Those that in their travels in France have had the good-fortune to visit
the Abbey of Bonne Aventure in Poitou can hardly fail to be familiar
with the many and varied treasures of the abbey library. Most of these
treasures were brought together by the erudite Dom Gregory, who had,
among the other honorable passions of a scholar, an enthusiastic desire
for the amassing of rare manuscripts. Perhaps one of the rarest of all
the manuscripts in his great collection is that one which claims to be
written by the Italian poet Lappo Lappi, and to set forth in something
like narrative form an account of the loves of Dante and Beatrice.
Students and scholars who have studied this manuscript have differed
greatly in their conclusions as to its authenticity and its value. The
German Guggenheim is emphatic in his assertion that the work is a late
eighteenth-century forgery, and he bases his conclusions on many small
inaccuracies of time and place and fact which his zeal and pertinacity
have discovered. On the other hand, Prof. Hiram B. Pawling, whose
contributions to the history of Italian literature form some of the
brightest jewels in the crown of Harvard University, is inclined, after
careful consideration, to believe that the manuscript is, on the whole,
a genuine work.
Undoubtedly the sheets of parchment upon which the remarkable document
is written are older than the fourteenth century, some time in whose
first half Lappo, if he be the author, must have written the book. The
keen scrutiny of powerful magnifying-glasses has revealed the fact that
much of it is inscribed on skins which had formerly been used for the
recording of a series of Lives of the Saints, whose almost effaced
letters belong, without question, to the latter part of the twelfth
century. Whoever wrote this story of Dante must have been at the
economical pains to erase carefully the ecclesiastical script, thus
curiously avenging so many palimpsests of Greek poets and Latin poets,
whose lyrics have been scrubbed away with pumice-stone to make room for
homilies and liturgies and hagiologies. If the writer of the story be
indeed Lappo Lappi, it would be quite in keeping with his character, as
we know it, to imagine him enjoying very greatly this process of
obliterating some saintly relation in order to set down upon the
restored surfaces his testimony to the greatest love-story of Italy. It
is, however, unfortunately impossible to maintain with certainty that
the writing is actually from the hand of Lappo. Though it appears to be
a clerkly calligraphy of the fourteenth century, such things have been
imitated too often to enable any but the rashest and most headstrong of
scholars to give a definite and unquestionable opinion. One may cherish
with reason a private belief that the thing is indeed Lappo's work in
Lappo's writing, but with the memory of some famous literary impositions
fresh upon us, very notably the additions to Petronius, we must pause
and pronounce warily. It may be, indeed, that although the book be
genuine enough in its creation, it was never intended to be regarded as
a serious statement of facts, but rather to be taken as an essay in
romance by one who wished the facts were as he pictured them. If this be
so, the narrative is even less historically reliable than the _Fiametta_
of Boccaccio.
In any case, the manuscript, whenever written, wherever written, and by
whom written, is in a far from perfect condition. Though the care of Dom
Gregory had encased it in a wrapping of purple-colored vellum, it still
seems to have suffered from time and careless treatment. Probably its
greatest injuries date from that period when, during the stress of the
French Revolution, the treasures of the abbey library were hurriedly
concealed in underground cellars, and suffered no little from damp and
dirt during the period of their incarceration. Many portions of the
narrative are either wholly absent or exist in such a fragmentary
condition that, like a corrupt Greek text, they have to be restored by
the desperate process of guesswork. Those, therefore, who thirst for the
exact text of the tale, must either wait in patience for Professor
Pawling's long promised edition, or satisfy their curiosity by a visit
to the Abbey of Bonne Aventure in Poitou.