Hopkins and Italomania : A Different Infatuation

This book explores Gerard Manley Hopkins's passion for Italian culture. Living at a time when Italomania was at its peak in British culture, Hopkins cannot be considered an Italomaniac in the same sense as the Brownings, Ruskin, Symonds or Clough. He travelled to Italy only once in his life and his personal relationships with Italians were mostly with fellow Jesuits. However, Hopkins's work reveals his bookish interests in Italy, derived from his reading of its writers and from the study of its history, art and music. The Italian pictorial, sculptural and architectural art of the Renaissance and after, and Gregorian chant, Palestrina and nineteenth-century Italian opera are among topics frequently discussed in Hopkins's letters and diaries. Catholic spirituality and theology and the reform movements preceding the Reformation (Savonarola, Frà Dolcino and others operating on the threshold between orthodoxy and heresy) could not but be of utmost importance for a former Anglican and later Catholic convert. By examining Hopkins and Italy, this study reveals new insights into this major Victorian poet and thinker.