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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Mary Shelley's Valperga is a captivating historical novel set in 14th-century Italy, intertwining political intrigue, romance, and the struggle for power. The vivid descriptions and atmospheric settings immerse the reader in the tumultuous world of medieval Italy, where alliances are fragile and betrayals abound. Shelley's lyrical prose and attention to detail create a vivid portrait of the characters and their complex relationships, making Valperga a compelling read for fans of historical fiction. The novel's exploration of power dynamics and the impact of ambition on personal relationships adds depth to the narrative, giving readers much to ponder long after the final pages have been turned. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Valperga
(Unabridged)
Published by
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Between the clang of banners and the hush of conscience, this novel follows hearts and cities as they are tested by the magnetism of power, the claims of love, and the austere demands of liberty in a world where history itself feels alive and watchful, turning private vows into public destinies, compelling its characters to choose between the glitter of victory and the quiet heroism of restraint, and asking, at every crossroads, whether greatness can be measured without first weighing the damage that ambition inflicts upon the souls it summons and the communities it would rule.
Valperga (Unabridged) presents Mary Shelley’s richly imagined historical romance, first published in 1823, set amid the factional strife of early fourteenth-century Italy. At its center stands Castruccio Castracani—remembered by history as the ruler of Lucca—whose rise unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of Guelph and Ghibelline conflict. Shelley’s narrative follows the intersecting fortunes of this formidable leader and Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga, a fictional noblewoman whose values and loyalties give the book its searching moral compass. Without revealing outcomes, the premise promises a contest between political destiny and private integrity, civic allegiance and intimate feeling.
Composed in the years following the astonishing debut of Frankenstein, Shelley’s second published novel grew from close engagement with Italian history during her residence on the peninsula. The book draws on chronicles of medieval Tuscany and the era’s civic turbulence to shape a narrative that feels both learned and vivid. Published in three volumes, it displays Shelley’s determination to move beyond scientific parable and into the terrain of historical imagination, testing how individual character, personal memory, and collective myth combine to make history not merely a sequence of events but a living field of ethical choices.
Valperga holds classic status because it expands the horizons of the Romantic historical novel as pioneered by Walter Scott, while offering an unmistakably Shelleyan emphasis on moral psychology. Rather than celebrating conquest for its own sake, the book interrogates the costs of charismatic leadership and the seductions of martial glory. It brings to the fore philosophical questions about political legitimacy and the obligations of conscience, anchoring its grand canvases of siege and ceremony in the intimate tensions of conversation, promise, and doubt. In doing so, it gives the genre a reflective depth that continues to reward attentive readers.
The novel’s enduring power comes from themes that are at once historical and perennial: liberty versus tyranny, justice versus expediency, and love’s vulnerability before the public claims of allegiance and ambition. Shelley examines how ideals can be tested by circumstance, and how personal attachments can either sustain or betray one’s sense of duty. The book also explores the shaping of reputations—how memory, rumor, pageantry, and narrative elevate individuals to symbolic stature—and asks whether that elevation reveals genuine virtue or merely masks corrosive desire.
Shelley’s technique enriches these concerns through atmospheric description, careful pacing, and a sensitivity to political detail that clarifies rather than overwhelms. Landscapes and cityscapes are rendered with a painterly attention that situates private choices in communal spaces—councils, streets, sanctuaries—where every resolution echoes. Speeches and deliberations are framed to illuminate contrasting visions of order and freedom. The novel’s historical scaffolding never feels pedantic; instead, it becomes the dramatic medium through which questions of responsibility, promise, and power gain weight and nuance.
At the narrative’s heart are characters who feel both emblematic and intensely individual. Castruccio appears as a figure of dazzling capability, strategic intelligence, and undeniable allure, whose path compels admiration even as it summons judgment. Opposite him stands Euthanasia of Valperga, a creation whose strength resides in principle as much as affection. Around them, Shelley arranges companions, rivals, and seers—most memorably a visionary woman whose spiritual fervor and vulnerability challenge easy interpretations—so that each encounter tests the balance between empathy and resolve.
One of the novel’s signal achievements is its centering of women’s experience within the historical romance. Shelley imagines how women act, deliberate, and influence events beyond the conventional spaces allotted to them, and how they articulate alternative visions of civic life. Rather than functioning as mere emblems of reward or loss, the female characters voice ethical arguments, negotiate conflicting duties, and insist that politics cannot be severed from care, memory, and responsibility. This perspective broadens the historical novel’s scope and invites readers to reconsider whose voices transmit the meaning of the past.
Valperga also bears the imprint of Shelley’s philosophical inheritance and reading, shaped by a milieu that scrutinized authority and championed rational inquiry. The novel’s politics are not delivered as doctrine but dramatized through the friction of competing commitments, exposing how good intentions, once entangled with mastery, may curdle into domination. Shelley invites readers to inhabit the gray zone where admiration for energy and intellect shades into unease at their consequences, and where the rhetoric of necessity tempts leaders—and those who love them—to excuse what conscience cannot fully endorse.
Its literary impact extends beyond its immediate moment. By wedding archival texture to ethical investigation, Shelley offered a model of historical fiction that encouraged later novelists to see the past as a proving ground for contemporary concerns rather than a decorative backdrop. Within Romantic and nineteenth-century studies, Valperga has secured a place as a significant counterpoint to celebrations of conquest, emphasizing the moral imagination as a crucial instrument of historical understanding. It stands as a landmark in Mary Shelley’s oeuvre, demonstrating her range and ambition well beyond her most famous creation.
Reading Valperga in an unabridged form restores the architecture of a three-volume narrative built on alternation, return, and accumulating moral pressure. Its sequences of counsel, journey, and confrontation operate like stages in a civic education, asking the reader to trace how decisions harden into habits and habits shape the fate of communities. The fullness of the text allows minor figures, local customs, and contested rituals to matter, underscoring Shelley’s conviction that history is never made by solitary will alone, but by the converging actions of many lives.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s questions feel urgently familiar. It considers how charismatic leadership can dazzle publics, how fear and hope may be mobilized, and how private devotion intersects with the demands of justice. Its portraits of divided cities and contested loyalties speak to modern debates about governance, populism, and the ethics of resistance. Valperga endures because it refuses easy consolations: it honors courage without sanctifying victory, and it trusts readers to weigh ambition against empathy, power against principle—an equilibrium that remains as compelling now as when Mary Shelley first imagined it.
