on the means by which the monarchy (officium regis) was
instituted in Israel. The Bishop’s initial response cites Dans in suo libello de
monarchia mundi among a number of authorities who deal in various ways with
the question:
Episcopus: Dans in suo libello de monarchia mundi in tercio libro eius disputat questio-
num. Jacobus etiam de Viterbo . . . in libro suo de regimine christiano . . . Quaedam etiam
glosa Decretalium . . . tenet quod temporalis jurisdictio & spiritualis sunt penitus disperate
& inmediate utraque etiam a Deo, sicut etiam tenet iste Dans—clamans quod contrarie
opinionatis solum excita ambicione ducti talem sententiam determinant & figurant.
Bishop: Dante in his little book Of World Monarchy debates this question [on the institution
of kingship]; so does James of Viterbo . . . in his book Of Christian Government . . . A certain
gloss on the Decretals [?] . . . holds that temporal and spiritual jurisdiction are entirely distinct
and that both of them derive immediately from God. This Dante also maintains the same,
claiming that those of the contrary opinion are led solely by the promptings of ambition to
reach and articulate such a conclusion.102
98 These are: Vatican, BAV MS Vat. lat. 4116; Seville, Biblioteca Columbina MS 57-1-7; and
Madrid, National Library 738 (see Harvey 1999: 235–6). I have consulted only the Vatican copy.
99 Defensorium in Vatican, BAV MS Vat. lat. 4116, f. 3v.
100 MacFarlane 1955: 146; and Harvey 1999: 228.
101 The first account of Easton’s references to Dante’s Monarchia (as far as I am aware) is in
Grabmann 1931: 575; see also the passages from Part 4 of the Defensorium transcribed in Macfarlane
1955: 2. 104–5, 138, 142, 228–9.
102 Defensorium in BAV Vat. lat. 4116, f. 293r. Cf. Dante, Monarchia 2. 10. 3, 3. 3. 8 (on his
opponents), and 3. 16. 1 (on the different jurisdictions).

Drawing upon Easton’s avowed ‘twenty years of studying the Book of Kings’
(including, it seems, the Hebrew text),103 the Bishop then focuses on the role
of the Jewish priesthood, especially Samuel as the vicar of God anointing Saul
(1 Sam. 10). The book that the Bishop has cited subsequently provides material
for the King, who uses exactly the same terms and simile as Dante’s in his
response:
Rex: Ista fundamenta opinionis tue Dans in suo libro de monarchia mundi soluit leuiter&
refellit, nam dicit quod Samuel non fuit vicarius dei . . . sed Samuel fuit solum dei nuncius
uel legatus & solum fecit non ut vicarius sed ut nuncius mandatum domini sibi dictum, &
sic quemadmodum malleus operatur in sola uirtute fabri, sic nuncius in eius arbitrio qui
hunc misit . . .
King: Dante in his book Of World Monarchy easily deals with and rebuts this basic point
in your argument, for he says that Samuel was not God’s deputy whose jurisdiction
was conferred with legal right and authority (for such a person may act against someone
whom his lord does not know), but he was only God’s messenger or legate and acted not as
a deputy but only as a messenger does when given a message from his lord. And exactly as a
hammer strikes only through the strength of the smith, so [does] the messenger [act],
following the authority of the one who sent him.104
The royal and episcopal debate about Samuel’s authority and that of priesthood
over kingship continues to rage during the rest of the Defensorium, and it invokes,
quotes, and disputes Book 3 of the Monarchia on a number of further occasions.
On one of them the Bishop accuses Magister Dans of having misunderstood the
Gospel, and the last reference to Dante, near the very end of the whole work, seeks
to refute his views on the invalidity of the ‘Donation of Constantine’.105 In most of
these citations Easton uses exactly the same name and title that is found in
Whethamstede’s article on the Papacy in the Cambridge manuscript: Dans in
libro suo de monarchia mundi. The wider and English implications of Easton’s
encounter with Dante will be considered later in this chapter, but first we need to
take into account the context of his reading and writing in papal Avignon.
DAN TE AT A V IGN ON
Easton’s Defensorium was the product of his residence in Avignon, and its appro-
priation of the Monarchia can be seen as one reflection of that papal city’s role in the
fourteenth-century reception and transmission of Dante. Avignon’s literary culture
and its intermediary role call for some attention here, as they have a bearing upon
several of these clerical readers around Chaucer’s time.
Dante’s own representations of the Papacy’s removal from Rome and of the
actions of the two Avignon popes of his lifetime (Clement V and John XXII) had
103 Defensorium in BAV Vat. lat. 4116, f. 2r; see also Grabmann 1931: 579; and Harvey 1999: 192.
104 Defensorium in BAV Vat. lat. 4116, f. 294r.
105 Defensorium in BAV Vat. lat. 4116, ff. 325r and 360r.
been unremittingly hostile.106 It seems that the hostility was mutual: as early as
1320 the first reference to Dante in the Avignon records implicates his name in an
alleged Italian plot to poison the second of these popes, John XXII.107 Towards the
end of that decade John XXII’s legate in the Romagna, Bertrand du Poujet,
condemned and burnt the text of the Monarchia—and the pro-papal Dominican
Guido Vernani anticipated Adam Easton by attacking it in writing.108
Dante’s politics and the Monarchia also continued to command some signifi-
cant attention in and around Avignon about the middle of the century. There is
evidence at this time of a convergence of interest in the subject—perhaps even
some kind of dialogue—between Boccaccio, Petrarch, and at least one other
Italian writer, all of whom were engaged in various dealings with the Papacy. In
May to June 1354 Boccaccio made the first of his two visits to Avignon—
heading a diplomatic delegation from the Florentine Signoria to reassure Inno-
cent VI of the city’s loyalty to the Papacy, at a time when renewal of the Holy
Roman Empire’s involvement in Italian affairs looked imminent.109 Whilst thus
acting in a pro-papal capacity, Boccaccio in the early 1350s was also working on a
text that was leading him to take a close look at the earlier Avignon Papacy’s
treatment of Dante. This text, the first redaction of his Trattatello in laude di
Dante, is the main source for the Papacy’s posthumous campaign against Dante
and the Monarchia:
Questo libro [Monarchia] più anni dopo la morte dell’autore fu dannato da messer
Beltrando cardinale del Poggetto e legato di papa nelle parti di Lombardia, sedente Giovanni
papa XXII [ . . . ] il detto cardinale, non essendo chi a ciò s’opponesse, avuto il soprascritto
libro, quello in pubblico, sì come cose eretiche contenente, dannò al fuoco. E il simigliante si
sforzava di fare dell’ossa dell’auttore a etterna infamia e confusion della sua memoria, se a ciò
non si fu opposto uno valoroso e nobile cavaliere fiorentino . . .
This book (Monarchia) several years after the death of its author was condemned
by Cardinal Bertrand du Poujet, legate of the pope in northern Italy during the pontificate
of John XXII . . . The said cardinal, there being no one to oppose him on the matter,
got hold of that book and, treating it as a heretical document, publicly consigned it to
the flames. And he would have sought to do the same to the bones of its author, to the
everlasting shame and destruction of his memory, had he not been prevented from doing so
by a courageous and noble Florentine knight . . . 110
Around this time, too, Petrarch’s awareness of Boccaccio’s Dante project and a
rereading of the Commedia—perhaps in a copy that Boccaccio had presented to
him around 1351–2—may have served to intensify his sense of Rome and Italy’s
106 On Dante and Avignon, see Vasina 1982, and the poet’s letter to the Italian cardinals at
Avignon (Dante 1966: 121–47).

