This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.

Prigioniero a Tripoli e falso sacerdote. Apostata e penitente. Supposto martire e, pertanto, candidato alla santità. È questo il ritratto di Alipio di S. Giuseppe che emerge dalle fonti agiografiche e dal cospicuo, e in gran parte inedito, corpus documentario, di cui il primo capitolo della tesi offre un’articolata ricognizione. La vicenda di questo frate agostiniano scalzo di origine palermitana – che ben si inserisce nel contesto mediterraneo dei secoli XVI-XVII, caratterizzato da un continuo e ampio rimescolamento di uomini, merci, appartenenze religiose e culturali, e di cui la guerra di corsa, con tutte le sue conseguenze, costituisce una delle dimensioni più rappresentative – fu anzitutto una vicenda di prigionia, conversione all’islam e successiva abiura, nonché di martirio, cui il religioso andò volontariamente incontro nel febbraio del 1645; di questi aspetti, delle modalità con cui il tragico fatto fu trasmesso dai missionari apostolici residenti a Tripoli e recepito all’interno dell’Ordine degli Agostiniani Scalzi, oltre che delle interessanti analogie con altri episodi di apostasia si parla nel secondo capitolo. Nel terzo capitolo, invece, si dà conto del ruolo di primo piano avuto dalla famiglia siciliana dei Tomasi nella promozione della causa di beatificazione di fra Alipio, avviata in seguito all’arrivo, nel 1653, delle sue reliquie sul litorale agrigentino e approdata, dopo le ordinariae inquisitiones del biennio 1654-1656, alla Congregazione dei Riti, che però espresse parere negativo sia nel 1658 sia sessant’anni più tardi. / Captive in Tripoli and false priest, apostate and penitent, alleged martyr and then candidate to sainthood. That is the portrait the first part of this work brought to light from the considerable documentary corpus about Alipio di San Giuseppe, mostly still unpublished. The human existence of this Augustinian Discalceate friar from Palermo – set in the XVI and XVII centuries, when in the Mediterranean mix of people, goods, religions, also privateering was a significant aspect – is a sequence of captivity, conversion to Islam and following abjuration, culminating in the martyrdom he deliberately chose in February 1645. This story, its narration made by the apostolic missionaries in Tripoli as wells as its understanding by the Augustinian Discalceate order are investigated in the second chapter and compared with similar episodes of abjuration. In the third part the relevant role played by the Sicilian family Tomasi in promoting the beatification proceedings of Alipio is explained; started after his relics were brought to the shore near Agrigento in 1653, the proceedings moved to the Congregatio Sacrorum Rituum after the ordinariae inquisitiones in 1654-1656, and there were denied first in 1658 and definitively 60 years later.