Synopsis
Mary Shelley’s Valperga, first published in 1823, is a historical novel set amid the violent factional struggles of medieval Tuscany. Reimagining the career of the Ghibelline leader Castruccio Castracani, the book intertwines political history with an intimate exploration of conscience, love, and power. Shelley frames Castruccio’s ascent through the perspectives of two women—Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga, and Beatrice, a visionary prophetess—whose distinct ideals confront his ambition. Moving through courts, camps, and city-states, the narrative depicts the pressures of the Guelf–Ghibelline conflict while examining how private attachments and public duty collide, shaping the destinies of rulers and those who live under their sway.
The early chapters establish a fractured Italy where rival allegiances divide families and cities. Castruccio emerges as a charismatic soldier and strategist whose talent and resolve promise a path to dominion. Shelley situates his return to Tuscan politics against rituals of civic life and the hard calculus of war. Euthanasia, the principled and independent mistress of Valperga, offers a counterweight: her cultivated court and humane governance exemplify republican virtue. An old bond links her to Castruccio, but the values that guide her estate—mercy, restraint, and the rule of law—stand in uneasy relation to his imperial aspirations and the ruthless logic of factional survival.
As Castruccio consolidates allies and tests his fortunes against rival cities, diplomatic missions and military maneuvers occupy the stage. Victories and reversals unsettle the region, and the prestige of Lucca rises with his fame. Reunited with Euthanasia, he seeks both moral validation and political advantage, while she measures his intentions against her principles and the welfare of her people. Shelley balances portraits of pageantry with scenes of displacement, allowing the costs of glory to appear in the faces of refugees and the anxious deliberations of councils. Love, in this telling, is inseparable from the terms imposed by power.
Euthanasia’s household becomes a haven for artists, scholars, and exiles, a small commonwealth ordered by reason and reciprocal duty. She leverages her influence to mediate disputes, hoping to spare her lands from the devastations that engulf neighboring territories. The novel’s middle movement turns on embassies, truces, and fragile guarantees that reveal the precariousness of civic freedom. Castruccio’s charm and resolve tempt acquiescence, yet his methods—swift, calculating, and sometimes merciless—force Euthanasia to reckon with what allegiance would ask of her. Shelley composes these debates with care, emphasizing the moral texture of decisions made under the shadow of war.
Into this contested world enters Beatrice, a solitary visionary shaped by ascetic discipline and the apocalyptic mood of the age. Subject to trances and inspired speech, she commands attention in marketplaces and sanctuaries, where crowds hear promises of judgment and deliverance. Castruccio encounters her and recognizes both the danger and utility of a charisma that answers to no earthly command. Shelley traces their evolving connection with psychological nuance: fascination, pity, and calculated opportunism mingle as power circles prophecy. Beatrice’s presence refracts the novel’s central conflict, confronting worldly prudence with a faith that reads politics as a drama of souls.
The contrast between Euthanasia and Beatrice structures much of the narrative’s tension. Euthanasia, the embodiment of enlightened stewardship, trusts in counsel and measured reform; Beatrice, aflame with visions, demands purity and sacrifice. Both, however, expose the limits of Castruccio’s project: one by principled resistance to tyranny; the other by unsettling his certainty with promises of divine reckoning. As rival factions press their claims and armies maneuver, Euthanasia defends Valperga’s autonomy through negotiation and carefully drawn boundaries. Each concession invites a further demand, and her position becomes emblematic of communities caught between preserving liberty and surviving the ambitions of a rising lord.
Shelley widens the canvas to show the tumult of Tuscan city-states, where civic rituals coexist with sudden violence. Alliances shift, oaths are sworn and broken, and reputations are made in the space between council chambers and the battlefield. Castruccio’s administrative rigor and battlefield prowess enhance his stature, yet the apparatus of rule—spies, sieges, and exacted tributes—exposes the impersonal machinery beneath chivalric display. Scenes of celebration and religious ceremony alternate with the austerity of campaign life, underscoring the novel’s recurring question: whether order founded on fear can secure a durable peace, or whether only consent and justice can reconcile authority with human dignity.
As conflict intensifies, Beatrice’s visions grow darker, interpreting the era’s calamities as signs of imminent judgment. Her uncompromising fervor unsettles friends and enemies alike, while Castruccio weighs the political advantages of sanctified spectacle against the risks of inciting fanaticism. Euthanasia perseveres in measured opposition, counseling moderation even as constraints tighten around her estate. Attempts at reconciliation falter on incompatible premises—ambition’s demand for unity, conscience’s insistence on limits. Shelley sustains the suspense through converging pressures: personal vows, public necessity, and the seductive eloquence of destiny tug the principal figures toward choices whose outcomes the narrative defers.
Without disclosing decisive turns, the closing movement clarifies the novel’s abiding concerns. Valperga interrogates the nature of greatness, testing martial prowess and statecraft against the claims of liberty, compassion, and faith. Shelley uses the medieval past to reflect on the modern problem of charismatic authority and the fragility of republican institutions under strain. The intertwined fates of Castruccio, Euthanasia, and Beatrice dramatize how private love and visionary conviction fare when subjected to history’s demands. The book endures for its sober meditation on power: that mastery of others may cost mastery of oneself, and that the just measure of rule is the freedom it leaves intact.
Historical Context
Valperga unfolds in early fourteenth-century northern-central Italy, principally Tuscany and the surrounding regions. The dominant institutions framing the narrative are the Roman Catholic Church, the self-governing city-republics (communes), and a patchwork of feudal lordships that still controlled castles and rural districts. Urban guilds regulated work and civic life, while councils, magistrates, and hired officials administered justice. The Holy Roman Empire claimed theoretical sovereignty in Italy, but imperial authority was intermittent. The papacy, increasingly influential in Italian politics, asserted spiritual supremacy and temporal claims. Against this backdrop of divided jurisdiction and overlapping loyalties, Mary Shelley situates a story of power, conscience, and civil conflict grounded in documented medieval struggles.
The Italian communes—Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Siena, and others—balanced republican forms with the rise of single rulers (signori) when war and faction intensified. Offices such as the podestà and the capitano del popolo were designed to keep peace among rival families and guilds, yet they often proved temporary solutions. In periods of stress, charismatic military leaders or noble factions seized control, converting communes into personal lordships. These shifts are central to the world of Valperga, where councils, embassies, and oaths coexist with coercion, fortifications, and purges. The novel’s settings—from council chambers to mountain castles—reflect the real interplay between civic institutions and martial power in medieval Tuscany.
