A digital edition of the Commedia of Dante Alighieri, part two

The Commedia of Dante Alighieri is the single most important work of Italian literature and one of the key works of world culture. However, there are considerable uncertainties as to exactly what Dante wrote. There is no authorial copy extant, and no agreement as to which extant manuscript might be closest to Dante's original text. The two principal editions of the last half-century (Petrocchi 1965; Sanguineti 2001) present radically different views of the textual tradition.

A better understanding of these issues must begin with the earliest history of the textual tradition in the form of the earliest surviving manuscripts. Seven manuscripts (in fact, six manuscripts and one early print edition including a full collation from a lost very early manuscript) were recently and controversially identified by Federico Sanguineti as 'necessary and sufficient' for an understanding of the early history of the text and for the production of a critical edition. This project will develop full electronic transcripts of the whole Commedia in these seven manuscripts (some 110,000 words in each). It will collate the seven manuscripts against each other and the two print editions, word by word, to create a full record of all agreements and disagreements, generating around one million pieces of information.

All this information will then be analysed by a variety of computer means. Firstly, software originally devised by evolutionary biologists for the hypothesis of family groupings among related species will be used, to create genetic hypotheses about these seven manuscripts: which are related most closely to which? This software has been well-tested on other manuscript traditions and found to give useful results -- results which can confirm, enhance or modify the results achieved by traditional scholarly methods. Secondly, specialized database software (VBase) will be used to interrogate the distribution of variant readings: if there is evidence of a grouping within the seven, exactly what readings do the manuscripts of that group share which are not found among the other manuscripts? From our assessment of the readings, is their character such that they appear to have been introduced by a scribe -- or might they be the result of authorial revision?

This analysis will lead to a fuller comprehension than ever before possible of the exact relations among these seven key manuscripts: until the advent of computer tools it was not possible to gather, manipulate and interrogate so much information. The results of this analysis will be presented in a full-scale digital edition as well as in talks and in printed articles. The electronic edition, to be published on DVD-ROM and on-line (including a free-to-all publication of the transcripts), will present all transcripts, collations and our analyses, together with the key tools used to make the analyses. Readers will be able to read the full text of the Commedia in any of the seven manuscripts (directly from the images or in the transcriptions); they will be able to see how the seven and the two editions differ at any word; they will be able to assess the weight behind any reading, and view our analyses and explanations of the variant readings, and use the tools included in the digital editon to check the analyses we offer to make their own analyses. They will also be able to view images of all pages of all manuscripts (subject to library agreement), to see the text as its earliest readers saw it.

There are already substantial models for such an edition, in the form of Robinson's Miller's Tale on CD-ROM (published 2004) and Shaw's Monarchia (published 2006). This electronic edition will permit readers to see how the earliest texts of the Commedia relate to the latest scholarly versions of those texts. It will open a new generation of Commedia textual studies, characterized by access to, and understanding of, unprecedented detail concerning the transmission of Dante's poem.