Dante’s Divine Comedy in Early Renaissance England: The Collision of Two Worlds, by Jonathan Hughes

In the second episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus rejects Mr Deasy’s presentation of history as progressive by asserting that it is in fact ‘a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (Joyce, Ulysses [1998 edn], p. 34). For Stephen, the passage of time involves a vicious cycle of violence and suffering; it is a trap from which the whole island of Ireland struggles to escape. In this moment, Joyce draws attention to the diverse ways in which history might be understood, as well as the impact of its telling on both individual and national identity.

In his present book, Jonathan Hughes proves himself to be alert to the complexities of historical writing. Throughout the first two chapters, Hughes relays in considerable detail the reception of Dante’s work in England, and in particular the various reasons for which the ‘Early Renaissance’, as Hughes calls it (p. 2), proved a fertile ground. The contributions of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester are presented with admirable clarity: in creating an intellectual environment in which ‘cultured individuals’ (p. 2) might engage with contemporary European writing, Gloucester created both the space and very often the opportunity for Dante’s writing to be scrutinised by intellectuals in England.

Moreover, for Hughes, Dante’s writing may also have been a lens through which English intellectuals interpreted their own historical circumstances. With reference to the moment from Ulysses mentioned above, Hughes observes that fifteenth-century readers, who were ‘much closer to his the poet’s time [sic], were also beginning to see history as something of a nightmare that approached the horrors of Dante’s view of Hell, without his reassuring sense of contrapasso and destiny’ (p. 165). In Hughes’s hands, fifteenth-century readers take the position of Stephen in opposition to Deasy/Dante: history has been stripped of meaning (‘contrapasso’) and direction (‘destiny’); it has become ‘something of a nightmare’ that is only slightly less horrific than ‘the horrors of Dante’s view of Hell’. Hughes continues, with reference to Lydgate’s poetry: ‘The Fall of Princes is nothing more than a journey through a hell on earth, where most of the protagonists, such as Brumhilde, queen of the Franks 543–613, and Andronikos I Komnenos (c.1118–85) the Byzantine emperor, end their lives in torture, mutilation and despair’ (p. 165).

Hughes acknowledges the (often traumatic) transformations experienced by European society between Dante’s death in 1321 and Lydgate’s birth around 1370, which also marks the beginning of what he calls the ‘Early Renaissance’ (1370–1450). The quantity of time to have passed may not have been so great, but in the wake of the Black Death and a whole range of attendant social and political restructurings, the world in which Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower lived and wrote would have seemed quite alien to Dante. In this respect, Hughes emphasises the significant implications for religious faith, which in turn would have inflected responses to Dante’s writing: Hughes suggests that from 1370 ‘boundaries were being crossed in the fields of exploration, philosophy and alchemical science, and the consequent lessening of faith in an afterlife and a physical resurrection that occasioned Pope Leo X to set forth a constitution at the Lateran Council of 1513 in defence of the immortality and individuality of the soul’ (p. 267).

Here, we might imagine the destruction of the First World War as being comparable (although not perfectly) to the losses observed by the generation of writers living in England in the early fifteenth century. Moreover, it is no small undertaking to chart the complexities of social and cultural transitions over time, particularly where they involve such a diverse range of writers. As another great modernist, T.S. Eliot, explained: ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’ (T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood [1997 edn], p. 41). In the middle chapters of the book, Hughes works hard to demonstrate the variety of responses, both to Dante and to one another, developed by writers in the period: for instance, in Chapter Six (‘Luna (the Moon): Women’), Hughes deftly discusses Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and ‘Dante’s idealization of the eyes of the beloved’ (p. 197). Such an appreciation for the subtle interactions that take place between texts and authors, both living and dead, is sustained throughout the book and in the final chapters Hughes points forward to Dante’s impact on modern authors such as ‘Eliot, Beckett, Joyce and Heaney’ (p. 335).

Returning to the quotation above, in which Hughes draws on Joyce, the inserted ‘sic’ signals an awkwardness of phrasing, which in turn draws attention to a weakness of Hughes’s book when it comes to textual accuracy, both in fact and in phrasing. It is a shame that errors such as the suggestion the Chaucer ‘may have been exposed to discussions about Dante before his momentous visit to Italy in 1473’ (p. 29) distract from what is otherwise a rich and well-researched book. Before Deasy and Dedalus, there is a more prosaic but nevertheless necessary understanding of history as being that which attends to the simple basics of what and when, in so far as they may be precisely discerned. Chaucer’s visit to Italy took place a full century before Hughes inadvertently claims, prompting this reader to wonder about the smaller interpretative missteps lurking behind the larger typographical errors.