107 See Eubel 1897, Michel 1909, and Arnold 2008: 1–9.
108 On Vernani, see also above, p. 10 with n. 16.
109 V. Branca, in Boccaccio 1965: 96–7 (of the profilo biografico, separately paginated).
110 Boccaccio 1974: redazione I, paragraphs 196–7.
claim upon his and the Papacy’s attention.111 Having met Boccaccio at Padua in
the spring of 1351, he may have been reminded of the papal condemnation of
Dante and his idea of Rome, which Boccaccio was about to describe at length in the
first redaction of the Trattatello. Indeed, writing from Milan a few years later (in the
autumn of 1357), Petrarch would describe the book-burning papal legate Bertrand
du Poujet himself as a ‘bandit’ (predo) rather than an apostolic emissary, and as one
who resembled not St Peter but Hannibal—thus identifying the censor of the
Monarchia with the greatest enemy ever faced by Rome.112
Also around the middle of the century, Petrarch, in the earliest group of the Sine
nomine letters, was engaging in a more polemical critique of the ‘western Babylon’
and the pretensions of Avignon’s tower-building ‘Nimrod’ (Clement VI). The
second and third of these letters express his support for the short-lived revolution
staged in 1347 by the ‘tribune’ of Rome, Cola di Rienzo, and his concern that Cola
should show what could be done for and by ‘the Roman people and the whole of
Italy’. The fourth of the Sine nomine letters dates from the autumn of 1352, when
Cola was a prisoner at Avignon; it is addressed to ‘the most unconquerable and
world-leading people [of Rome]’ and is comparable, to some extent, with Book 2 of
Dante’s Monarchia as an investigation of Rome’s right to rule.113 The subject of
this letter of Petrarch’s was himself a writer on Dante.114 It may have been during
his time as prisoner of the emperor in Bohemia before being transferred (in June
1352) to the custody of Clement VI in Avignon that Cola di Rienzo composed his
Commentarium in Monarchiam Dantis, which introduces Dante to a wider audi-
ence as writer of the Commedia and addresses contentious issues about the Papacy’s
temporal wealth and power.115
Dante’s political position in relation to the Papacy was thus a very live issue for
several significant Italian authors who had had dealings with Avignon in the 1350s,
and it is not surprising, therefore, that the Monarchia continued to be a text for an
English Avignon writer to reckon with later in the century. The accuracy of
Easton’s quotations indicates that he must have had access to a copy of Dante’s
text during his years at Avignon in the 1370s.116 The English Benedictine’s
knowledge of the Monarchia has long been known to historians, but it does not
seem to have attracted much attention from Dante scholars. It does not seem to be
included in standard accounts of the Monarchia’s medieval reception; a recent and
111 The Commedia presented to Petrarch is Vatican MS lat 3199; see Farinelli 1908: 1. 141;
Billanovich 1947: 147–8, 161, 163; Mombello 1971: 89; Roddewig 1984: 270–1 (no. 632); and
Pulsoni 1993. It contains a note (f. 4r, commenting on Inferno 2. 24–7) and some markings which may
reflect Petrarch’s interest in the Commedia’s concerns about Rome, the Papacy, and the Church; see
Pulsoni 1993: 157–60 and 198–200.
112 Sine nomine 17, in Petrarca 1974: 182.
113 Petrarca 1974: 42; my translation; compare Dante, Convivio 4.4.8.
114 See Falconieri 2002: 171–2.
115 For example, Cola refers his readers to what Dante ‘writes in the text of his Commedia
against the corruption of Church leaders’ (in libro Comedie sue contra Pastorum pravitates expressit),
Ricci 1965: 699.
116 On the likelihood that the Monarchia ‘was well known in Avignon’, see also Harvey 1999: 226
and n. 163.
very thorough survey of early ‘assaults’ upon Dante’s text does not refer to it;
whilst the introduction to a new parallel-text edition simply states that ‘before
the editio princeps of 1559, the Monarchia attracted hardly any interest outside
of Italy’.117 We may perhaps have to make at least one exception for the culture of
the Avignon curia.
Although there is no mention of the Monarchia in the existing Avignon library
catalogues nor in the surviving details of Easton’s collection, there is some textual
evidence to associate both it and Dante’s Commedia with the papal city. As we have
seen, at least one earlier Avignon cardinal (Du Poujet) knew enough about Dante’s
book to want to burn it;118 and later in the century one of the few surviving
manuscripts of the Monarchia suggests a possible connection by following its text of
the treatise with Avignon-related material.119 It may also be significant, from
several points of view, that during 1377, the year in which Adam Easton was
completing his dialogue with Dante and other anti-papal writers—a southern
Italian text of the Inferno was being acquired at Avignon. This was not a regular
purchase for the papal library and does not appear in the catalogues; instead it was
obtained under the terms of the ius spolii—a provision instituted in 1316, entitling
the pope to the moveable goods of certain deceased clerics. The cleric in question
here was a Franciscan, Matteo Porta, who had been archbishop of Palermo since
1367, and among the hundred books in his library appear texts by Ovid, Virgil, and
Lucan—together with a paper copy of the Inferno with what appear to be southern
Italian features:
Item liber de Dantis in papiro, qui incipit ‘Nel mezo camin di nostra vita’, et finit ‘Et quindi
simu a vidir li stilli’.
Also a book of Dante, written on paper and beginning: ‘In the middle of the way through
life’ and ending ‘And so we emerged to look upon the stars’.120
DANTE, EASTON, A ND CHAUCER
At the time when that manuscript of the Inferno reached Avignon, Adam Easton
was relocating from there to Rome. Easton’s Defensorium, as this chapter has
shown, provided a channel by which some specific knowledge of another Dantean
text (the Monarchia) reached English readers. Easton also possibly anticipated
Chaucer as the first English writer to refer to Dante by name. His polemical
Latin treatise constitutes a very different context from that of Chaucer’s dream-
poem, The House of Fame (late 1370s/early 1380s) since the English Benedictine
117 Cassell 2004; and Kay 1998: xxxiii.

118 On Du Poujet and the condemnation of Monarchia, see above, pp. 10 and 27–8.
119 BL Add. 6891, dated to the third quarter of the fourteenth century. On ff. 18–20 a later hand
has added a copy of a letter of Clement VI (dated 15 September 1349, from Avignon) to the
Archbishop of Salzburg about the forthcoming Jubilee of 1350. On this manuscript and the
Avignon material, see Quaglioni 2011 and Shaw 2011: 225-6.
120 Williman 1980: 264 (no. 98). On other manuscripts of Dante later associated with Avignon, see
below, p. 31 and n. 129. On Matteo, see above, p. 13, n. 27.

was taking issue with Dante, not as an authority on the afterlife or literary model,
but as a commentator on contemporary and contentious political issues. Moreover,
the Defensorium’s known English reader, John Whethamstede, seems to have
misunderstood or deliberately distorted Easton’s account of what Dans de mon-
archia mundi had to say about papal possessions.121 Yet the two Benedictines were
senior and influential figures on the British and international ecclesiastical scene in
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the nexus of references in their
works, from Easton’s Defensorium to Whethamstede’s Manipularium doctorum,
implies a continuing clerical conversation about Dante.
The Defensorium is not likely to have reached England until a few years after
Chaucer’s death, but during the 1370s and 1380s the English poet could well have
known about the career and interests of this prominent English cleric in Avignon
and Rome.122 Easton and Chaucer were both in Italy during the dramatic events
leading to the Great Schism in the late summer of 1378. Easton was then in Rome
for Urban VI’s election and probably presented the Defensorium to him shortly
afterwards; whilst Chaucer was on a mission to confer ‘on matters concerning the
conduct of our war’ with Hawkwood and Bernabò Visconti at Milan.123 The
upheaval in papal politics—which Easton witnessed and of which he was eventually
a victim—occurred during Chaucer’s second Italian visit, and it has been argued
that this may underlie the reference to ‘Linian’ along with Petrarch in the prologue
to the Clerk’s Tale, since the jurist Giovanni da Legnano was then writing on behalf
of the Roman pope Urban VI to whom England would also declare allegiance.124
Easton also knew Linianus: he refers to him respectfully several times in the
Defensorium and both are said to have served as advisers to the pope about the
canonization of Bridget of Sweden around 1378–80.125
An even closer possible connection between Easton and Chaucer has also been
envisaged, and it is one that might have had consequences for the poet’s work in the
early 1380s. It has been argued that Chaucer’s life of St Cecilia in his Second Nun’s
Tale could have been written for the monks of Easton’s former house, the Cath-
edral Priory at Norwich, and as a way of exercising some influence with the English
cardinal on behalf of the English Crown.126 The Second Nun’s Tale concludes with
the burial of the martyred protagonist in the church from which Easton took his
name as cardinal and in which he himself would eventually be buried: Santa Cecilia
in Trastevere.127 In the context of contemporary ecclesiastical politics, it has also
121 See above, p. 23. For evidence about the presence of Easton’s Defensorium in the library at
St Albans, and for Whethamstede’s reference to it in his Granarium (BL Cotton Nero C VI, f. 35v), see
Harvey 1985: 118, n. 74; also above, p. 24, n. 92.
122 Easton’s books arrived at Norwich in 1407; on their subsequent dispersal, see below, p. 32 and
n. 134.
123 On Easton at Rome in 1378, see Harvey 1985: 197–8. MacFarlane (1955: 15 and 147) dates
Easton’s presentation of the Defensorium a little later (c.1379–80). On Chaucer’s mission to Milan, pur
ascunes busoignes touchantes lexploit de nostre guerre, see Crow and Olson 1966: 54.
124 McCall 1965: 484–9.
125 MacFarlane 1955: 171; Harvey 1999: 199–200 and 229–30.
126 Giffin 1956: 29–48. 127 Giffin 1956: 38–40.
been suggested that Chaucer’s choice and treatment of material in the Tale could
echo concerns about the Great Schism itself.128
Indeed, the authoritative and subsequently mutilated figure of Cecilia could be
seen as in part an image of the suffering and enduring Church. The name of the
early pope who presides over the burial of the saint is reiterated by Chaucer with
some frequency in the Tale and is the same as that of the Roman pope supported by
Easton and his countrymen: Urban. And, to stretch speculation a little further: if
the Second Nun’s Tale, or word of it had reached the cardinal of Norwich and of
Santa Cecilia at Rome, he would also have been struck by both the Dantean and the
Marian features of its prologue. To an English Benedictine writer who had earlier
entered into detailed argument with magister Dans and was in the 1380s himself
engaged in texts relating to the cult of the Virgin, Chaucer’s rewriting of the
invocation to Mary from the last canto of the Paradiso would probably have been
of some interest.
AVIGNO N, K ONST AN Z, AN D BRIT ISH R EAD ER S
In the early fifteenth century Dante’s circuitous route towards a British readership
also involved texts, readers, and writers associated with Avignon. During the closing
years of the Avignon anti-Papacy two manuscripts of and a commentary on Dante’s
Commedia are mentioned in its records. A catalogue produced for the last Avignon
pope, Benedict XIII, in 1407 lists a manuscript of ‘Dante’ (presumably the
Commedia) and describes it simply as in vulgari ytalico. Later (around 1417),
among a much shorter list of books ‘to be bought (emendi) for the Benedict’s
library in Spain, is ‘Dante translated from Tuscan into Latin’—reductus de lingua
florentina ad latinam—and this may, as we shall see, be a copy of a very recent
translation of the Commedia: the one that had been completed at Konstanz by
Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle.129
Evidence about other responses to Dante in earlier Avignon culture, as we have
seen, is tantalizingly fragmentary.130 Yet one of the three senior clerics mentioned
as supporters of Serravalle’s project was an Avignon cardinal, Amedeo di Saluzzo
(c.1361–1419), who had been a leading advocate for Petrarch at the papal
city in the 1380s and 1390s.131 In associating himself with two English bishops
as an instigator of Serravalle’s translation, the (Piedmontese) Italian Amedeo was
128 Hirsh 1977: 129–33.

