Dante's Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England compares the intellectual, emotional, and religious world of Dante in 13th-century Florence with that of a group of English intellectuals gathered around Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the King, Henry VI.
Here, Jonathan Hughes establishes that there was a Renaissance in 15th-century England, encouraged by the discovery and translations of works of Greek philosophers and developments in science and medicine; and that vernacular writers in Gloucester's circle, such as John Lydgate and Robert Hoccleve, were of fundamental importance in exploring the meaning of the self and man's relationship with the natural world and the classical past. However, the appearance in 15th-century England of Dante's 'Commedia', the most popular work of the Middle Ages, served to remind writers and readers of the cost of intellectual enquiry: the loss of faith in a harmonious and beautiful world; the redemptive power of the love of a woman; and the tangible presence of an afterlife.
Engagingly written and meticulously researched, this innovative study shines a new perspective on Dante scholarship as well as offering a unique anaylsis of intellectual thought and culture in 15th-century England.
In this impressively erudite and ambitious study, Jonathan Hughes provides a long overdue, wide ranging account of Dante's reception in England in the late 14th and 15th Centuries. Spanning the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and the wider circle of writers and intellectuals linked to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Hughes persuasively defines this period as an Early English Renaissance whose conflicted response to Dante's vision was mediated by Boccaccio and the later Italian humanists. In its cross-disciplinary scope, this study vividly evokes the complex network of discourses and concerns-literary, political, theological, philosophical, psychological, and scientific-within which Dante's works were productively entangled on their arrival in England. This study will no doubt become an important source for scholars interested in early responses in England to both Dante and to 15th Century Italian humanism.
