Dante Early Printed
The John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s collection of Dante in early print is globally renowned as one of the most complete collections of his works anywhere in the world, and the Manchester Digital Collections makes this outstanding collection freely available to readers worldwide.
The Dante Early Printed library contains digitisations of every early printed edition of Dante held in our Special Collections, and is organized in several parts. The first part contains our Dante Incunables, comprising all the editions of Dante’s Commedia printed between 1472 and 1500, the second part will contain editions from 1502 to 1555, and the third part editions printed between 1564 and 1629. We also have a final section containing early printed editions of other works by and concerning Dante, which demonstrate the early modern reception of his works beyond his poem across different print contexts and readerships.
The Incunable section is the first part to be published and contains fourteen of the fifteen editions of the Commedia published before 1500 (i.e. all except the 1478 Naples Francesco del Tuppo edition), some in multiple copies. Particular highlights include all three of the editions printed in 1472 (in Foligno, Jesi or Venice, and Mantova), the first three editions to include a paratextual commentary (Venice 1477, Milan 1477-78, and Florence 1481), Lucius Laelius’s Latinized edition of 1478, and examples of all of the illustrated editions from the first 1481 edition with copperplate engravings, edited and commented by the Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino, the Brescia edition of 1487, and the series of editions printed in Venice in the 1490s, the first to contain an illustration for each on the of the hundred cantos of the poem.
The Dante Early Printed Digital Library has been created as one of the outputs of the AHRC-funded Envisioning Dante c. 1472-c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page (AH/W005220/1). Envisioning Dante, c. 1472-c. 1630 offers the first in-depth study of the material features of the early printed page for almost the entire corpus of prints (1472-1629) of Dante's 'Comedy', using cutting-edge machine learning computational technologies and image matching in addition to book-historical, literary and art-historical approaches. The project is led by Principal Investigator Professor Guyda Armstrong, Professor of Italian, University of Manchester, and Co-Investigator Professor Simon Gilson, Serena Professor of Italian, University of Oxford. The team also includes two postdoctoral research associates, Dr Gloria Moorman (Manchester) and Dr Rebecca Bowen (Oxford), Research Fellow Dr Giles Bergel and his colleagues at the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, photographer Samuel Simpson, and many more curatorial, computational, imaging, and metadata experts from the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, including Dr John Hodgson, Julianne Simpson, Jane Gallagher, John Gandy, Gwen Riley-Jones, Jamie Robinson, Charlotte Hoare, Tom Higgins, Helen Scott, John Mccrory, Tino Oudesluijs, Ourania Karapasia, Joe Devlin and Briony Cheetham.