129 See Faucon 1886: 2. 140 (item 935); and Jullien de Pommerol and Monfrin 1991: 1. 221 (item
405) and 2.767 (item 322).
130 See above, p. 29; also Mombello 1971: 88–9, and Roddewig 1984: 282–3 (no. 660).
131 Amedeo is mentioned alongside the English bishops in Serravalle’s dedications and conclusions;
see Serravalle 1891: 3, 5, and 1215. On his career, see: Serravalle 1891: xx–xxi; Chacón 1630: 1010;
Berton 1857: 1499; Jarry 1873: 446–50; and the online Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, at <http://
www2.fiu.edu/~mirandas/bios1383a.htm#Saluzzo>. For his role in Avignon culture, see: Coville
1934:178; Simone 1961: 26; Sottili 1966; Ornato 1969: 161; and Cecchetti 1996: 56, 59, 73.
Another random document with
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"Yes, thanks to you, and I feel a hundred per cent. better."
"But one doesn't shave on a sporting trip, does one?"
He did not believe in anything, that Englishman. He was a true sceptic.
We dined pleasantly enough. The resident talked a lot, although he did

not seem to be naturally a talkative kind. He asked me many questions,
which I answered cautiously. A native servant brought him a note, and he
scribbled a note in return. After a few minutes, the servant brought him
another message, and again he answered it. This happened several times.
"Important messages?" I asked.
"Oh, no," he replied hastily, "they are from my friend Low. He wants to
arrange to have us all take coffee at his bungalow."
It was very queer. I was prepared, though, and thanked my stars for the
pistol and hand grenade in my pockets. I learned later that their scheme was,
in fact, to question Kircheiss and me separately. The purpose of the notes
was to arrange questions to be asked of us, so that they might check up our
separate answers to the same questions. These answers, it happened, had
jibed fairly well, although not well enough to disarm suspicion altogether.
I thought it an imprudent time to ask when a ship might be expected, and

hoped that some voluntary information on the subject might be vouchsafed.
None was, however. I resolved to let the subject wait. People suspected of
being a boatload of armed Germans might too readily be suspected of being
interested in the arrival of ships.
When the time for leaving came, the resident told me that, if we would
return on the following day, he would give us the certificate we desired,
certifying that in the course of our sporting voyage we had called at the
island of Aitutaki. The delay about the certificate was, of course, to detain us
a day longer.
Away from this unsatisfactory interview, we encountered the Norwegian

carpenter who informed Kircheiss that the natives believed we were
Germans. The British had been recruiting soldiery among them for service in
France, and for the purpose of getting recruits had stirred them up with a bit
of war fever. The islanders therefore hoped that we were enemies so they
could seize us. They planned to get our boat ashore and capture it. Upon
hearing of this, I ordered that two men be on watch all the time, ready to
repel any attack.
"Any ships expected in port?" Kircheiss asked the carpenter.
"There may be one to-morrow," was the reply, "or it may not be here for
a month."
We held a council of war that night. Should we sail straight on? That
would make them certain that we were Germans, but there was no wireless
station on the island, and they could not warn the other islands until a ship
arrived to take away the news. Or should we capture the island, which we
could easily do with our extensive armament, and then wait for a ship? Or
should we still try to convince the resident that we were the Norwegian
sportsmen we pretended? This latter temporizing measure we adopted, and
decided to call on the resident the following day and try to get our certificate
from him. In preparation for the visit, I instructed the men who remained
behind to be ready for trouble ashore. If we needed them, they would hear a
pistol shot. They should immediately open fire with machine guns and hand
grenades. They should shoot into the air and throw the grenades into the
water, where they would make the most noise. The row would create a
diversion, and then they should hurry ashore with machine guns, rifles, and
grenades to rescue us if need be.
The following day provided us with plenty of thrills. When Kircheiss and
I went to the resident's house, crowds of natives followed us. The resident
greeted us with a worried expression but came straight to the point.
"I shall have to examine your boat and papers," he said sternly.
"How so?" said I.
"The natives think you are Germans. I know you are not, but I must
inspect your boat to satisfy them."
He vacillated between the desire of not letting us get away and the fear
of a fight.
Outside, the Polynesians were gathering from all quarters. They made a
menacing, ugly-looking mob. Left hand in pocket, I attached a carbine hook
to the fuse of the grenade. With that mob of heathens on the rampage, there
was no use in trying to carry the deception any further.
"It is true," I said to the resident, "we are Germans. But don't you think it
would be better if we remained friends? We are white men. I am with you in
front of these natives. Act the part that will impress them. Come and
examine our boat."
"Very well," he replied, growing pale, "but you won't take me with you?"
"No, upon my word, no."
When we stepped out on the porch, the islanders raised a howl. I never
thought there were so many Polynesians in the world. I had never before
stood in the face of a mob. Sailors or soldiers would not have made me so
afraid.
"Don't be a coward," I said to myself. "On, by Joe, on."
Kircheiss and I stayed close together. The resident led us through the
mob, which was overawed by his presence. We were halfway to the boat
when a native in Colonial uniform stepped up. He had seen service with the
British in France, we were afterward told.
"Shall I arrest them, sir?" he asked.
"Arrest what?" I shouted. "Shut your trap. Why should a fool like you try
to arrest Norwegians?" Then I muttered to the resident: "If that fellow makes
any fuss, I'll shoot him dead."
"Don't talk that way," he replied nervously, and waved the native soldier
away.
The crowd followed us to the landing. A small rowboat picked us up.

