The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook

suppression.¹⁰ The commission was, of course, given by Henry VIII, who was himself the major animating force behind the dissolution of the monasteries. Thus, as James Simpson writes, “Leland’s raison d’être for constructing a British past is in part, then, the fact that the past is undergoing destruction by Leland’s own patron. Leland is himself, accordingly, an agent of destruction, and the very object of his attention as antiquary—the past seen as something distant and sharply different—is itself a product of Leland’s moment.”¹¹ The complex set of motivations behind the visitations notwithstanding, Leland’s travels gave him an unparalleled knowledge of the breadth and depth of England’s medieval textual and intellectual heritage.

      Upon his return, Leland used the materials collected during these journeys to begin working on the massive compendium of the life and works of learned Britons now known as De Viris Illustribus.¹² Like Leland’s other writings, De Viris Illustribus expresses a deep appreciation for the English past alongside loyalty to a Tudor regime that increasingly defined itself against that past.¹³ While Leland’s antiquarian writings bemoan the destruction of the monastic libraries during the dissolution, his position within the court of Henry VIII meant his critiques were enabled by the patronage of those largely responsible for it.¹⁴ The result is, in Simpson’s phrase, “a deeply divided consciousness.”¹⁵

      Leland explains the origins and scope of the De Viribus project in a kind of prospectus, written in the mid-1540s and published some years later (with interpolations by John Bale) as The laboryouse Journey and serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees (1549; STC 15445). Addressed to Henry VIII, De Viris Illustribus’s prospective patron, Leland explains how the project would bring together records of a “great a numbre of excellent godlye wyttes and wryters, learned wyth the best, as the tymes served, hath bene in thys your regyon,” who without such a monument were “lyke to have bene perpetually obscured, or to have bene lyghtelye remembred, as uncerteyne shaddowes.”¹⁶ The ensuing book would cover the accomplishments of English writers from pre-Roman times to the present, with the final volume (of four) dedicated solely to the reign of Henry VIII.¹⁷ Leland completed substantial work on De Viris Illustribus by the early 1540s, but around the time of Henry’s death in 1547 he experienced what Bale calls a “soden fall”—apparently some kind of mental breakdown—that brought an end to his scholarly activities. He died in 1552, having been declared insane two years prior.¹⁸

      In its final yet incomplete form, De Viris Illustribus covers nearly a millennium of British intellectual history and presents information on the work of nearly six hundred individuals, from Roman antiquity to the early sixteenth century.¹⁹ That said, De Viris Illustribus includes some entries for figures who not only did not write the works Leland attributes to them, but did not exist at all. As James Carley notes, “Leland does tend to be credulous in his enthusiasm for the British past, most notoriously in his accounts of the ancient prophets Aquila (the eagle in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae who prophesied when Shaftesbury was built) and Perdix (a prophetic partridge at the time of King Rivallo) and in the account of Pope Joan.”²⁰

      A typical entry in De Viris Illustribus describes its subject’s life and education, offers a list of his works—sometimes supplemented by comments about Leland’s research in monastic libraries—and concludes with a few words about the subject’s death, burial place, and legacy. There is room for significant variation and digression within this format, however: Leland’s entry on the fourteenth-century chronicler Ranulf Higden (no. 354), for example, devotes more than half its space to criticisms of Leland’s contemporary and nemesis, the Anglo-Italian antiquarian and historiographer Polydore Vergil.²¹ The entries are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the Druids and ending with the poet and musician Robert Widow, who died in 1503.²²

      While each entry is discrete and Leland does not provide the kind of contextual historical narrative that John Bale does in his later appropriations and expansions of Leland’s work, the various political, religious, and pedagogical links among his subjects form a web of historical connections. Read as a whole, the work constitutes a grand narrative about the transmission of knowledge that stretches back, ultimately, to the Roman occupation of the British Isles and, through that, to the glories of classical civilization. In this way, Leland anticipates the interest in antiquity that marks the work of later antiquaries like William Camden and Sir Robert Cotton, but he also reflects admiration of the Greek and Roman past that characterizes the humanistic beginnings of Renaissance antiquarianism.

      As a collection of biobibliographic writings, De Viris Illustribus continues a long-standing and wide-ranging scholarly genre that includes works by Jerome, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The immediate catalyst for Leland’s work was the Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, written by the German polymath, abbot, and early humanist Johannes Trithemius and printed in Basel in 1494.²³ Trithemius’s work includes entries for nearly a thousand writers, including numerous English authors. Leland felt that Trithemius had failed to acknowledge the significance of English writers and their accomplishments, and had unjustly set them apart from their rightful place in a distinctively English intellectual tradition.²⁴ By researching and writing De Viris Illustribus, Leland sought to claim these writers, and many more, for England.

      In its awareness of the asymmetry between the reputation of continental writers in England and the reputation of English writers abroad, De Viris Illustribus reflects something of the anxiety around English as a cultural and national identity in the sixteenth century.²⁵ Leland’s desire to equip English readers with an intellectual genealogy of their own makes him a historiographical analogue to writers seeking a native alternative to “inkhorn terms” brought over into English from other vernaculars.²⁶ In the dedication to his English version of Jacopo di Porcia’s De Rei Militari (1554), for example, the translator Peter Betham makes the case directly: “I take them beste englyshe men, which folowe Chaucer, and other olde wryters, in whyche studye the nobles and gentle men of England, are worthye to be praysed, whan they endevoure to brynge agayne to his owne clennes oure englysshe tounge, & playnelye to speake wyth our owne termes, as others dyd before us.”²⁷ For Betham and other advocates of nativist diction, Englishness and use of the English language tended to go hand in hand. Leland, by contrast, remained a consummately Latinate thinker. Not only is De Viris Illustribus written in Latin, the majority of its subjects are learned clerics who—while celebrated here for their English origins—also write in Latin.

      In this context, the entries on John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer stand out as vernacular exceptions to the Latinate rule. While John Bale’s later Catalogus (which takes Leland as its main source) adds entries for English-language writers like John Lydgate, Walter Hilton, and even the elusive “Robert” Langland, Gower and Chaucer are the only English-language poets included in Leland’s collection.²⁸ Leland’s decision to include Chaucer and Gower in De Viris Illustribus—a work that, as The laboryouse Journey makes clear, is dedicated to the glories of England—is a bold claim for the importance of their poetry, not just in the field of literary endeavors but in intellectual and learned culture more generally. Their very presence in the project places the two poets at the intersection of English poetics and a largely Latinate intellectual tradition and suggests that their vernacular poetry is an important part of the shared national culture in England, worthy of commemoration at the highest levels. Writing about Middle English poetry in Latin is, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, an act of consecration that elevates Gower and Chaucer to an elite position within their field of cultural production. It is also a means of spreading their fame as English writers to an audience that extends, at least in theory, far beyond England toward a wider community defined by latinitas.²⁹

      While a tradition of vernacular tribute to Chaucer and his contemporaries continued to flourish among early Tudor poets, Latin praise of English poets was something relatively novel in the 1530s. By the time that Leland set to work on De Viris Illustribus, poets like John Skelton and Stephen Hawes had begun to blend an appreciation for Chaucer’s achievements rooted in fifteenth-century Chaucerianism with a new sense of the possibilities of English verse. Gower,