Lewes Priory Trust hails discovery of manuscript as ‘Dan Brown moment’ for fans of Hilary Mantel

They said that Chris McGovern from the Trust unnearthed a manuscript of over 42,000 words that Giovanni Portinari wrote for Queen Elizabeth I in 1568 in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Chris is hailing the discovery as a ‘Dan Brown moment’ for fans of Hilary Mantel, saying that it even has da Vinci links.

A Lewes Priory Trust spokesperson said: “The text is Italian, a language in which Elizabeth was proficient. It opens with a letter to the Queen in which Portinari states that he is presenting it as additional to a work on fortifications [now lost] that he has promised her. In places the manuscript echoes closely the words of Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine friend of Portinari’s father. Ostensibly about how to subdue and rule Ireland, it is also a treatise on political and military power more generally. It urges her to learn from the past: ‘Take heed, because time, which carries experience, is the father of truth’.”

Lewes Priory Trust called the manuscript ‘a compendium of knowledge about the 16th century Renaissance world and its thinking’, saying it looks at issues including military engineering, mathematics, music, diamond cutting, weaponry and dancing.

The Trust said the Florentine archives show Portinari was born in Florence in 1504 and was a direct descendant of Manetto Portinari, father of Dante’s muse Beatrice. They said The Portinari family had close links to popes, princes and artists of the Renaissance period, including the Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and (indirectly) Raphael, who are all central to the BBC’s Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light.

The Trust said: “The family had equivalent links with, and were indeed patrons of, famous artists in northern Europe. Giovanni Portinari’s personal story even adds a couple of ingredients to our knowledge of Shakespeare.”

They continued: “In Mantel’s “Mirror and the Light”, currently being serialised on BBC 1, Thomas Cromwell tells Henry VIII that he will employ the Italian to blow up the great Cluniac monastery of Lewes in Sussex. Portinari was the Guy Fawkes of Lewes but he was also a Renaissance Man: a humanist, architect, stager of court masques, soldier, war strategist, military engineer, royal bodyguard, philosopher, mathematician, superintendent of the tomb of Henry VIII, translator, classicist, musician, physician, historian and more.

“During the 1550s He also worked for, and was much valued by, the French monarchy This included the time when Mary Queen of Scots was also Queen of France. Portinari spoke the Scots language. He ‘secretly’ contributed to Queen Mary Tudor’s loss of Calais in 1558 – an early and enforced Brexit. He nevertheless had a warm relationship with Elizabeth I when she brought him back to England.”

The Trust said: “To date, Giovanni Portinari, has largely escaped the attention of historians; totally so for the manuscript.”

The manuscript was found as part of a research project for Lewes Priory Trust. It has now been transcribed, translated, indexed and annotated and will be published soon with profits going to Lewes Priory Trust and UNICEF. The Trust cares for the Cluniac monastery in Lewes, which is part of a bid by the Federation of Cluniac Sites for UNESCO World Heritage status.