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  • Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester
  • Kenneth Bartlett
Alessandra Petrina . Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 124. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004. xii + 382 pp. index. illus. bibl. $130. ISBN: 90-04-13713-0.

There has been recently a renewed interest in Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and his times. Studies, such as Susanne Saygin's Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447) and the Italian Humanists (2002), have reopened the established interpretations of how and when humanism entered England and why the century after the death of Geoffrey Chaucer was so curiously barren in terms of literary and artistic production. Petrina's excellent study enters this debate in several ways. First, it challenges and brings up to date the foundation on which much received scholarship rests: the work of Roberto Weiss. Second, it broadens the scope of the discussion to review Humphrey not as a singular, eccentric example of enlightened patronage but as a contributor to a larger court and university culture that included both pure and applied learning. In this context, Humphrey emerges as a more complete and even impressive figure than, for example, Saygin's Humphrey, the almost obsessive dynast and failed Lancastrian manipulator.

To be sure, Humphrey was both of those things. He was obsessive over his belief that he alone was the keeper of his brother, Henry V's, memory and policy toward France, and, consequently, the best candidate for the keeper of the young Henry VI as well. This dynastic preoccupation and Humphrey's own character flaw of excessive pride resulted in his single-mindedly pursuing a bellicose program against France and quarreling with his fellow royal counselors, particular Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. This political duel overflowed into the cultural debates of their time and ours, as Beaufort has been portrayed as the feudal ecclesiastic who managed to lure Poggio Bracciolini to England only to employ him as a servant, an anachronistic observation that Poggio so carefully broadcast in his unhappy letters from England, a place he found particularly uncongenial. [End Page 319] Nevertheless, Beaufort did secure Poggio and thereby earned an important footnote in English cultural history.

Humphrey has usually been declared the greater of the two because, although his Italian humanist secretary Tito-Livio Frulovisi was hardly Poggio's equal, he actually accomplished things and left monuments for others to follow. Frulovisi did write the first humanist biography in England (Vita Henrici Quinti) and an epic poem on Humphrey's life, Hunfoidos, an execrable piece of epic poetry, but like Johnson's dancing dog, a miracle that he wrote it at all. Moreover, Humphrey's gifts to the University of Oxford consisted of many important humanist texts and became the nucleus of the library that in part still bears his name. Petrina is very careful to note that the gifts were not exclusively recent humanist scholarship, that scholastic and other manuscripts were included; all they shared in common was that they were in Latin, despite the duke's wide collection of materials in French and English. But, again, the simple fact to be noted is that these three gifts were made and that the residue of his library was to have been conveyed to Oxford after his death, if his nephew had not intervened to direct it rather to his own foundation of King's College, Cambridge. Humphrey was, then, the exemplar of English interest in humanist, particularly Italian, learning.

Petrina elaborates these traditional assertions, held as given since Weiss, by examining in a very sophisticated way how Humphrey served as a patron for literature altogether and how this function cannot be completely separated from his appreciation of his political ambitions and social position (he was, after all, heir presumptive to the throne after the death of his brother, Bedford). Besides the usual encomia of the duke's humanist connections, such as Frulovisi and Del Monte, Petrina evaluates and places in context his patronage of English writers, such as Lydgate. Humphrey exercised generous good lordship to a number of writers who might not have enjoyed the genius of Chaucer...

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