AN ANTI-HERETICAL CRUSADE IN ITALY, IN THE EARLY PART "Or di a Frà Dolcin dunque che s' armi, S' egli non vuol qui tosto seguitarmi, Si di vivanda che stretta di neve Non rechi la vittoria al Novarese Ch' altrimenti acquistar non sarà breve." DANTE, Inferno, XXVIII. 58-64. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. PREFACE. THE lines of Dante which have been taken as an epigraph to the present work, first directed my attention to the subject. The vague but unanimous statement of the poet's commentators that Dolcino's main error consisted of a community of goods and community of wives,” made me anxious to ascertain to what extent an identity might be established between the Italian heresiarch of the thirteenth century, and the St. Simonians, and other agitators of the nineteenth. As it always happens in historical studies, the subject widened on a closer acquaintance, and its interest deepened. I was surprised to find so many of the great social and moral questions which have stirred up mankind for the last eighteen hundred years, involved in what I had at first too hastily ooked upon as a partial and local movement. That lark and sad, but to all appearance merely episodical, page of Italian history, furnished a clue to the knowedge of a vast conspiracy against the Church of |