The most persistent fault line of the era was the Guelph–Ghibelline divide, shorthand for allegiance to papal or imperial interests. Originating in earlier struggles between the Hohenstaufen emperors and the Church, by the 1300s these labels often masked local rivalries, mercantile competition, and family feuds. Cities regularly expelled political opponents, confiscated their property, and rewrote statutes to favor victors. Alliances shifted quickly as towns sought advantages against neighbors. Valperga echoes these dynamics: characters move through a landscape shaped by factional banners, oaths, and banishments. The book’s attention to civic rhetoric and battlefield realities mirrors how ideological slogans intertwined with practical contests for jurisdiction, taxes, and trade routes.
At the center stands the historical figure Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (c. 1281–1328), whose career exemplifies the era’s volatility. A Ghibelline captain, Castruccio rose to prominence amid the turbulence that followed Uguccione della Faggiuola’s dominance in Pisa and Lucca. In 1316 Castruccio emerged as lord of Lucca, consolidating power through alliances and military campaigns. His most famous victory came at Altopascio (1325), where he routed Florence’s Guelph army. He later aligned with Louis IV of Bavaria during the emperor’s Italian expedition, receiving imperial titles—contemporary sources report him styled as duke and vicar in Lucca and neighboring territories. He died in 1328, leaving a contested legacy of tactical brilliance and harsh rule.
Florence, the era’s commercial powerhouse, supplies a crucial counterpoint in the novel’s context. The city’s government of guilds, rooted in the Ordinances of Justice (1293), curbed magnate violence while empowering merchant elites. Internal fissures produced the White and Black Guelph split around 1301–1302, leading to cycles of exile, including that of Dante Alighieri. Florence’s Guelph identity put it at odds with Ghibelline neighbors such as Lucca. The conflict shaped taxation, military levies, and diplomatic maneuvers across Tuscany. Valperga’s depictions of Florentine civic pride, public oratory, and anti-tyrannical ideals reflect this republican tradition under constant military pressure.
The imperial–papal confrontation intensified under Pope John XXII (reigned 1316–1334), who resided in Avignon. He excommunicated Louis IV in 1324 amid a dispute over imperial investiture. Louis’s expedition into Italy (1327–1328) sought to assert imperial rights; in 1328 he entered Rome and, without papal sanction, arranged a coronation and supported the short-lived antipope Nicholas V. Castruccio, a key imperial ally in Tuscany, benefited from the emperor’s favor. Valperga situates its characters within these conflicts, where ecclesiastical censures, imperial edicts, and local oaths overlap, illustrating how high politics filtered down into municipal statutes, siege decisions, and the precarious terms of civic loyalty.
Religious institutions permeated everyday life. Mendicant orders—the Franciscans (approved 1209) and Dominicans (1216)—preached in cities and staffed universities, while the papally sanctioned inquisitorial machinery investigated heresy. Apocalyptic and reform currents, influenced by prophetic traditions associated with Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), sometimes found adherents among laypeople and friars. Movements deemed heretical, such as that led by Fra Dolcino, were violently suppressed (Dolcino was captured and executed in 1307). Valperga’s portrayal of visionary piety and popular preaching resonates with this environment, where charismatic prophecy could inspire spiritual renewal yet clash with church authority and civic order.
The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) altered Italy’s political chemistry. With the pontiff absent from Rome, papal legates and fiscal officials operated across the peninsula, and Italian Guelph polities often asserted solidarity with the papal cause. Meanwhile, power vacuums in Rome and elsewhere encouraged local experiments in government and opened doors to imperial intervention. These conditions amplified the stakes of factional allegiance for communes like Florence, Lucca, and Pisa. In Valperga, papal declarations, ecclesiastical alliances, and the moral authority of the Church appear as both spiritual touchstones and instruments of temporal strategy, complicating individual conscience and civic obligation.
Warfare defined the period’s rhythms. Communal militias—organized by neighborhood and guild—served alongside professional soldiers increasingly hired for campaigns. Crossbowmen, cavalry, and infantry endured sieges and ambushes across Tuscan valleys and passes. Stone walls, towers, and hilltop fortresses controlled routes between city and countryside. The Battle of Altopascio (1325) showed how a tactical victory could rapidly alter regional balances, intensifying purges and reprisals. Valperga’s martial episodes reflect the logistics of medieval campaigning: supply lines, fortified towns, negotiated surrenders, and the relentless pressure such conflicts imposed on artisans, peasants, and urban elites alike.
Economic life undergirded political power. Tuscany’s wool and silk industries, regulated by guilds, fueled prosperity and civic rivalries. The florin, Florence’s gold coin first minted in 1252, circulated widely and enabled long-distance banking. Houses such as the Bardi and Peruzzi operated international credit networks in the early 1300s. War taxation, forced loans, and the confiscation of exiles’ property destabilized households and reshaped class alliances. Rural communities suffered requisitions and destruction of crops during campaigns. Valperga registers these forces obliquely, as fortunes rise and fall with sieges and treaties, showing how material interests, no less than ideology, steered allegiances and sharpened factional divides.
Cultural life flourished amid turmoil. Dante composed the Divine Comedy in exile, fusing theology, politics, and vernacular poetics around 1300–1321. In the visual arts, Giotto’s innovations in Florence and elsewhere advanced naturalism and religious storytelling. Courtly ideals and chivalric rhetoric remained influential, even as civic humanism’s antecedents took shape in communal schools and notarial culture. Literacy in the vernacular expanded among merchants and professionals. Valperga draws on medieval romance motifs—oaths, trials of loyalty, prophetic signs—yet it also interrogates the gap between chivalric display and ethical conduct, echoing the period’s own tension between ceremonial honor and the brutal arithmetic of war.
Women’s lives were constrained by law and custom, though circumstances varied by city and class. Dowry systems structured marriage; patrilineal kin groups guided alliances; and formal political office was closed to women. Yet some women managed estates during male relatives’ absences, patronized religious institutions, or gained reputations for sanctity and prophetic insight. Female visionaries and abbesses occasionally influenced civic debates, particularly in times of crisis. Valperga gives sustained attention to women’s moral and social agency within these constraints, portraying how vows, lineage, and piety could become tools for negotiating power in a male-dominated public sphere.