"You won't keep me with you?" the resident asked again.
I assured him that we would not. So we rowed over and climbed into my
boat, impelled less by his own desire than by the attitude of the natives.
"Here is the log," Kircheiss, with an impassive face, handed him a log
we had taken from one of our captured ships. He perfunctorily turned the
pages and came upon a chronometric diary we kept in the book. Above was
stamped in fat type: KAISERLICHE MARINE.
"What is that?" he stammered.
"Something in Norwegian," Kircheiss grinned sardonically. "I don't

understand it."
The resident saw: GAND UND STAND.
"What language is that?" This time he was a trifle ironical.
"Oh, Norwegian, of course," said Kircheiss.
The resident raised a tarpaulin, but dropped it quickly. He had seen rifles.
He raised another. There were neat rows of hand grenades, as easy to pick up
as apples.
"Keep those covered," he exclaimed, as pale as ashes.
"Well," I asked, "how do you find everything?"
"Quite all right—quite all right." He smiled a very acid smile.
"Won't you tell your people here that everything is all right?" I
suggested.
He turned to the crowd on the pier.
"Everything is in order," he called. "These gentlemen are Norwegian

sportsmen, as they say."
"And now the certificate," I reminded him.
He wrote a note just as the resident at Aitu had done.
"You don't intend to take me with you?" he repeated.
"No," I responded, "but I should like to have your company until we can
get some fruit and tobacco."
I stood chatting with him on the pier while Kircheiss went to procure the
fruit and tobacco. Hadn't we better take the island and wait for a ship instead
of sailing off? I debated the question with myself, and then decided we had
better go.
The last scene of this little drama was played as the resident and I shook
hands and bade each other an apparently cordial farewell. He was a decent
fellow, even if he had been suspicious, and I had eaten an excellent dinner at
his house. I was glad that we didn't have to humiliate him before the natives,
a dreadful fate for an Englishman.
As we hoisted anchor and raised sail, a cheer went up from the natives
lined along the shore. They were trying to make amends for having treated
us so shabbily and for having taken us for Germans!
But there at Aitutaki I had made the great mistake of our cruise. We
should have captured that island. Three days later a schooner arrived. We
could have taken it, rejoined our comrades, and continued our raids. Instead,
the resident told the officers the story of our visit. The schooner sailed the
next day and in a little while met a steamer to which it transferred the news
about us. The steamer in turn radioed a warning to the whole South Seas. So
we were now in for a warm welcome.
XXVII
THROUGH A SEA OF FLOATING BRIMSTONE TO
FIJI
At Rarotonga, another island of the Cook group, we had a fright. By Joe,

we were scared. It was night. We suddenly saw, right before us, in the
shadow of the shore, a big steamer. She had no lights. She must be an
auxiliary cruiser. Hard on the helm and every stitch of canvas up. We turned
and sailed the other way as fast as the wind would carry us. We expected
every moment to be spotted by their lookout and then see the ghostlike
searchlight beam fingering toward us through the dark.
"Our luck is with us," I said to Leudemann, when finally we were far
enough out at sea to consider ourselves past danger.
Months later, while discussing our adventures with a group of ship's

officers, I was told by one of them that the supposed auxiliary cruiser that
had frightened us at Rarotonga was really nothing more than a wreck.
Several months before our approach to the island, a steamer had gone
aground on a reef just offshore, and had been abandoned. The position of the
wreck was such that at night it might readily be taken for a ship lying at
anchor.
But we had decided when we got well away from Rarotonga that the
Cook group of islands was no place for us. At Atiu we had found no ship to
capture. At Aitutaki no ship either, only a lot of trouble, including the
misfortune of being recognized as Germans. And now at Rarotonga we had
nearly sailed into what we supposed to be an auxiliary cruiser in the dark.
"By Joe," I said to the boys, "we'd better clear out of here and try our
luck in other waters."
"Aye, but where? The Fijis?"
"The Fijis," I responded. "We'll find plenty of ships there."
We had all along figured that we might have to go to the Fiji Islands,
where a constant stream of sailing ships was always taking aboard copra for
the munition factories in the United States. But we also were fully aware that
sailing in a little open boat from the Cook Islands to the Fijis might easily be
a perilous venture. Our voyage so far had gone fairly smoothly. There had
been no hurricanes, and we thanked God for that. Our itinerary from our
starting point at Mopelia in the Society group to the adjoining Cook group
and among the islands of the latter represented jumps of several hundred
miles each and quite a few days at sea. On to the Fijis, however, meant a sail
across twenty degrees of longitude. The first half of the jaunt, or about a
thousand miles, was over a vast open space of sea where there were no
islands on which to find fresh food or on which to take refuge in case of
need. In fact, we were to sail for thirteen days out of sight of land. We had
expected, when we left Mopelia, that the leg to the Fijis would be a hard one,
even if we had fair weather all the way. But now the weather turned against
us for a whole week, and we began to think we had run across St. Swithin's
day. We had forgotten—if we had ever known it—that this was the time
when the equinoctial storms broke in those waters. Had we known it, we
never would have headed for the Fijis.
For ten days we sailed through a drenching downpour, the rainy season.
The sea was choppy. The wind whipped the spray and the crests of waves
over us in driving sheets. In our cockleshell, things were afloat, and it was
bitter cold o' nights. We threw our mattresses overboard. In their soaked
condition they were far worse to sleep on than the wet planks, and there was
no use keeping them any longer. When the sun occasionally shone, our
drenched clothes would dry quickly and stiffen like boards of salt. They
rubbed and scratched the skin off our bodies. When they got wet again,
which they promptly did, the salt would soak into the raw flesh and inflame
it. Our bodies felt as though they were on fire. We had no regular sleep.
Instead, a man would doze away suddenly at almost any time. Even the
helmsman would drowse off like that, and, with a free rudder, the boat would
veer around crazily.
One morning, when dawn came, we could hardly believe our eyes. The
sea had turned from its normal blue to yellow. On scooping up a pail of it we
found a scum that we concluded must be brimstone and ash. We were sailing
through a field of brimstone. For three days we saw from horizon to horizon
this yellowish expanse of volcanic dust. It no doubt came from some
submarine eruption, perhaps the one we could thank for the tidal wave that
had wrecked the Seeadler. The waves carried the gritty dust into the boat. It
penetrated everything. Every surface became like sandpaper. Our skin grew
rough and caked with it. Our blankets were like sandpaper, and so were our
clothes.
As the voyage grew longer, we had to be more and more sparing with
our drinking water. The supply began to run low. We could no longer collect
rain water in our sails. They were coated with salt. We tried to wash them
out in the rain, but then the spray and the waves kept washing in and kept the
sails salty and added a further salting to any water we collected. Our supply
of fruit that we had picked up in the Cook Islands ran out now, and about all
we had left was hardtack, not in itself a thirst-quenching kind of food. We
also had a side of delicious bacon, but of course we dared not touch it for
fear of increasing our thirst. You have often heard of the torments of thirst at
sea? Well, they are not exaggerated, for exaggeration is impossible. When
the rains stopped and the blazing tropical sun beat down on us all day and
we still had days to sail on and on, then the torments of the damned, the
torments of thirst smote us with a fiery agony. Our gums dried out and were
like rough iron. We sucked our fingers and gnawed at our knuckles to bring a
flow of saliva and refresh our burning mouths.
And then came the sailor's worst enemy, scurvy. Our diet of hardtack,
lack of exercise, and general hardships brought it on. Our knees swelled up
so badly that we had to cut our trousers. The rocking of the boat knocked
them together or against the wooden sides, and then the pain was almost
unendurable. Our lips were black and broken. Our tongues were swollen and
hard. It was as if you had a stone in your mouth. Our gums became snow
white and seemed to recede. Our teeth felt as though they were sticking far
out of our jaws. They hurt constantly and were loose and felt as if they were
going to drop out. With these shaking teeth we ate our hardtack. I never
before knew how hard hardtack was. We had unending headaches, and it
seemed as if something were pressing our eyes right out of their sockets. We
got water in our legs, and could hardly stand any more. We had to slide
around the seats to do what had to be done in navigating the boat. In scurvy,
the blood turns to water, first in the legs and then upward. When it reaches
the heart you die. Where the blood is water the flesh is white, and you can
see the line of the white creep slowly up. We wondered who would be the
first—the first to have the line of white rise to the heart. My boys made
marks to show the line clearly and mark its daily progress upward. It was a
kind of sport. It was keeping a daily log, a log of death. Parmien was the
youngest of us, but he seemed to be on his way to win the race. The line was
higher on him than on the others. He joked about it. There was nothing
terrible in it. We were all in a deep apathy. Our brains were like balls of
cotton. Nothing mattered, certainly not death. Death would come, we
thought, as a relief from these sufferings. The prospect of its arrival became
more and more attractive.
"Boys," I said, "let us take pieces of ballast iron and tie them around our
necks. One plunge and in a few seconds all of our pains will be gone."
"Yes. All right." There were mutterings of assent.
But Parmien, the youngest, the one who was nearest death, picked up the
comic volume, Fritz Reuter's Trip to Constantinople, and began to read a
funny story. We all laughed. That book had eased many a hard hour before,
on this ghastly voyage, and now, perhaps, it saved our lives.
And so we continued on with but one instinct left in us, the sailor's
instinct to navigate his craft. Mechanically, without any particular hope,
without any particular thought, we trimmed the sails, guided the helm, and
calculated our position as best we could. Nautical science was at a low ebb
among us now. We were too far gone to reckon exactly where we were, and
were only vague in our steering. All we knew was that we should steer to the
west where the island groups were.
You have read in many a sea story about the delight, the almost insane
ecstasy, of castaway men adrift in open boats who are dying of hunger,
thirst, and disease, when, at last, a rescuing ship approaches or they see land.
No matter how the writers describe it, even the greatest of writers, they can
tell you only a tiny bit, only a grain of sand. So, I won't try to say how we
felt when we saw a speck on the horizon and the speck grew bigger and
turned into the familiar green of a tropical island. We had been so much like
dead men, who had thought that nothing could ever make us glad again. By
Joe, that sight gladdened our hearts, though. We grew even weaker, but it
was the weakness of happiness. As we drew near, we thought of nothing but
land, fresh water, and soft food, a soft banana, for our loose, shaky teeth.
Never mind ships or capturing ships. Never mind being taken prisoners. We
headed straight toward a crude pier that stuck out into the water.
A crowd of a hundred natives, perhaps less, were gathered at the landing

place watching our approach. They were ferocious-looking black warriors.
We had now passed from the region of the brown, indolent Polynesians to
those of the black, warlike Melanesians.
"What ugly customers," I said to Leudemann. "They look like

cannibals."
The forbidding battle array on shore stirred a new strength in us. It

certainly looked like a cannibal island, and miserable as we were, still we
could not escape the thought of our skin and bones being fattened up in
preparation for an old-time South Sea banquet.
"Clear the boat for action!" I ordered. Even in our present straits, we
could still remember our old naval ways.
The German flag went jerking to our masthead, and rifles and machine
guns were displayed.
A shout went up on shore and a babel of talk. Voices yelled in pidgin

