Edmund Garratt Gardner

Edmund Garratt Gardner FBA (12 May 1869 – 27 July 1935) was an English scholar and writer, specializing in Italian history and literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he was regarded as one of the foremost British Dante scholars.

Gardner was born in Kensington in 1869, the fifth of six children of John Gardner, a member of the stock exchange, and his wife Amy Vernon Garratt. His sister was the Polish scholar Monica Mary Gardner.

He attended Beaumont College in Windsor before starting a science degree at University College London. He transferred to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1887, with the intention of reading medicine. His studies were interrupted in 1890 due to health problems that were to persist throughout his life; during his convalescence in Florence, he received his only formal training in Italian from a Florentine bookseller. He eventually graduated with a B.A., having been granted an aegrotat in Part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos.

Gardner decided to engage in literary studies instead of following a medical career. In 1893 he was teaching English literature at the Cambridge Extension School and had his first article on Dante published in Nature. He proceeded to contribute to a series of popular travel guides on cities in Italy published by J. M. Dent, while producing a steady scholarly output on Dante, Ariosto and their period. His interest in Roman Catholic mysticism resulted in books on Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Bernard and Dante and the mystics, in which he argued that Dante was "a scholastic in theology but a mystic in religion".

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