Geography shaped politics. Lucca controlled fertile plains and sat on the Via Francigena, a major pilgrim and trade route linking northern Europe to Rome. The city’s famed relic, the Volto Santo (Holy Face), drew pilgrims and trade. Mountain passes over the Apennines connected Tuscany to the Ligurian coast and the Lunigiana, a contested zone of castles and corridors. Control of roads, bridges, and river crossings determined who paid tolls and who could mobilize troops swiftly. Valperga’s movement across valleys and hillforts mirrors a real topography in which political fortunes hinged on access to routes, sanctuaries, and defended high ground.
Mary Shelley drew on well-known historical accounts. Niccolò Machiavelli’s early sixteenth-century Vita di Castruccio Castracani portrays Castruccio as a model of princely prowess, blending anecdote and didactic purpose. In the early nineteenth century, J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi’s multivolume Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Âge (published from 1807) offered an influential narrative of Italian communal politics and civic liberty. Valperga engages these traditions of writing about Castruccio and the republics, shifting attention from the triumphs of statecraft to the human costs of faction and rule, and interrogating the idea of the “hero” celebrated by earlier historiography.
The novel also belongs to a contemporary literary movement: the historical novel popularized in Britain by Walter Scott after 1814. Readers had an appetite for carefully dated settings, documented events, and fictional characters woven through them. Shelley follows this pattern while emphasizing moral and political inquiry. Her medieval Italy is reconstructed through chronicles and modern histories but is attentive to private life—friendship, vows, and belief—as engines of public consequence. In doing so, Valperga participates in Romantic historicism: the conviction that past epochs illuminate enduring conflicts of conscience and policy, without sacrificing factual scaffolding or period specificity.
Mary Shelley composed the book while living in Italy (1818–1822), a period when the peninsula, after the Congress of Vienna (1815), was largely restored to conservative dynasties under Austrian influence. In 1820–1821 revolts linked to the Carbonari sought constitutional limits in Naples and Piedmont; they were suppressed by forces aligned with the Holy Alliance. Although set five centuries earlier, Valperga’s interest in tyranny, civic liberty, and exile resonates with this contemporary climate of surveillance and reaction. Shelley’s immediate surroundings—Tuscany, Liguria, and their medieval monuments—also supplied tangible sites and archives for reconstructing the fourteenth-century world.
Valperga appeared in London in 1823 in three volumes, under the full title Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. Its publication coincided with renewed interest in Italian history among British readers, fueled by travel writing, translations, and political news from the peninsula. The book offered the attractions of pageantry and warfare, yet its narrative choices foreground the ethics of rulership and the vulnerabilities of communities under siege. By juxtaposing documented events with invented lives, Shelley provided a narrative bridge between archive and imagination that tested the moral reputations of both republican and princely regimes in medieval Tuscany’s crucible of conflict.
Author Biography
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist, biographer, and editor whose career unfolded amid the Romantic era’s intellectual ferment. She is best known for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818, a work often cited as foundational to both Gothic literature and modern science fiction. Across fiction, travel writing, and biography, Shelley examined the ethics of knowledge, the vulnerabilities of social life, and the legacies of history. Living through an age of political upheaval and rapid scientific speculation, she produced a body of writing that interrogated imagination’s promises and perils while helping to shape nineteenth-century literary culture.
Raised in a household deeply engaged with books and public debate, Shelley received an unconventional education centered on extensive reading rather than formal schooling. She absorbed Enlightenment arguments about reason and rights alongside the emergent sensibilities of British Romanticism. Literary influences included John Milton’s epic poetry, the Gothic tradition, and continental prose and drama circulating in translation. She followed contemporary discussions of natural philosophy, including electricity and galvanism, and read travel narratives and histories that cultivated a comparative outlook. Early notebooks and later prefaces indicate how this wide reading, combined with conversations in an active intellectual circle, formed her habits of inquiry.
In 1816 she spent a formative summer near Lake Geneva in a company of writers where a ghost-story challenge spurred new work. Out of that period she developed the conception that became Frankenstein, drafted primarily in 1816–1817. The novel appeared anonymously in 1818, prompting curiosity about its authorship; an 1823 edition named her, and a substantially revised 1831 edition added her reflective introduction on the tale’s origin. Frankenstein fused Gothic atmosphere with contemporary debates about scientific creation and responsibility. Early reviews were mixed, yet the book rapidly entered public discourse, inspiring stage adaptations and ongoing discussion of invention, ambition, and accountability.
Shelley pursued a varied literary career beyond her most famous novel. Valperga (1823) offered a carefully researched historical narrative set in medieval Italy. The Last Man (1826) imagined civilization under the pressure of a global plague, combining speculative motifs with meditations on loss and community. She returned to history in The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), and explored social and legal pressures on women in Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Alongside novels, she produced numerous short stories for literary annuals and the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Contemporary reception often divided, but her range and ambition were recognized.
After the death of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she had married, she returned to Britain and undertook sustained editorial work to secure his reputation. She prepared texts, arranged publications, and supplied contextual notes and biographical prefaces, while navigating constraints placed on what she could publicly disclose. Her efforts resulted in landmark editions across the 1820s and 1830s, notably a collected Poetical Works in 1839, and helped establish the corpus and chronology of Percy Shelley’s writings. This curatorial labor, conducted alongside her own authorship, significantly shaped how Romantic poetry came to be read in the Victorian period and after.
Shelley’s writing consistently interrogates power, responsibility, and sympathy. She appraises scientific curiosity through ethical questions rather than spectacle, foregrounding education, consent, and care. Her historical and domestic fiction scrutinizes political violence, exile, and the precarious status of women under law and custom. She also contributed biographical essays to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, where she treated cultural history as a moral and civic education. Influences often noted by scholars include the rational dissent and political thought prominent in her upbringing and the poetic ideals of the Romantic movement. Yet her prose tends toward pragmatic skepticism, attentive to unintended consequences and human interdependence.
In later years Shelley continued to write, manage editions, and cultivate a professional identity as an author and editor. She maintained connections with publishers and the broader literary world, while her works circulated in Britain and on the continent. She died in 1851. Her legacy has only grown: Frankenstein remains a touchstone in debates about innovation, creation, and social responsibility, and The Last Man is recognized as an early landmark of apocalyptic and pandemic fiction. Scholars now emphasize her breadth across genres and her shaping of Romantic canons, while stage and screen adaptations keep her ideas vividly present to new audiences.