English.
"You Germans? How you get here from way off? Come on. Germans
great warriors."
Still wary, we drew near the landing pier and talked with the natives.
They were unmistakably friendly, very cordial. From what they told us they
had, in the first place, grievances against their masters, the British. Then
quite a number had been recruited and sent to the trenches in France. There
some had been killed and some wounded, and most who survived had
contracted tuberculosis from the unaccustomed climate and had been
returned to the island worn-out shells of men. One of their most influential
chiefs was particularly concerned about the war. He was on the pier, and he
reasoned thus:
"White man send missionary. Missionary say we must not fight. Because
all men children of God. All men brothers. They say we can have war no
more. Then they say we must go fight. They have war. We no fight for
ourselves, they say, we fight for them. How, if men are brothers? Our men
killed. Our men come back sick with cough. Cough never goes away."
These people were of a warrior race. What the British had told them
about how bad the Germans were had not made much impression. What
stuck in their minds was the fighting power of the Germans. They had heard
about it from the British, and those who had been in the trenches of Flanders
knew about it first-hand. The sudden appearance of armed Germans at their
remote island could but increase their admiration. Morality among them had
principally to do with a man's fighting spirit.
They said there were no white men on the island, and we longed to go
ashore. With our scurvy-swollen legs we could hardly stand, however. It
wouldn't do to be hauled ashore as cripples. It would not increase these
warriors' respect for Germans as fighting men: Cripples do not fare well
among savage peoples, and we thought it best not to reveal our impotence.
So, we refused the natives' invitations to partake of their hospitality, told
them we must hurry on to fight the British, and asked for fresh water and
bananas. They brought great gourds full of water and bunches of bananas.
We drew up to the dock and they handed these precious supplies down for
us.
We had our fill of bananas and water, and, with shouts resounding from
the shore, set sail again. This lucky spot was Niue, an outlying isle of the Fiji
group. The sun blazed down upon us, but a fair wind carried us along
briskly. The first day after leaving Niue we felt better. The second day we
were on the road to high good health. It is amazing the curative effect of
fresh fruit, especially bananas, when you are suffering from scurvy. They
seem to put new life and blood into you and draw the sickness right out of
the body as though some huge and marvellous poultice had been applied.
Our cure was completed at the isle of Katafanga. It is quite a large isle
and inhabited by more natives. But we hit upon a stretch of shore that
seemed permanently deserted. At any rate, we remained there for five days
and saw not a soul. When we went ashore, we all walked with a comical
staggering gait. You know the characteristic rolling gait of the sailor
accustomed to having a deck under his feet? Ours was an exaggeration of it.
After two weeks in our constantly pitching boat and never a foot on land, we
could not get our legs used to solid, unmoving earth. Even after five days of
extensive pedestrianism on the beach we rolled along rather than walked.
There was plenty of fruit around, and many streams ran down to the sea. We
ate enough fruit to expel all the scurvy in the world and bathed luxuriously
in the clear water.
On the island was a deserted house. We inspected it and saw that it had
been owned by a German planter. We afterward learned that, at the outbreak
of the war, the planter fled to the interior of the island, and an Englishman
had taken possession of his house, then, not liking the island, had left it
pretty much to itself. Among the rubbish in the house was a German
mercantile magazine, and on the first page that I turned to I saw an
advertisement of the paint firm of Erdmann and Kircheiss. One of our sailors
was named Erdmann and my lieutenant was named Kircheiss. No relations
of the paint firm, but we took it as a good omen. At any rate, coming upon
the planter's house was certainly good luck. It had gone to seed a bit, but
there still were Christian beds in it. For the first time since sailing away from
Mopelia, we slept comfortably, and between sheets, too.
We were now getting near the larger islands of the Fiji group, where the
sailing ships loaded with copra would be encountered. If we did not succeed
in capturing a ship here, we never could hope to capture one. We found a
handsome little sailboat belonging to the Englishman who had taken over the
German's house, but we left her where she lay. She was more comfortable
than our battered old lifeboat—but the latter was a last relic of our old
Seeadler. She had brought us this far, so we wanted to keep her until we had
captured a ship. We raised sail, knowing that, for better or for worse, we
were on the last leg of our voyage in the lifeboat.
We came to the main body of the Fijis, and sailed into a large gulf
surrounded by distant islands. It was night, and we decided to wait till
morning to see how many ships were passing and what island they were
bound for. We reefed our sails and threw out our sea anchor, that sacklike
drag of canvas that keeps a boat from turning broadside to the wind and
waves and from drifting too fast. We lay down for a decent night's sleep. We
would need all our energies for the morrow.
A sudden shout. I awakened. It was just daybreak. Straight ahead was a

wild white line of surf. It broke over a long, low coral reef, and just behind it
was a high cliff. We had run into a strong current during the night. Krauss
had awakened just in time to see that it had carried us perilously near the
reef. The wind was sweeping us toward the breakers.
"Raise sail," I shouted.
We scrambled frantically and raised the canvas. The wind was inshore.
We could not head into it. We were being blown slowly, inexorably on to the
reef.
People accustomed to the surfs along ordinary coasts have no idea of

what breakers are like off the islands of the South Pacific. The surf all over
the Pacific is particularly strong. But when it breaks over a mid-oceanic
coral reef nothing can live in it. The strongest swimmer is sure to be dashed
to pieces against the jagged coral.
The Sea Devil is caught again. With bayonets
at his back they strip him of his weapons.
The Sea Devil and Kircheiss as prisoners on
the New Zealand isle of Motuihi.
The New Zealand colonel in whose uniform

Von Luckner made his sensational escape
And there wasn't the slightest hope of our moving against the wind and
backing away from the reef. Slowly, slowly we were nearing it. The breakers
roared like thunder. In a few moments, we would be flung into that death
trap of water and coral.
Pistol in hand, I shouted something to the effect that I didn't intend to be

