William Morris's mediaevalism between Dante and Boccaccio : a cognitive approach to literature

Abstract

'I am really much excited at all I have seen and am seeing, though sometimes it all tumbles into a dream and I do not know where I am. ' Writing to Georgiana Burne-Jones from Verona in 1878, Morris reveals his fascination with Italy characterised by 'magnificent and wonderful towns' that capture his imagination and draw him into a dream in which he feels a strange exaltation of spirit. What stirred Morris's interest was not the noble Italian art of the earlier Renaissance with which he had but little sympathy, but the natural beauty of Italy with its sublime Alps and Apennines and such wonderful lakes as the Lake Garda that gave him such a shock of delight that he 'really thought [he] had fallen asleep and was dreaming of some strange sea where everything had grown together in perfect accord with wild stories. ' For the Victorian dreamer of dreams whose 'work was the embodiment of dreams' , those 'bits of the great world', as Morris calls them, gave him the impression that Italy was a 'country like a garden' , an earthly paradise whose dream-like landscapes are fictionally reproduced in The House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1890) and The Wood Beyond the World (1894).