Valperga (Unabridged)
Preface
The accounts of the Life of Castruccio known in England, are generally taken from Macchiavelli’s romance concerning this chief. The reader may find a detail of his real adventures in Sismondi’s delightful publication, Histoire des Republiques Italiennes de L’Age Moyen. In addition to this work, I have consulted Tegrino’s Life of Castruccio, and Giovanni Villani’s Florentine Annals.
The following is a translation from the article respecting him in Moreri.
“Castruccio Castracani, one of the most celebrated captains of his time, lived in the fourteenth century. He was of the family of the Antelminelli of Lucca; and, having at a very early age borne arms in favour of the Ghibelines, he was exiled by the Guelphs. He served not long after in the armies of Philip king of France, who made war on the Flemings. In the sequel he repassed the Alps; and, having joined Uguccione Faggiuola, chief of the Ghibelines of Tuscany, he reduced Lucca, Pistoia, and several other towns. He became the ally of the emperor Louis of Bavaria, against pope John XXII, Robert king of Naples, and the Florentines. Louis of Bavaria gave him the investiture of Lucca under the denomination of Duke, together with the title of Senator of Rome. Nothing seemed able to oppose his courage and good fortune, when he was taken off by a premature death in 1330, in the forty-seventh year of his age.”
The dates here given are somewhat different from those adopted in the following narrative.
Chapter 1
The other nations of Europe were yet immersed in barbarism, when Italy, where the light of civilization had never been wholly eclipsed, began to emerge from the darkness of the ruin of the Western Empire, and to catch from the East the returning rays of literature and science. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante had already given a permanent form to the language which was the offspring of this revolution; he was personally engaged in those political struggles, in which the elements of the good and evil that have since assumed a more permanent form were contending; his disappointment and exile gave him leisure to meditate, and produced his Divina Comedia[1].
Lombardy and Tuscany, the most civilized districts of Italy, exhibited astonishing specimens of human genius; but at the same time they were torn to pieces by domestic faction, and almost destroyed by the fury of civil wars. The ancient quarrels of the Guelphs and the Ghibelines were started with renovated zeal, under the new distinctions of Bianchi and Neri. The Ghibelines and the Bianchi were the friends of the emperor, asserting the supremacy and universality of his sway over all other dominion, ecclesiastical or civil: the Guelphs and the Neri were the partizans of liberty. Florence was at the head of the Guelphs, and employed, as they were employed by it in their turn, the Papal power as a pretext and an instrument.
The distinctions of Bianchi and Neri took their rise in Pistoia, a town of some moment between Florence and Lucca. The Neri being expelled from Pistoia, the exiles fixed their residence in Lucca; where they so fortified and augmented their party, as to be able in the year 1301 to expel the Bianchi, among whom was Castruccio Castracani dei Antelminelli.
The family of the Antelminelli was one of the most distinguished in Lucca. They had followed the emperors in their Italian wars, and had received in recompense titles and reward. The father of Castruccio was the chief of his house; he had been a follower of the unfortunate Manfred, king of Naples, and his party feelings as a Ghibeline derived new fervour from the adoration with which he regarded his noble master. Manfred was the natural son of the last emperor of the house of Swabia; before the age of twenty he had performed the most brilliant exploits, and undergone the most romantic vicissitudes, in all of which the father of Castruccio had been his faithful page and companion. The unrelenting animosity with which the successive Popes pursued his royal master, gave rise in his bosom to a hatred, that was heightened by the contempt with which he regarded their cowardly and artful policy.
When therefore the quarrels of the Guelphs and Ghibelines[2] were revived in Lucca under the names of Bianchi and Neri, Ruggieri dei Antelminelli was the chief opponent and principal victim of the machinations of the Papal party. Castruccio was then only eleven years of age; but his young imagination was deeply impressed by the scenes that passed around him. When the citizens of Lucca had assembled on the appointed day to choose their Podestà, or principal magistrate, the two parties dividing on the Piazza glared defiance at each other: the Guelphs had the majority in numbers; but the Ghibelines wishing, like Brennus, to throw the sword into the ascending scale, assailed the stronger party with arms in their hands. They were repulsed; and, flying before their enemies, the Guelphs remained in possession of the field, where, under the guidance of their chiefs, they voted the perpetual banishment of the Ghibelines; and the summons was read by a herald, which commanded all the districts of Lucca to range themselves the next morning under their respective banners, that they might attack and expel by force those of the contrary party who should refuse to obey the decree.
Ruggieri returned from the Piazza of the Podestà, accompanied by several of his principal friends. His wife, Madonna Dianora, was anxiously waiting his return; while the young Castruccio stood at the casement, and, divining by his mother’s countenance the cause of her inquietude, looked eagerly down the street that he might watch the approach of his father: he clapped his hands with joy, as he exclaimed, “They come!” Ruggieri entered; his wife observed him inquiringly and tenderly, but forbore to speak; yet her cheek became pale, when she heard her husband issue orders, that the palace should be barricadoed, and none permitted to enter, except those who brought the word which shewed that they belonged to the same party.
“Are we in danger?” — asked Madonna Dianora in a low voice of one of their most intimate friends. Her husband overheard her, and replied: “Keep up your courage, my best girl; trust me, as you have ever trusted. I would that I dared send you to a place of safety, but it were not well that you traversed the streets of Lucca; so you must share my fortunes, Dianora.”
“Have I not ever shared them?” replied his wife. His friends had retired to an adjoining hall, and she continued; — “There can be no dearer fate to me than to live or perish with you, Ruggieri; but cannot we save our son?”
Castruccio was sitting at the feet of his parents, and gazing on them with his soft, yet bright eyes. He had looked at his mother as she spoke; now he turned eagerly towards his father while he listened to his reply:— “We have been driven from the Piazza of the Podestà, and we can no longer entertain any hope of overcoming our enemies. The mildest fate that we may expect is confiscation and banishment; if they decree our death, the stones of this palace alone divide us from our fate. And Castruccio, — could any of our friends convey him hence, I should feel redoubled courage — but it is too much to risk.”
“Father,” said the boy, “I am only a child, and can do no good; but I pray you do not send me away from you: indeed, dear, dearest mother, I will not leave you.”