ground to death by the breakers on that jagged coral.
The others looked for their pistols. One could not find his. Between the
pull of the current and the power of our sails, we were drifting along the
reef, edging toward it. The wind gave us an extra push. We were in the
backwash, only a few yards away from the breakers. And still one man could
not find his pistol. Instinctively, we all waited. And that was what saved our
lives. Suddenly we saw the reef drop away, slanting back at a sharp angle,
and a moment later we were drifting parallel to the coral.
It was then that I discovered there were two kinds of breathing. In times
of terrible danger, the breath comes in short, quick puffs. The danger gone,
you breathe deeply. By Joe, when we got clear of that reef I breathed such a
breath that it seemed to go right down to my heels. I sat looking at my boys'
faces. When we got our pistols ready, their faces had set tense, as if cast
from bronze. With the danger past, their faces held the same set expression.
It was an hour before their old expressions came back again. Two of my
fellows found patches of gray in their hair afterward. (Maybe they had been
there for years only to be discovered now!) Another's leg was absolutely
blue in spots. In those frightful moments he had, without knowing it, grasped
his thigh in a clutch like a drowning man. I tell you, by Joe, it was the hand
of God that put the curve in that reef! When one of the boys, I don't know
which, said in surprise, "We are clear!" I knew it was the hand of God.
XXVIII
CAUGHT BY THE BRITISH AT WAKAYA
The island was Wakaya. Several old sailing ships were in the harbour.
We gazed at them with hungry eyes, and eager plans of capturing one ran
through our minds. Natives on shore spied us, took us for shipwrecked
sailors, and put a boat out to meet us. It suited our plans to let them go right
on thinking we had been shipwrecked. That might make it much easier for us
to get some information about the vessels at anchor. Leaving a couple of my
boys in the boat, the other four of us accompanied the natives to their huts,
where they treated us hospitably. They were a simple, trusting people.
Several half-breeds and a couple of white men, however, looked at us
suspiciously. One half-breed was particularly offensive and insisted on
asking us many questions. We did not like his behaviour at all.
Kircheiss and I took a walk along a path in the woods to talk over what
seemed another menacing situation. A white man came galloping by on
horseback. He was pale with excitement. He slowed down for a moment,
gazed at us, responded curtly to our greeting, and went on. Thoroughly
alarmed, we hurried back to the village. Some curious business was afoot,
and we were determined to find out what it was.
"Our last half gallon of rum," Kircheiss murmured regretfully.
"Yes," I responded, "it is too bad, but it will go to a useful purpose."
We got hold of the half-caste who had been so inquisitive. The white
man we had seen on horseback was with him. Something, indeed, was afoot.
We talked casually with them and then suggested drinking. They were
interested, and became enthusiastic when we produced our half gallon of
rum. In the half-breed's hut we staged a drinking bout, which lasted half
through the night. Nothing like rum to make men friendly and
conversational. The half-breed got so conversational that he blurted out,
"Why, you're all right. But at first we thought you were Germans. We
could get fifty pounds if you were Germans."
Now, as an American sailor would say, you've got to "hand it" to the
English. They know how to spend money when it is useful. We Germans are
usually more niggardly, or "careful" some might call it. We will try to save a
mark and then lose thousands. Having received the wireless warning from
the resident at Aitutaki of mysterious armed Germans in the South Seas, the
authorities in the Fijis had passed word among the natives to be on the
lookout for us, and had offered a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar reward to
anyone who turned in definite information about a party of Germans posing
as neutrals.
It was clear enough that the half-breed and the white man had been
plotting to hand us over to the authorities, but how far they had gone we did
not know. We didn't find out that night. It was not until later that we learned
the white man's horseback ride had been to give a warning about us to the
captain of a cutter in the harbour, and that the cutter had at once shoved off
to carry the message to the officials on one of the larger islands a day's sail
away. Not knowing this, we used a good deal of persuasion to put the idea
firmly into the heads of the two men that we could not possibly be Germans.
It may have been our eloquence, or, more likely, the genial influence of the
rum, but, at any rate, they seemed to lose all of their suspicions and became
convinced that we were the truest Norwegians from Scandinavia. Kircheiss
and I, somewhat the worse from our session at detective work, slept at the
Englishman's house.
The four others were offered quarters ashore for the night, but two of my
boys remained in the boat as a precaution. It was well they did, too. During
the night, native swimmers went out to her and cut the anchor rope. They
were put up to it by a Malay police officer who was suspicious of us. Not
knowing any or my men would remain on board her, since she was only an
open lifeboat, he planned to search her. So he sent his swimmers out to pull
her ashore and beach her. The wind was inshore. The anchor rope cut, the
boat drifted in. Our two men were asleep, and only awakened when keel
jarred against bottom. Dark figures were around in the water, trying to pull
the boat on the beach. Our men, pistol in hand, drove them away and then
pushed out into open water.
On the following day, we made our final costly error. The ships in the
harbour weighed anchor and raised sail. We picked the one that seemed the
newest and arranged with the skipper to take us along with him to Suva, on
the main island Viti Levu. Of course, our plan was simply to sail a few miles
out to sea with him and then take the ship ourselves after donning our
uniforms and getting out all of our weapons. A sudden squall blew up and
forced the vessels back to port. We returned with her. And now we should
have taken her while she lay at anchor. The people ashore would have seen
what was going on, but we could have held up the island and then put to sea,
storm or no storm. That was our first impulse. We should have followed it.
Always trust your first impulse—at any rate, if you go into the pirate
business. It is the boldest and best. Instead, we chose a more cautious course.
Prudence ceases to be a virtue when you are on an adventure like ours. We
had been bold enough heretofore, and I have no satisfactory explanation for
our caution now. It may have been that we were not quite ourselves. Our
voyage down from the Societies and the Cooks to Fiji, with those days of
hunger, thirst, and scurvy, had sapped our strength and vitality. Perhaps,
although we felt quite well, we had not yet got back our full vigour of body
and mind. Perhaps we were low on red corpuscles. At any rate, we resolved
to wait until the following day and capture our ship when it had got out to
sea. While we waited, another vessel arrived.
She was a beauty, too, and would have delighted any seaman's eye as she
came sailing into the harbour. She had just arrived, we were told, from Suva.
She ran regularly among the islands, carrying merchandise to the traders.
She was a handsome three-masted schooner with auxiliary motor power,
new, clean, and trim, just the kind of ship we wanted.
"By Joe," I said to my boys, "there's our ship."
We immediately dismissed all idea of the old windjammer we had

intended to capture, and devoted ourselves to this new beauty. A council of
war was held, after which Kircheiss went to the captain of the vessel, which
now had docked, and told him that we were Norwegians who, while making
a cruise in a lifeboat, had missed our ship, which was taking coal from
Australia to Suva. Could we not take passage with him to Suva instead of on
the other slower old craft, so that we could get back to our own ship? We
would pay regular rates for the passage.
"All right," replied the captain, a jovial, unsuspecting fellow. "Come

aboard at eight o'clock this evening. We sail in the morning."
It was our plan again that, once aboard this lovely ship and out at sea, we
would suddenly appear in our uniforms and hoist the German flag.
We made ready to abandon the lifeboat. Our belongings required careful

packing. We put rifles, machine guns, cartridges, and grenades in our canvas
bags, wrapped our naval uniforms around these, and then rolled each bundle
in a couple of blankets and tied it securely. A casual handling would not
reveal the armament inside. Each of us took a pistol in one pocket and a
hand grenade in the other. At eight o'clock we went aboard the schooner. Our
manœuvres had been made carefully, and we had attracted no undue notice
of the people who were suspicious of us.
Aboard, the captain received us hospitably, and we went around looking

over what we expected to make our next prize of war. And a prize she was,
just a year out of the shipyard and beautifully finished in every detail.
"Look at the saloon," I muttered to Leudemann as we wandered around,

"think of what meals we will have here. No more hardtack with loose teeth
to bite it. And look at those cabins. Won't those bunks be comfortable when
it blows and rains? And what a fine big level deck to walk on, so different
from the bottom of our lifeboat."
The schooner had two new motors capable of driving her along at a
lively clip. They would enable us to cover a lot of the wide Pacific and run
down many a copra-laden clipper.
The captain told us he had aboard a miscellaneous cargo of cloth, white

shoes, helmets, silk underwear for the wives of planters and traders, silk
stockings, and so on. He was provisioned for a cruise of six months, and had
aboard large stores of preserved fruits and vegetables and six thousand
pounds of fresh meat. I said to myself:
"Just what we want, by Joe."
Here was the perfect prize. What would our comrades marooned back
there on Mopelia say when we turned up with this beautiful schooner in tip-
top shape, with powerful motors, well-provisioned and all? Already we
could hear the lusty cheers, as, with the German flag at our mast, we drew up
and cast anchor off the coral reef. I looked up at the trim masts and spars and
around at the freshly scrubbed woodwork of the deck and spoke silently to
the schooner, calling her by a new name.
"Ho, there, Seeadler-the-Second! You'll like it as an auxiliary cruiser.

We'll have a lot of fun together, by Joe."
I could hardly wait for her to raise anchor and set sail. But we had
counted that brood of mental chickens before they had hatched, by Joe.
A steamer slid into port!
The skipper of our clipper who was standing next to me said he supposed
she had brought over the proprietor of the island. The new arrival lowered a
boat. In it were a military officer and four Indian soldiers. The boat rowed
straight toward our ship. We surmised at once that they were coming for us.
Having received the message sent by the suspicious half-breed and the white
man that there were six Germans on the island, the authorities had sent a
force of military police to arrest us. There had been some delay in this, as the
only available boat on which to send the police was a cattle steamer, the
Amra, and she could not raise anchor for some hours. She had arrived now
right in the nick of time, had communicated with the shore, and been
informed that we were aboard the schooner.
The storm had cleared during the early morning. The palm trees ashore
were ablaze with the tropical sunshine. The water under us was of the deep
blue that you see only in the South Seas. A brisk, refreshing wind blew from
the west. The boat with the officer and four soldiers came rowing with long,
powerful strokes. The Indians wore puttees and those funny little pants that
leave the knees bare. They carried no arms other than bayonets. The officer
had a sword and a revolver. We could easily have shot them down with our
pistols, or thrown a hand grenade in their boat, or held them up at pistol
point when they came aboard. Then we could have captured the ship and
sailed away. The steamer would have been powerless in the face of our
machine guns. There were mutterings among my men. They were full of
fight. We should, they urged, make the capture and get away.
I passed an uncomfortable moment of indecision. Our uniforms were

