Easton and Dante: beyond Chaucer

Easton’s detailed engagement with the Monarchia (especially Book III) is a very early – and possibly the earliest – response to Dante by an English writer. It forms an important part of the debate about papal authority in the later stages in his Defensorium ecclesiastice potestatis, and it would influence thinking on the subject in the middle of the following century (for example, in John Whethamstede’s writing on the papacy). The essay considers Easton’s reading of and disagreement with Dante in the context of the Defensorium’s composition at the Avignon Curia in the 1370s, along with the possibility that during the English cardinal’s later years in Italy he and Chaucer might well have known about each other’s work.