The trampling of horses was heard in the streets: Ruggieri started up; one of his friends entered:— “It is the guard going to the gates,” said he; “the assembly of the people is broken up.”
“And what is decreed?”
“No one ventures near to inquire out that; but courage, my noble lord.”
“That word to me, Ricciardo? — but it is well; my wife and child make a very woman of me.”
“Ave Maria is now ringing,” replied his companion; “soon night will set in, and, if you will trust me, I will endeavour to convey Madonna Dianora to some place of concealment.”
“Many thanks, my good Ricciardo,” answered the lady; “my safest post is at the side of Ruggieri. But our boy — save him, and a mother’s blessing, her warm, heartfelt thanks: all the treasure that I can give, shall be yours. You know Valperga?”
“Yes, the castle of Valperga. Is the Countess there now?”
“She is, — and she is our friend; if my Castruccio were once within the walls of that castle, I were happy.”
While Madonna Dianora conversed thus with Ricciardo, Ruggieri held a consultation with his friends. The comfortable daylight had faded away, and night brought danger and double fear along with it. The companions of Ruggieri sat in the banqueting hall of his palace, debating their future conduct: they spoke in whispers, for they feared that a louder tone might overpower any sound in the streets; and they listened to every footfall, as if it were the tread of their coming destiny. Ricciardo joined them; and Madonna Dianora was left alone with her son: they were silent. Dianora wept, and held the hand of her child; while he tried to comfort her, and to shew that fortitude he had often heard his father praise; but his little bosom swelled in despite of his mastery, until, the big tears rolling down his cheeks, he threw himself into his mother’s arms, and sobbed aloud. At this moment some one knocked violently at the palace-gate. The assembled Ghibelines started up, and drew their swords as they rushed towards the staircase; and they stood in fearful silence, while they listened to the answers which the stranger gave to him who guarded the door.
Ruggieri had embraced his wife he feared for the last time. She did not then weep; her high wrought feelings were fixed on one object alone, the safety of her child. — “If you escape,” she cried, “Valperga is your refuge; you well know the road that leads to it.”
The boy did not answer for a while; and then he whispered, while he clung round her neck, — “You, dear mother, shall shew it to me.”
The voice of the man who had disturbed them by his knocking, had reassured the imprisoned Ghibelines, and he was admitted. It was Marco, the servant of Messer Antonio dei Adimari. A Florentine by birth, and a Guelph, Antonio had retired from his native city while it continued under the jurisdiction of the opposite party, and had lived at the castle of Valperga, of which his wife was Countess and Castellana. He was bound to Ruggieri by the strongest ties of private friendship; and he now exerted himself to save his friend. Marco brought intelligence of the decree of the assembly of the people. “Our lives are then in safety,” — cried Dianora, with a wild look of joy, — “and all the rest is as the seared leaves of autumn; they fall off lightly, and make no noise.”
“The night wears apace,” said Marco, “and before sunrise you must depart; will you accompany me to Valperga?”
“Not so,” replied Ruggieri; “we may be beggars, but we will not burthen our friends. Thank your lord for his many kindnesses towards me. I leave it to him to save what he can for me from the ruins of my fortune. If his interest stand high enough with our rulers, intreat him to exert it to preserve the unoffending walls of this palace: it was the dwelling of my forefathers, my inheritance; I lived here during my boyish days; and once its hall was graced by the presence of Manfred. My boy may one day return; and I would not that he should find the palace of his father a ruin. We cannot remain near Lucca, but shall retire to some town which adheres to our party, and there wait for better days.”
Dianora made speedy preparations for their departure; the horses were brought to the door; and the stars were fading in the light of dawn, as the cavalcade proceeded through the high and narrow streets of Lucca. Their progress was unimpeded at the gates; Ruggieri felt a load taken from his heart, when he found himself, with his wife and child, safe in the open country. Yet the feeling of joy was repressed by the remembrance, that life was all that remained to them, and that poverty and obscurity were to be the hard-visaged nurses of their declining years, the harsh tutors of the young and aspiring Castruccio.
The exiles pursued their way slowly to Florence.
Florence was then in a frightful state of civil discord. The Ghibelines had the preponderance; but not a day passed without brawls and bloodshed. Our exiles found many of their townsmen on the same road, on the same sad errand of seeking protection from a foreign state. Little Castruccio saw many of his dearest friends among them; and his young heart, moved by their tears and complaints, became inflamed with rage and desire of vengeance. It was by scenes such as these, that party spirit was generated, and became so strong in Italy. Children, while they were yet too young to feel their own disgrace, saw the misery of their parents, and took early vows of implacable hatred against their persecutors: these were remembered in after times; the wounds were never seared, but the fresh blood ever streaming kept alive the feelings of passion and anger which had given rise to the first blow.
When they arrived at Florence, they were welcomed with kindness by the chiefs of the Bianchi of that city. Charles of Valois had just sent ambassadors to the government, to offer his mediation in composing their differences; and on that very day the party of Ghibelines who composed the council assembled to deliberate on this insidious proposition. It may be easily supposed therefore, that, entirely taken up with their own affairs, they could not bestow the attention they would otherwise have done on the Lucchese exiles. On the following day Ruggieri left Florence.
The exiles proceeded to Ancona. This was the native town of the Lady Dianora; and they were received with hospitality by her relations. But it was a heavy change for Ruggieri, to pass from the active life of the chief of a party, to the unmarked situation of an individual, who had no interest in the government under which he lived, and who had exchanged the distinctions of rank and wealth for that barren respect which an unblamed old age might claim. Ruggieri had been a man of undaunted courage; and this virtue, being no longer called into action, assumed the appearance of patience and fortitude. His dearest pleasure was the unceasing attention he paid to the education of his son. Castruccio was an apt and sprightly boy, bold in action, careless of consequences, and governed only by his affection for his parents. Ruggieri encouraged his adventurous disposition; and although he often sympathized in the fears of his anxious wife, when Castruccio would venture out to sea on a windy day in a little fair-weather skiff, or when he saw him, without bridle or saddle, mount a horse, and, heading a band of his companions, ride off to the woods, yet he never permitted himself to express these fears, or check the daring of his son.