packed in our bundles, stowed below. We would have to fight off arrest and
take the ship in the guise, not of naval soldiers but of civilians, and as
civilians we would have to raise our weapons against soldiers. That not only
went against the grain, but it went against the unwritten laws of the game.
There are many sporting traditions that are carefully inculcated in every
German naval officer. If we could have fought in our uniforms, it would
have been as honourable naval men. In the end, the odds would be all against
us and the chances were at least a hundred to one that we would be captured
before getting back home. If we fought as naval men and were later
captured, we would be entitled to the treatment due honourable prisoners of
war. If we fought in citizen's clothes, we were nothing more than
international bandits and as such almost sure to hang finally from a yard
arm. They say that all is fair in love and war, but this does not alter the fact
that there are things you can do that are not playing the game. Of course,
each side has its spies, and a spy, if caught, expects no quarter and gets none.
But during the War of 1870, and during the late war, too, we Germans
were most severe with franctireurs, civilians who sniped at soldiers. It has
been one of our cardinal principles that war must be waged by uniformed
soldiers. In the World War, both sides were charged with introducing new
methods of warfare that were not in accordance with the ethics of the game.
But you will recall that even Allied cargo and passenger ships armed with
guns to fire on submarines made it a general rule to carry gun crews of
uniformed marines to handle the guns.
"No," I said to my men, "in the uniforms of our country we can fight. As
civilians we cannot. At any rate, we are not going to drop a bomb down there
and kill that poor defenseless police officer and his men in those short pants!
There would be neither fun nor glory in that."
My officers were with me, and the men also saw the point, but agreed
with much reluctance. Certainly, none of us wanted to go to a British prison
camp. But there seemed no help for it.
It was the twenty-first of September, just two days short of a month since
our departure from Mopelia. The lieutenant and his four men in those short
pants and bare knees came aboard. Followed by his men, he stepped up to
me.
"I've got to arrest you," he began decently enough. "Who are you?"
"Allow me," I responded, "to introduce myself. I am Count Luckner,

commander of the Seeadler. These men here are part of my crew."
"Are you Count von Luckner?"
"Yes."
He gazed around bewildered, frightened, and certainly nonplussed. I

imagined I could see his legs shake. Apparently, he was digesting the fact
that he and his men were practically unarmed and the certainty that we must
be armed to the teeth.
"We have," I continued, "hand grenades and firearms enough to send you
and your knee-pants army here to Kingdom Come, and if we were in
uniform, you would be our prisoners. However, be that as it may, you have
caught us in civilian clothes—but look here."
We took our weapons out of our pockets. I had had two of our men bring
up our bundles. We cut them open and displayed the grenades, pistols, and
machine guns. The lieutenant stared, still aghast in spite of my reassuring
speech. The soldiers were funny. You could see the goose pimples on the
skin below the lower edge of those short pants. They edged to the rail,
evidently ready to tumble overboard. The captain of the schooner and his
crew now knew what kind of guests they had welcomed aboard. They stood
gaping.
"I must ask you to stand back a moment, Lieutenant," I exclaimed,

"while I destroy my war material. Overboard with it all!" I called to my men.
Pistols, grenades, and machine guns dropped splashing into the water.
"And now, Lieutenant," I saluted, "at your service!"
"Right ho, Count," he replied, "you men have made a great name for
yourselves on your cruise, and now you have played cricket with me. You
will receive decent treatment. You have my word as a Briton for that." He
emphasized the word "Briton."
Aboard the Amra we heard a different tune piped. They had an old black
stewardess aboard, a particularly bad-tempered scold. The moment she saw
us her shrewish tongue began to wag.
"Just look at those Huns, and look at their muddy boots, soiling our clean
deck. And then the black men are supposed to scrub it after them. These
Huns should be painted black, and with tar. I'd rather be black than one of
those Germans. Sinking ships with women and children is all they can do. I'd
like to get a gun and shoot every one of them."
She certainly had been filled right up to her ear lobes with this war of
frightfulness propaganda, and that old Jezebel knew how to do her bit of
spiteful tongue-lashing. A ducking in cold water would have done her no
harm. But we were prisoners now, and the berating of an ill-tempered old
Melanesian woman was likely to be the smallest of our troubles.
I had no doubt as to what our first ordeal was to be. Unless the British
had more recent news than we concerning our comrades whom we had left
at Mopelia, which was not probable, we would be questioned as to the
whereabouts of the Seeadler and the remainder of her crew. I told my men
that they should give the same reply to all interrogations, namely that I had
bidden them to keep silent and that I would answer for all. That would
prevent us from tripping one another up. We had taken care to throw away
any notes or papers we had that gave any hint as to where we had gone
ashore in the Society Islands. They could search us as much as they liked,
but they would find nothing. One mischance, though, befell us. I was to
learn in a few days that one of my comrades had dropped a notebook, which
presently was found. In it he had a brief diary of the Seeadler's voyage. I
questioned the diarist who had kept the unfortunate record, and he told me
that his notes about Mopelia were very sketchy. He remembered clearly that
he had written we had captured the sailing ship Manila. After that was a
single entry.
"Landed stores at Mopelia."
There his diary broke off. There was no mention of our having sunk the
Manila or of our having lost the Seeadler at Mopelia or taken refuge on the
island.
"And now," I said to my men as we came in sight of Suva, "you keep

your mouths shut, by Joe. Let me do the lying. They've got us, but they must
not get the boys back at Mopelia."
XXIX
JAILED IN FIJI WHILE THE OTHERS ESCAPE

TO EASTER ISLAND
Our arrival as prisoners was the event of the year at Suva, the capital city
of the Fiji Islands. Our capture was the only warlike happening that had
come along in those parts to break the monotony of life in the dreary South
Seas. The newspaper got out a lurid special edition filled with a harrowing
account of the capture of the captain and a part of the crew of the desperate
raider, the Seeadler. It gave the hour when we were expected to reach Suva.
So a huge crowd, that is, a huge one as crowds go in Fiji, had gathered at the
pier to look us over. A company of infantry lined both sides of the approach
to the pier with bayonets fixed. They certainly were a comic-opera-looking
lot in their hot-weather knee pants.
During our march down the street between the gauntlet of bayonets and
the crowd behind them, a half-caste fellow, seeing us unarmed and helpless,
stepped forward and spat in the face of one of my boys. I jumped out of line
and gave him a blow straight from the shoulder that sent him down in a
heap. His friends had to carry him away. I had acted on the impulse of the
moment and expected to be run through with a bayonet, but the officer in
command of the soldiers shouted:
"Serves him right! Good for you, Count!" Then addressing himself to the
crowd he added: "These men have done nothing to deserve such treatment."
He said it as though he meant it, too. That Englishman was a real fellow, I
tell you.
We were promptly questioned. Where were the Seeadler and the

remainder of its crew? Of course, my boys kept mum. I, on the other hand,
invented a story about accidentally getting separated from the rest, who were
still aboard the Seeadler—where, we didn't know. The story, of course, was
not believed.
At first they kept us at the Governor's Rest House, a fine place with a
garden, where visiting white people often stopped. Our meals were borne to
us by coolies from the local hotel. The temporary commandant of the Rest
House was a Lieutenant Wodehouse, a fine fellow. After a day or so he was
replaced by a Lieutenant Whitehouse, whom we didn't like so well. He was
what the British themselves would call "a bit of an ass, y'know." Whenever
he talked with me he kept his hand on his pistol. He apparently thought me a
sort of ogre, a bad man sent to frighten nice young lieutenants. Presently he
came, hand on pistol, and announced:
"General Mackenzie wants to see you, all of you."
"More questions, by Joe," I thought.
Appearing before a general was an event of some moment. We felt we

had to look worthy of the German Navy. We had our uniforms, which were
somewhat faded after the long trip at sea. But we slicked them up as best we
could and generally made ourselves as presentable as possible. They loaded
us into stinking cattle cars. For a visit to a general? Qurre! we thought. They
led us to a stone building and ushered us in. It was a jail!
"Is this your General Mackenzie?" I sneered at Whitehouse. "You're a

fine British officer."
He walked away, ashamed, himself, of the dodge he had used to get us to