So Castruccio grew up active; light and graceful of limb, trusting that by his own powers he should always escape. Yet the boy was not without prudence; he seemed to perceive instinctively the limits of possibility, and would often repress the fool-hardiness of his companions, and shew his superior judgement and patience in surmounting the same difficulties by slower and safer means. Ruggieri disciplined him betimes in all the duties of a knight and a soldier; he wielded a lance adapted to his size, shot with bow and arrows, and the necessary studies to which he applied, became, on account of their active nature, the source of inexhaustible amusement to him. Accompanied by a troop of lads, they would feign some court surrounded by an old wall, or some ruined tower, to be Troy Town, or any other famous city of ancient days, and then with mimic balestri, and slings and arrows, and lances, they attacked, and defended, and practised those lessons in tactics which their preceptors inculcated at an early age.
During the first year of their banishment his mother died; her weak frame was destroyed by hardship and disappointment. She recommended her son to his father in terms of tender love; and then closed her eyes in peace. This circumstance for a considerable time unhinged the young mind of Castruccio, and interrupted his studies. His father, who loved her tenderly, and who had found in her a friend to whom he could confide those regrets which pride forbade him to impart to any other hearer, now lamented her with excessive grief.
He did not dare check the silent tear that started into the eye of Castruccio, when, returning from his exercises with his companions, he was no longer embraced by his mother; he felt that his own sentiments would refute the lesson he wished to impress.
Ruggieri was consoled for all his past misfortunes by the promising talents and disposition of his son, and parental tenderness, the strongest of all passions, but often the most unfortunate, was to him the sunbeam, solitary, but bright, which enlightened his years of exile and infirmity.
Yet at the moment that he most enjoyed this blessing, his security was suddenly disturbed. One morning Castruccio disappeared; and the following perplexing note addressed to his father, was the only trace that he left of his intentions:—
“Pardon me, dearest father; I will return in a very few days; I am quite safe, therefore do not disquiet yourself on my account. Do not be very angry with me; for, although I am indignant at my own weakness, I cannot resist! Be well assured that in less than a fortnight your unworthy son will be at your feet.
“Castruccio.”
This was the year 1304, when Castruccio was fourteen years of age. Ruggieri hoped and trusted that he was safe, and that he would fulfil his promise and soon return; but he waited with inexpressible anxiety. The cause of Castruccio’s flight was curious, shewing at once the manners of the age and country in which they lived, and the imagination and disposition of the boy.
Chapter 2
A traveller had arrived at Ancona from Florence, and had diffused the intelligence that a strange and tremendous spectacle would be exhibited there on the first of May of that year. It had been proclaimed in the streets of the city, by a herald sent by the inhabitants of the quarter of San Frediano, that all who wished to have news from the other world, should repair on the first of May to the bridge of Carraia or to the quay of the Arno. And he added, that he believed that preparations were made to exhibit Hell, such as it had been described in a poem now writing by Dante Alighieri[3], a part of which had been read, and had given rise to the undertaking.
This account raised the curiosity, and fired the imagination of Castruccio. The idea darted into his head that he would see this wonderful exhibition; and no sooner had he conceived the possibility of doing so, than his determination was fixed. He dared not ask his father’s permission, for he knew that he should be refused; and, like many others, he imagined that it was better to go, not having mentioned his design, than to break a positive command. He felt remorse at leaving his father; but curiosity was the stronger passion, and he was overcome: he left a billet for Ruggieri; and, during the silence of a moonlight night, he mounted his steed, and left Ancona. While proceeding through the streets of the town, he several times repented, and thought that he would return; but no sooner had he passed the walls, than he seemed to feel the joy of liberty descending on him; and he rode on with wild delight, while the mountains and their forests slept under the yellow moon, and the murmur of the placid ocean was the only sound that he heard, except the trampling of his own horse’s hoofs.
Riding hard, and changing his horse on the road, he arrived in five days at Florence. He experienced a peculiar sensation of pleasure, as he descended from the mountains into Tuscany. Alone on the bare Apennines, over which the fierce wind swept, he felt free; there was no one near him to control his motions, to order him to stay or go; but his own will guided his progress, swift or slow, as the various thoughts that arose in his mind impelled him. He felt as if the air that quickly glided over him, was a part of his own nature, and bore his soul along with it; impulses of affection mingled with these inexplicable sensations; his thoughts wandered to his native town; he suffered his imagination to dwell upon the period when he might be recalled from exile, and to luxuriate in dreams of power and distinction.
At length he arrived at the fair city of Florence. It was the first of May, and he hastened from his inn to the scene of action. As he approached, he observed the streets almost blocked up by the multitudes that poured to the same spot; and, not being acquainted with the town, he found that he had better follow the multitude, than seek a way of his own. Driven along by the crowd, he at length came in sight of the Arno. It was covered by boats, on which scaffoldings were erected, hung with black cloth, whose accumulated drapery lent life to the flames, which the glare of day would otherwise have eclipsed. In the midst of these flames moved legions of ghastly and distorted shapes, some with horns of fire, and hoofs, and horrible wings; others the naked representatives of the souls in torment; mimic shrieks burst on the air, screams and demoniac laughter. The infernal drama was acted to the life; and the terrible effect of such a scene was enhanced, by the circumstance of its being no more than an actual representation of what then existed in the imagination of the spectators, endued with the vivid colours of a faith inconceivable in these lethargic days.
Castruccio felt a chill of horror run through his frame; the scene before him appeared for a moment as a reality, rather than a representation; the Arno seemed a yawning gulf, where the earth had opened to display the mysteries of the infernal world; when suddenly a tremendous crash stamped with tenfold horror the terrific mockery. The bridge of Carraia, on which a countless multitude stood, one above the other, looking on the river, fell. Castruccio saw its props loosening, and the curved arch shake, and with a sudden shriek he stretched out his arms, as if he could save those who stood on it. It fell in with a report that was reverberated from the houses that lined the Arno; and even, to the hills which close the valley, it rebellowed along the sky, accompanied by fearful screams, and voices that called on the names of those whom they were never more to behold. The confusion was beyond description terrible; some flying, others pressing towards the banks of the river to help the sufferers; all, as himself, seized with a superstitious dread, which rebuked them for having mimicked the dreadful mysteries of their religion, and which burst forth in clamorous exclamations and wild horror. The heroism of Castruccio failed; he seized with eagerness the opportunity of an opening in the crowd; and, getting into a by street, ran with what speed he could, while his knees still shook beneath him, from the spot he in the morning as eagerly sought. The sound of the shrieks began to die away on his ear before he slackened his speed.