the jail without the desperate attempts he, in his stupid timidity, expected us
to make.
But the jail was not so bad. We got our meals from a restaurant. They
separated me from my men, which I did not like. Nor was it exactly military
ethics to confine prisoners of war in a common calaboose. But the
authorities were nervous. They believed the Seeadler was lurking
somewhere near by, and they expected our comrades to come raiding ashore
and try to rescue us. Of course, they kept on trying to get us to tell them
where the Seeadler was, but they learned nothing.
Lieutenant Whitehouse was still our jailer. Keeping a good hold of his
pistol, he came up to me again. He spoke very politely this time:
"A Japanese admiral wants to see you, sir."
I laughed at him.
"First it was General Mackenzie, and now it is the Japanese admiral. Ho!
Ho! What tricks are you up to this time?"
"No, really, upon my word, really, Count, the Japanese admiral wants to
see you."
"By Joe, Lieutenant, I was fool enough to get all slicked up to see your
General Mackenzie. But I'll be hanged if I'll budge an inch to see your old
Japanese admiral."
I didn't know what kind of foolishness it was this time, and intended to
protest and stall as long as I could. He went away rather sheepishly. In a few
minutes another lieutenant showed up.
"There is a Japanese admiral who really does want to see you, Count
Luckner, you know," he said.
"Oh, since you say so, Lieutenant, it must be so," I replied.
I brushed up my uniform and accompanied him through the courtyard to

a pier. A splendid cruiser, the Ysuma, lay out there at anchor in the harbour.
A boat manned by Japanese sailors was waiting there for me at the landing.
Aboard the cruiser, the magnificent deck contrasting with the dingy jail that
now was my home, I felt like a man who, long confined in darkness,
suddenly walks into sunlight.
My feelings changed to those of discomfort as the Admiral welcomed

me. He was a grave, courteous little man, clad in an immaculate white
uniform. My own uniform had once been white, but in spite of all the
washing I had given it, it was now a dingy gray. The gold braid had turned
green from the corrosion of the sea water. So I tried to make up in dignity of
bearing what I lacked in perfection of dress. He introduced me to his
officers:
"Here is the man we have chased for three months." And then turning to
me:
"I am sorry, sir, to meet you in this situation. I would rather it had been in
a good, square fight."
"I should far rather be your prisoner, Admiral," I answered, "than the
ignominy of living in this beastly Fiji Island jail."
The Japanese had not known of the jail part of it. The officers looked in
cold astonishment at the British lieutenant, who was much embarrassed.
In the luxurious saloon I was extended gracious, indeed ceremonious

hospitality, the hospitality of Japan. The admiral offered me cigars and
cigarettes and poured out the champagne for me. I took a cigar, but refused
the wine.
"I am a teetotaller," I said, "a prohibitionist, as the Americans would

say."
I suspected that I would be questioned about the Seeadler, and didn't

want my tongue lubricated with champagne!
The admiral placed three books before me. The frontispiece of one was
the picture of the Emden; of the other, a picture of the Moewe. He turned the
pages. Both were filled with Japanese writing. The third book was empty.
The admiral placed this book before me and presented me with a pen.
"Write something about your cruise," he asked. "In our country we write
about the deeds of the enemies we have met. We tell what they did for their
countries, so that it may fill our youth with enthusiasm to do as much for our
country. Write down one or two things that I can use."
"Gladly," I replied, and began to write briefly of our experiences while

rounding Cape Horn.
"Just a question first," interrupted the admiral. "Did you put to sea from a
neutral port, the United States, Argentine, or Chile?"
"We sailed from Hamburg," I responded. "We flew the Norwegian flag
and were searched for an hour and a half by a British cruiser."
"Examined by the British?"
"Yes."
Those grave Japanese faces lighted up with smiles of exquisite

amusement.
After I had written my short piece, the admiral spoke again.
"And now, Count, tell me where you have been."
"Admiral," I responded, "that is a question I should prefer not to answer

right away. First tell me where you looked for me."
He brought out a big chart. A quick glance, and I saw the island of
Mopelia. Around it was a faint line in pencil. That told me what I wanted to
know. Undoubtedly, they had found the diary my boy had lost, the last entry
of which mentioned Mopelia.
The admiral pointed to the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New
Zealand.
"I was on your trail here, Count, but I lost you near New Zealand."
"I am sorry to say, Admiral, that my ship was never within six thousand
miles of those waters."
"But," he responded, "the ships you sank in the Pacific were all to or
from Australia."
"I know, but—" A little judicious hesitation.
"But where were you, Count? Tell me."
"I cruised back and forth south of the Hawaiian Islands over the waters
where the Australia-San Francisco ships, the eastbound and westbound,
pass." There is nothing like the truth.
"You are right, Count. I should have thought of it."
"I am glad you didn't," I replied, "or you would have captured me."
He dropped the questioning for a while and asked me about the Battle of
Jutland, which always seems to interest Japanese naval men tremendously.
When I said I had been through the battle, they made me tell them every
detail I could remember. They were interested in everything. The admiral's
comment on what I told him was interesting.
"Another proof," he exclaimed, "that the smaller fleet was superior per
ship to the larger."
And now the admiral came square to the point.
"Tell me, Count, where your Seeadler is."
I was in a tight hole. I must strike a blow for my comrades out there on
Mopelia. The elements I had to work upon lay in the fact that the diary
which had been found mentioned merely that we had put stores aboard at
Mopelia and told of the capture of the Manila and said nothing of the fact
that we had sunk that ship. Then, also, the truth is rarely believed. I
proceeded to skate very near the truth.
"The Seeadler," I replied, "was lost."
"How was it lost?"
"We got on the coral reef at Mopelia. We tried our best to get off, put our
stores ashore to lighten the ship. But it was no use."
"What did you do then?"
"We went aboard the Manila."
"The four-masted schooner, Manila?"
"Yes, we captured her and took her along with us."
"Where is the Manila now?"
"She is waiting for me off Mopelia. My men are having a good vacation
on the island until I come back."
"I say, Count, we Japanese are not such fools. You had the four-master
Manila, and you sailed from Mopelia to the Fijis in a small boat."

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Alchemist in Literature From Dante to the Present 1st

Introduction to Molecular Magnetism From Transition

Dante s Poets Textuality and Truth in the COMEDY

Dante s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of

Joyce and Dante The Shaping Imagination Mary Trackett

The Early Italian Poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Editor)

The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante s

A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Dante s The Divine

List of Figures viii

Prologue: A Wandering Comedy 1

Appendix 1: Chronology, c.1320–2013 284

‘global’ Dantes—their importance is to some extent acknowledged here, for in-

12 Ruskin 1851: 2. 342; 3. 158.

Permission to reproduce privately owned archival material at the Highland

An unprepossessing manuscript of Dante’s Commedia in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek,

1 On the sizes of Commedia manuscripts, see Boschi Rotiroti 2004: 29–32.

Bertelli 2007: 39–76.

Fig. 1. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS Hamilton 207, f. 202r, by permission of Bildarchiv,

7 I am grateful to the staff of the Handschriftenabteilung at the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, for

allowing the page to be inspected by this means.

London, Prof. Linne Mooney, University of York, and Dr Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli.

9 See Ruddock 1951: 19 and Spufford 2002: 396–8.

London Record Society for providing these references.

17On the Medici in London, see Holmes 1996.

time, see Rundle 2013: 545–6.

24 See below, p. 17.

reading, see Wakelin 2007: 93–108.

9171/5/, f. 376Av. I am grateful to Dr Helen Bradley for this reference.

Giovanni (1434–1498), papal ofﬁcial, diplomat, and bishop of Worcester’.

appropriating lines and phrases from Paradiso 33. 1–21.

edition by A. M. Chiavacci Leonardi (Dante 1997).

THE MYSTERY OF F RIAR R OGER: T RANSL ATING

13 See Minnis and Scott, with Wallace 1991: 439–58.

DE 855, also Matteini 1958:27–43 and Cassell 2004: 44–9.

23 Quadragesimale de scolis/scolarum, in Assisi Comunale MS 492, f. 62v (partly transcribed by

Fame, see Ellis 1988 and Taylor 1989: 39–49.

309–90 and 346.

probably present at Cambridge during 1351–2, is one frater Rogerius de Cicilia.32

indicates an early channel of communication and a context for interest in Dante’s

‘ RUSTIC LATIN’: SER RA VA LL E’S COMMEDIA

38 Chaucer, House of Fame, 445–50, 499–508, 523–8, 530–44, and 1091–109.

convent in Ferrara from 1379 to 1383.47 It is possible, therefore, that if his

2004: ch. 4; and Wakelin 2007: 25–31.

Rundle 2004: 115.

‘ NOTABLE COMEDIES ’: DANTE AT ST ALBANS

Hertfordshire around 1392/3, he entered St Albans Abbey some time between

The Palearium poetarum is found in a handsomely illuminated manuscript of

Genealogiae, e.g. 1. 14 and 15. 6).

pagans’ is articulated in the previous canto, Paradiso 19. 67–90.

century, see above, pp. 17–18.

see Alakas 2009: 68–72.

85 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 230/116, f. 145v.

Whethamstede’s references to Dante’s Monarchia and Marsilius’s Defensor pacis. Whethamstede’s

Benedictine monk, scholar, and ecclesiastic’.

and 1955: 178–80; and MacFarlane 1955.

opponents), and 3. 16. 1 (on the different jurisdictions).