The first idea that struck him, as he recovered his breath, was — “I am escaped from Hell[1q]!” — And seeing a church open, he with an instinctive impulse entered its doors. He felt as if he fled from the powers of evil; and, if he needed protection, where should he seek it with more confidence, than in the temple where the good God of the universe was worshipped? It was indeed as a change from Hell to Heaven, to have escaped from the jostling of the crowd, the dreadful spectacle of mimicked torments, the unearthly crash that bellowed like thunder along the sky, and the shrieks of the dying — to the silence of the empty church, the faint smell of incense, and the few quiet lights that burned on the high altar. Castruccio was seized with a feeling of awe as he walked up the aisle; and conscience, alive at that moment, reproached him bitterly for having quitted his father. When the idea struck him — “If I had been on that bridge,” — he could no longer resist his emotions; tears ran fast down his cheeks, and he sobbed aloud.
A man, whom he had not perceived before kneeling in a niche beside the altar, arose on hearing the voice of grief, and drew near the boy. “Why do you weep?” — he said. Castruccio, who had not heard his approach, looked up with surprise; for it was the voice of Marco, the servant of his father’s friend, Messer Antonio dei Adimari. Marco instantly recognised him; for who that had once seen, could ever forget his dark eyes, shaded by long, pointed lashes, his sun-bright hair, and his countenance that beamed with sweet frankness and persuasion? The boy threw himself into the arms of his humble, but affectionate friend, and wept there for some time. When he had become more calm, his story was told in a few words. Marco was not inclined to find fault with an adventurous spirit, and soon consoled him. — “You are safe,” — he said; “so there is no harm done. Come, this is rather a fortunate event than otherwise; my lord and lady are in Florence; you shall stay a night with them; and to — morrow morning we will send you home to your anxious father.”
The eyes of Castruccio sparkled with hope. — “Euthanasia is here?”
“She is.”
“Quick then, dear Marco, let us go. — How fortunate it was that I came to Florence!”
The life of Messer Antonio dei Adimari had been spent in the military and civil service of his country; he had often been Priore; and now, that age and blindness had caused him to withdraw from the offices of the state, his counsels were sought and acted upon by his successors. He had married the only daughter of the Count of Valperga, a feudal chief who possessed large estates in the territory of Lucca. His castle was situated among the Apennines north of Lucca, and his estates consisted of a few scattered villages, raised on the peaks of mountains, and rendered almost inaccessible by nature as well as art.
By the death of her father the wife of Adimari became Countess and Castellana of the district; and the duties which this government imposed upon her, often caused the removal of her whole family from Florence to the castle of Valperga. It was during these visits that Adimari renewed a friendship that had before subsisted between him and Ruggieri dei Antelminelli. Messer Antonio was a Guelph, and had fought against Manfred under the banners of the Pope: it happened during one campaign that Ruggieri fell wounded and a prisoner into his hands; he attended him with humanity; and, when he perceived that no care could restore him if separated from his prince, and that he languished to attend at the side of Manfred, he set him free; and this was the commencement of a friendship, which improved by mutual good offices, and more than all by the esteem that they bore one to the other, had long allied the two houses, though of different parties, in the strictest amity.
Adimari continued in the service of his country, until his infirmities permitted him to withdraw from these active and harassing duties, and, giving up the idea of parties and wars, to apply himself exclusively to literature. The spirit of learning, after a long sleep, that seemed to be annihilation, awoke, and shook her wings over her favoured Italy. Inestimable treasures of learning then existed in various monasteries, of the value of which their inhabitants were at length aware; and even laymen began to partake of that curiosity, which made Petrarch but a few years after travel round Europe to collect manuscripts, and to preserve those wonderful writings, now mutilated, but which would otherwise have been entirely lost.
Antonio dei Adimari enjoyed repose in the bosom of his family, his solitude cheered by the converse which he held with the sages of Rome in ages long past. His family consisted of his wife, two boys, and a girl only two years younger than Castruccio. He and Euthanasia had been educated together almost from their cradle. They had wandered hand in hand among the wild mountains and chestnut woods that surrounded her mother’s castle. Their studies, their amusements, were in common; and it was a terrible blow to each when they were separated by the exile of the Antelminelli. Euthanasia, whose soul was a deep well of love, felt most, and her glistening eyes and infantine complaints told for many months, even years after, that she still remembered, and would never forget, the playmate of her childhood.
At the period of this separation Adimari was threatened by a misfortune, the worst that could befall a man of study and learning — blindness. The disease gained ground, and in a year he saw nothing of this fair world but an universal and impenetrable blank. In this dreadful state Euthanasia was his only consolation. Unable to attend to the education of his boys, he sent them to the court of Naples, to which he had before adhered, and in which he possessed many valued friends; and his girl alone remained to cheer him with her prattle; for the countess, his wife, a woman of high birth and party, did not sympathize in his sedentary occupations. — “I will not leave you,” said Euthanasia to him one day, when he bade her go and amuse herself, — “I am most pleased while talking with you. You cannot read now, or occupy yourself with those old parchments in which you used to delight. But tell me, dear father, could you not teach me to read them to you? You know I can read very well, and I am never so well pleased as when I can get some of the troubadour songs, or some old chronicle, to puzzle over. These to be sure are written in another language; but I am not totally unacquainted with it; and, if you would have a little patience with me, I think I should be able to understand these difficult authors.”
The disabled student did not disdain so affectionate an offer. Every one in those days was acquainted with a rude and barbarous Latin, the knowledge of which Euthanasia now exchanged for the polished language of Cicero and Virgil. A priest of a neighbouring chapel was her tutor; and the desire of pleasing her father made her indefatigable in her exertions. The first difficulties being conquered, she passed whole days over these dusky manuscripts, reading to the old man, who found double pleasure in the ancient poets, as he heard their verses pronounced by his beloved Euthanasia. The effect of this education on her mind was advantageous and memorable; she did not acquire that narrow idea of the present times, as if they and the world were the same, which characterizes the unlearned; she saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight, scattering change as he went; and, if her voice or act could mingle aught of good in these changes, this it was to which her imagination most ardently aspired. She was deeply penetrated by the acts and thoughts of those men, who despised the spirit of party, and grasped the universe in their hopes of virtue and independence.
Liberty had never been more devotedly worshipped than in the republic of Florence: the Guelphs[5]
